I’m tired of being cooped up is what my wife, Danny, said to me as we drove down the highway Sunday morning. She’s not the only one. We’re not the only ones. Everybody is tired of being cooped up.
It’s been a year now that we’ve all been basically cooped up due to COVID-19, and masks, and social distancing, and the like. We’ve not even been out to eat in more than a year. No fast food, no order in, no take out. None of it!
We go to the grocery store, we go to Walmart, we go to Dollar General, we go home.
Not that we were regulars at any restaurant, or bar, or anything like that before the pandemic, but we did enjoy the option. A couple of times a year we liked to go out for a nice dinner. We liked to go to New Orleans for a few days and hit the high spots — and some of the low spots on occasion — of that city.
At Christmas time we liked to go to dinner as a little family, and each year we gave one of our best “family” friends a homemade gift certificate to join us for dinner, at a place of her choosing, as her Christmas present. We would always wait until after the first of the year when things had settled down a bit and my wife, my daughter, our friend, and me would head into the city for a nice sit down meal and some visiting. This past Christmas I stamped renewed on the gift certificate from 2019 since she never got to cash that one in. Sometimes lately I wonder if she’ll ever get to cash that one in.
Often on weekends before March 2020, we’d be out spelunking and would stop in at a Mexican restaurant for an order of nachos, or quesadillas, or whatever looked good on the lunch menu. Or we might hit up a sushi bar if we were in an area where that was available. No more! We haven’t even spelunked in well over a year.
I have become a bit more creative with home cooking at lunchtime, enjoying grilled fish tacos and even a blackened fish sandwich with dill pickles this past Sunday and it was fine. I like fish most anyway it is cooked. The wife on the other hand does not and would rather have a banana sandwich and sometimes a bowl of soup on the side. Campbells tomato or chicken noodle.
Those are cooped up foods.
Then we had the ice storm last month and we were double cooped up for a week. COVID cooped, and sure enough cooped by ice and sleet that even kept us from going to the grocery store, or Walmart or Dollar General.
I had fish in the freezer and we had soup in the pantry and the banana became peanut butter on her sandwich. Fortunately we had bought the last loaf of any kind of bread on the bread aisle as the winter weather run on that sort of thing began.
It was some kind of organic, whole wheat bread with seeds and nuts and other “stuff” in it. I really liked it. The wife, not so much, but that meant more for me and my fish.
Cooped up people eat cooped up food and basically, one could say, that is what you have on hand like fried salmon patties. They were good!
This past weekend was beautiful, but still being COVID cooped we kept the shopping to a minimum and teetered on the edge of ribs, and potatoes, and corn but opted for a pasta plate instead on Saturday night. We did dine in the sunroom to be fancy.
Sunday would have been a beautiful day for barbecuing, but I had already picked up some really pretty collard greens and rutabagas at Vowell’s along with two of their “small” chicken breasts for frying. Cooped up winter food on a perfect spring-like day, but it was still good.
We did do some piddling in the yard and finished a few projects we had started, and stopped, as the pandemic spread, and as has been true with so many folk, kind of made us not interested in doing much of anything.
Sunday, being out in the yard with the sun on my bare back, and on the front porch, and even in the kitchen with the doors open frying up that chicken really got us hankering for spring, a little free range spelunking, and a nice dinner from someone else’s kitchen as this darn virus is hopefully getting under control.
