"Listen to your body, Morgan," I tell myself (which is disturbingly meta on so many levels). I'm in that "I'm going to go about my life even though I am really quite sick" phase, in which I go about my business as usual, just with a deeper voice and the occasional phlegm rattle and a bit of a pity sniff when I need some attention.
This is why last night found me not going to sleep at 7pm, as I was inclined to, but staying up until 1am doing the things I do so that I don't feel like a complete waste of energy. This includes: making big batches of chicken stock, roasted garlic soup, cauliflower soup, a loaf of bread, and some butter, like a fucking idiot when I have to get up early for work (early=9ambutreally10am) AND drive to LA later today AND work all day tomorrow AND work all night tomorrow night. My life hesitates for no ailment.
All the recipes were crazy easy (with the proper kitchen accoutrement -- Benriner mandolin, you have changed my life for the better; Cuisinart food processor, I do love you so; KitchenAid, I choose not to remember a time before you) and turned out reasonably well, but I'm hoping the flavors for the soups will deepen after a night in the fridge. Also, I desperately need an herb garden.
The thing is, I don't like to cook -- I get anxious and self-conscious when a recipe is inexact, and I have absolutely no instinct when it comes to food. I do, however, love to bake, so when I make a meal, I prefer for it to be complicated enough to have a strict recipe.
The soup recipes could be doctored up any which way you like, if you're into that whole individualist food movement that I just made up. The bread recipe is my new go-to -- with a stand mixer, it takes 10 minutes of pouring stuff into the bowl, and then a few hours of waiting. And, of course, stock and butter are the two easiest things in the world to make if you have a bit of time.
The other thing is that, I like to have something to show for my effort. Nothing like spending a few hours on a meal that disappears in 20 minutes.
For a few hours' of work, I got at least five meals' worth of chicken stock (now frozen in ice cube trays, cute!), two meals' worth of poached chicken (from the stock making), two weeks' worth of soup (frozen in happy little tupperware containers), and breakfast for the next week (whole wheat toast with freshly mashed blueberries and honey, yay health), all for something ridiculous like $30. I'm deliciously proud of myself.
In keeping with the "illness, what?" phase, I'm off to Pomona tonight to see Lykke Li (whose name I prefer to pronounce Likey Lie, even though it is grotesquely incorrect and should be Licky Lee) with blast-from-the-past Samantha (not the one with whom I visited Costa Rica, the one with whom I attended my senior year of high school at community college, but we weren't friends until our moms set us up on a playdate in San Francisco and we first hung out in my mom's hotel room to watch the last episode of Sex and the City and then went and had cosmopolitans at the Casanova, and most of the rest is history until she seduced and eventually moved in with Deanna, but they broke up a few months ago after moving from San Francisco to LA, which I did not know before I emailed her to apologize for not talking to her for a year and a half because she was dating Deanna and I could not handle that degree of drama in my life at that point. The few minutes she spent telling me about their doomed relationship were enough to justify deleting both of them from my life, because Holy Lesbians, Batman, the crazy is strong in that one. Deanna, not Sam.