The gustatory dance by Danceofchaos
The quarantine for the last few months have been very productive in many field of home improvement. On a regular office day, we would get up, have breakfast, go to work and our lunch and some cases early dinners would be taken care of the Office Canteen or some form of canteen.
In the beginning
When quarantine had first started, we had high hopes of eating super delicious, tasty, home made food everyday, with fresh produce sourced from our small coy balcony. The wish has been only partly fullfilled.
Homeoffice these days means endless hours of calls, often starting with the morning coffee in your pyajamas, which expands till the evening. Everyone is trying to makeup for the lack of physical proximity by scheduling any amount of conference call. Between my husband and me, we hardly get time to eat, let alone prepare and cook juicy meals.
Foraging in our garden
I do have some fresh salad and vegetables to source from the garden, but we are lucky if we can have a good meal time, let alone prepare and cook.
I really miss the luxury of the canteen. Really, even the weird mashy noodles and potatoes, mixed with heavy dose of cheese: I would take that carbohydrate rich, cholesterol inducing thing called lunch. I have truly come to appreciate the luxury of office canteen these days.
Anyway, the lack of time and the unwillingness of ordering our every meal has resulted in some very innovative preparation and cooking of food these days.
Zoodles and meal prep
I have always been a fan of meal prep. Due to health reason, I more than often had meal-prepped and carried lunch boxes. But lunch box for a tiny female with meagre calory needs and that of a tiny female and a raging athlete, who runs tens of kilometers just for fun is a totally different ball game. So we prepare beforehand and we innovate.
We all know vegetables are amazing and zoodles are the new things. Zoodles are basically noodles made out of zuccinni but you can also use other vegetables for the noodle purpose. Zoodles have been a huge source of vegetable and salad these days. We chop the vegetables over weekend and freeze them. During the weekdays, we just take them an hour or o beforehand and saute them slightly… or not for Salad.
Old Fashioned Sandwich
I have also become a fan of bread and cheese. Never have I ever thought, the classic european staple of bread and cheese would be so useful and helpful. Add some of the fresh lettuce leaves, tomatoes from the garden and we got ourselves nice, green leafy BLT minus the B .
Our recipes are mostly functional. They are tasty, as they are freshly cooked and we are sourcing a few things straight from the field, but we do not do elaborate cooking any more. it is usually a bunch of vegetables, some potatoes, occassionally some meat, some onion, thrown together to make some of the easiest made quarantine canteen menus.
I am going to bring to you, my dear readers, some of the innovations we have gone through, along with my jumbled up recipes. Like everything in life, we aimed for being home trained michelin star chefs, and ended up being passable cooks.
My husband has been sneakily copying pictures off my tablet, to make his own quarantine menu post. Till then, do give his blog a read, about how he is staying fit while working from home .
If you like this blog, do like and share the different posts. It is a labour of love and a happy place out of my busy corner of life. Feel free to browse the guest contributions, the miscellaneous featured posts, a whole section of gardening and many more.
If you are a creative person and wish to post your creation on this blog, be it a writeup, a recitation, a poem, a story written by you, or a dance performance: feel free to get in touch with us.
The featured images of the blogs, unless otherwise mentioned are taken by the blog owner and regular photography partner, Pritha. All copyright on the images are reserved.
Fresh Salad – one of my favourite food. Yourgarden is so beautiful