It occurred to me today that this quarantine has not changed my life pattern much at all. Living alone is basically a quarantine. The only things I have given up are meeting my friends on Tuesday evenings at a bar for drinks, and going to the library. Instead a couple of us just have a virtual happy hour. We text and drink together. In some ways it is more fun than sitting within arms reach of someone at the bar. Because we are not face to face, the double entendres can fly back and forth without any fear of being smacked. Other than that my life is the same.
On my daily walk I encountered several couples walking dogs or running. We gave each other plenty of space as we passed, and now I am back in the sterility of my home enjoying quiet. In about an hour, I will descend to my shop and make some noise with my grinders. I am ensconced with my three roses. Each one is a new project. I learned what not to do, or how not to do, on the first and changed my methodology for the second and learned some more. Now I am using a totally new process on number three. On each rose the amount of effort and time has decreased. I am also answering a question I asked myself awhile ago , i.e. why don’t I try making miniature intarsia? The answer, small pieces take extreme effort to hold and shape with machines. These roses have the smallest pieces I have ever cut for intarsia art work. That doesn’t mean, however, that I will not give up on making miniatures, it just means I have to undertake a lot of training and and develop new skills to do so.
I am also taking these quiet moments to teach myself new cooking skills. Being on a KETO diet means giving up many of the comfort foods I love so much. Yesterday I learned to make a cauliflower mash as a substitute for mashed potatoes. Believe it or not, it was good. I have eaten pre-made cauliflower mash in frozen dinners and I rated it a minus ten on a zero to ten scale. I never had runny mashed potatoes, and the watery cauliflower mash I experienced in some frozen dinners is a total turnoff.
YouTube is my teacher for cooking. There are thousands of people making videos of their favorite recipes. Finding KETO versions of favorite dishes is easy. Today, I researched KETO Stroganoff and found five videos by five different cooks and five different ways to make stroganoff. All of them were composed of the same ingredients. Only the spices were different. Saturday, I will make KETO Stroganoff.
On the COVID-19 front, I am watching fewer news programs about the disease. I don’t need anymore panic news to upset me. It is what it is and we have to be serious about staying away from each other to keep from getting it passed down. I keep asking myself, what would I do if a beautiful mature woman hit on me? Would I risk the virus, or resist the temptation? At my age the only option is to resist the temptation. Who can we trust? Even folks living together have risk. All it would take is for one of them to leave the confines of the quarantine to go some place and come back with the bug. If we could see the enemy maybe it would be more simple to move around, but none of us can see where it lurks and we can’t see it coming at us. At this time isolation is the best protection we have.
In the meantime, I have learned to download a book from the internet and am reading from my lap-top. So my excuse of not being able to got to he library has been eliminated.
Filed under: Biography, Cooking, family, health care | Tagged: Covid-19, Isolation, Keto, Stroganoff |
Good luck with the roses. Creative folks have an inherent advantage in being able to ride out this storm with equilibrium.
This is the third attempt to make something special like roses. So far it is better then the first two, but still a disappointment to me.