Spiced Maqluba

I've been cooking. I have also been going for walks, imposing schoolwork on my backup dancer, stalking foods and toilet paper on FreshDirect, drinking a lot of alcohol, and connecting with friends through email and video and text. I have been gloomy.

Zoom happy hour with our friends

I've been cooking, yes, but not posting about it. I have disappointed myself by abandoning my commitment to Meatless March. I started to slide a couple days ago with a smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwich. and then yesterday a friend texted that a local restaurant, Turtle + The Wolf, was offering their irresistible fried chicken as takeout. I texted back "GUCK MEATLESS MARCH." Only I didn't type guck.

Nobody is shooting at me. I'm not deprived of vital supplies. The people I love are healthy right now, and I can reach all of them. I am one of the privileged whose family income does not look threatened. It is spring, and daffodils and hyacinths are blooming in my garden.

The problem is not the present; it's the unknown future. I fear for the vulnerable people I know, and I have a specific fear about my mother that I can't bring myself to articulate here because it is too sad. Too sad. I fear that untold sadnesses along those lines are possible in months to come. I don't know what will happen, so I can't let go of the fear.

In the face of that, fried chicken seems not only acceptable, but actually vitally important.

I'm comfortable with the bigger picture on my semi-vegetarianism. I eat so much less meat than I used to, for the sake of the planet, and that's going to remain the same.

Last night, for example, I made "Spiced Maqluba With Tomatoes and Tahini Sauce" (NYT Cooking; subscription required), and it turned out great (Emma did not love it. Emma seems to be getting pickier, which is super annoying to me as a chef). I used 3/4 of a teaspoon of ground cardamom instead of pods.

I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing with this skewer, but I followed directions and it worked out well.

I'll also share a couple other things I made this week when I didn't have the heart to write about them, like "Zucchini Fries" (Betty Crocker), which were perfect, and a great way to use up breadcrumbs with an approaching expiration date.

Zucchini fries and pasta

And my backup dancer and I used that unintentional butter stockpile to bake some biscotti (NYT Cooking) that turned out really delicious and perfectly crisp, not like the hard biscotti you sometimes get from bakeries. We used chopped hazelnuts instead of almonds. The one challenge I had was slicing the half-baked dough into wedges; it crumbled a lot. I found a sharp regular knife better than a serrated one for that task.

Before baking

After first bake; before slicing

After slicing; before second bake

After second bake: final product

Yum

I leave you with a coronavirus haiku I wrote:

Reading latest news

Chest tightness. COVID-19?

Or just heart attack?

And, on a lighter note, one of the many fabulous 1950s/60s photos of my mom that I have been digitally scanning:

My mom's the blonde in the middle. This was in Cyprus. She had turned this photo into a postcard and sent it to her parents, with a note that she didn't want to leave!