Dr. Zoidberg, homeowner

freezer meals, packing woes, and the act of baking as a reward

Jeff and me last week: so Tuesday we’ll be able to start taking some stuff to the new apartment, and if we keep that up it’ll make the move a lot easier because it’ll mostly just be furniture by then
covid: no
12” of snow: no
freezing rain: no

If you don’t follow me elsewhere, our unfortunate news is that after managing to avoid it for the past four years, our luck finally ran out and Jeff tested positive for covid last Friday. I was negative and don’t have any symptoms, so we’ve been isolating from each other, and wearing masks when we’re in the same part of the house. We’re lucky to be in a place where we each have a room we can be in most of the time (I’ve been sleeping on the futon in my office). Normally we do actually spend a fair amount of time separately just doing our thing because we have different hobbies and value our alone time, but being forced to do it, moving in careful orbit around each other while neither of us has left the house in a week, is pretty lonely. He’s feeling a fair bit better now, though, so hopefully we’ll be through this soon. And shoutout to Chris for coming by to drop off some groceries for us earlier this week.

The good news is that our apartment purchase is now complete! It’s a huge change, obviously, and I’m going to miss the neighbourhood and being within spitting distance of my favourite breweries a lot, along with my yard and the garden we’ve cultivated over the past six years, but the idea that no one can make me leave my home because they’ve decided they want to charge more money for it or tear it down will give me some solace. We’ll have to do some adapting in terms of our possessions, too, going from three bedrooms down to two, but I’m thankful the kitchen layout is basically the same so I won’t have to learn how to cook all over again like I did when we moved in here in 2017.

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“What is this? Why do we have it?” In the leadup to moving, we’ve been finding ourselves cursed with all sorts of things whose existence had been forgotten, or become so abstracted so as to no longer be thought of as a physical thing. A beautiful yet rarely used thrift store dish becomes yet another item I have to safely pack and find a home for, or else add to a pile of things to make their way to a new owner. The books that have been nestled in my shelves for years suddenly have dimension and weight, incredible weight, to them. Why must electronics have so many wires and cords? Why have I decorated my home with loose rocks and crystals and seashells on every surface? And the things you use daily, of course, you can’t pack until you’re ready to take yourself to your new place, which creates a whole other problem of trying to make sure you aren’t searching for your essentials at the end of an exhausting day of moving.

All this applies to the pantry and fridge too, of course. We’ve been doing the normal thing before a move, where you try to buy as little food as possible in an attempt to use up bits of nearly-empty sauces and jars of olives and pickles, clearing containers of soups and things out of the freezer so there’s less random stuff to jam into a cooler on moving day. Hence why I didn’t write last week— because we were so busy with everything we needed to do before our possession date, we largely fed ourselves on the freezer’s bounty. It’s weird to actually be able to see into the back of it.

I did take a little while, though, to decompress and make a curried pot pie which used multiple containers of frozen things: roasted butternut squash, leftover turkey pieces, the end of some bags of corn and peas. This is a recipe I adapted from something I cut out of a newspaper or magazine years ago, and there are a lot of different ways you can make it. It’s like a soup in that it will forgive you if you don’t have the exact amount of bell pepper or whatever, or if you use all chickpeas instead of a combo of chickpeas and meat. The important part is that this is a flavourful, vegetable-filled dish that has a satisfying, creamy curry gravy and a nice crispy pastry top.

My pie dough recipe (also linked in the pot pie recipe above) requires twenty minutes’ rest time, so for this, I did all my veg prep and then made the dough, and cooked the filling while it was resting. The timing worked out almost perfectly. I hadn’t made this dough in awhile, and I’m happy to say I still managed to do a good job— it came out flaky and lovely. Or rather, it came out flaky and ugly as hell, but tasty and satisfying as part of the whole, as is the will of the pot pie.

Jeff, luckily, only had a day or two where he was feeling really bad and didn’t have much of an appetite, so on those days we made do with leftovers, and when he started to feel better, I made an easy, delicious soup. This came from the book Milk Street: Tuesday Nights— red lentil with paprika and tomato paste for a robust flavour, and a little rice for texture. The recipe in the book also has you making your own Aleppo chili oil to garnish it with, but I just used chili crisp to save myself the time (and having to wash another pan). I also made grilled cheese to finish off a loaf of bread that was near its best before date, because what’s more comforting when you’re sick than a nice bowl of soup and a crispy, melty grilled cheese sandwich to dip into it?

With Jeff being sick we’ve gotten behind on packing, because we want to make sure he rests enough, and even though I could do more while he’s in the other room, I’m so deeply unmotivated to live in chaos. So I’ve been trying to trick myself into it in various ways: some nights I’ll eat an edible and pack and until it kicks in and it feels insurmountable to seal and label a box, others I’ll put on a familiar movie in the background to keep me company while I empty my bookshelf. The other day I packed up most of what remained of our barware and liquor, telling myself I could have the reward of baking cookies when I finished.

My sister had been talking in the group chat earlier that day about my mom’s buffalo chip cookies (also sometimes known as kitchen sink cookies), and once I’d thought about them I couldn’t let them go. My mom’s usually have nuts, chocolate chips, and cornflakes (my favourite part), but I didn’t have her recipe and I don’t usually have cereal in the house. Instead, I took my usual chocolate chip cookie recipe and subbed in a mix of peanut butter chips, coconut granola, and peanut M&Ms for the chocolate chips. I loved what the granola did for the texture, and I think my only regret is not using more M&Ms— I was worried they wouldn’t hold together easily if I did, but I’ll know better for next time.

Speaking of granola, my old go-to breakfast of Greek yogurt, granola, and banana has forsaken me sometime in the past few months. It’s not its fault— breakfast and I have always had a temperamental relationship— but I couldn’t keep going like I was, just sitting around drinking coffee until I got hungry enough to eat a fig bar or something, sometimes just going without food until lunchtime when I’d eat leftovers or make myself a pot of noodles. Anyway, I’ve been trying out breakfast rice again, cooking jasmine rice every few days to keep in the fridge. Then in the morning I can fry it up with a little kimchi and soy sauce and sesame oil, and cook a soft egg to put over top of it with some chili miso or chili crisp.

If I do it in the 10” cast iron, it’s easy to quickly heat the rice and then push it all to one side and flatten it a little bit while I cook the egg on the opposite side of the pan. This way it takes less time and also gets a little bit of caramelization on the rice, if I leave it undisturbed in the few minutes it takes to fry the egg. The only hard part of this breakfast is remembering to cook more rice once I use up what’s in the fridge.

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Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with someone new! I like providing this to you for free, but it does still involve time and effort, so any donations, especially while I’m still looking for work, are greatly appreciated. I’ll continue to post bi-weekly until we’re through the move and a bit more settled, and then I hope to get back to weekly updates. Finally, here’s some life advice from Deep Space Nine’s favourite cook.