Baked Risotto with Greens and Peas

I just read a New Yorker piece that perfectly captured my current feelings about cooking. Helen Rosner wrote so beautifully about something I will put very bluntly: I am SICK OF COOKING. I would just give up altogether right now and eat cheese and crackers for every meal, if I wasn't responsible for nourishing a growing backup dancer.

And a (mostly) vegetarian diet is limiting for a cook like me. It used to be so easy to plan delicious dishes when I was wasn't giving a second thought to meat as an ingredient. Obviously there are wonderful vegetarian dishes, but I have cut myself off to half the food options by reducing my meat consumption for the sake of the environment. I am committed to it, but it makes planning meals more fatiguing.

We get takeout a couple days a week, and that's a relief, but I'm conscious that the takeout options that appeal to us aren't particularly healthy, and I also feel guilty about the billion plastic containers piling up in my cupboard. A few spare containers are handy; a billion spare containers are distressingly superfluous.

I suppose the best solution is to make fairly quick, one-pot meals that have vegetables wrapped in. With those meals, you don't have to make a side dish, and the cleanup is minimal. "Baked Risotto with Greens and Peas" (NYT Cooking; subscription required) is a good example.

I only had half the necessary vegetable stock so I had to supplement with water, and the flavor suffered. Even so, I thought this was delicious, with some Maldon salt flakes sprinkled on top. And it is just as creamy as a risotto made the traditional, time-consuming way on the stove.

Today marks a strange anniversary: it has been one year since I got a proper haircut (though I thank my backup dancer for the much-needed mid-summer trim he gave me). Where am I now, a year after losing one of the normal rituals of the Before Times? 

A rather sad Thanksgiving is behind us; I'm afraid a rather sad Christmas lies before us, though we do what we can to make the season festive. I am trying to embrace Scandinavian strategies for thriving in winter, and they do help. The stupidly expensive heated gloves I bought this fall are making my outside time more tolerable. The houseplants that friends gave me are growing new leaves and bringing me pleasure. 

We will soon be tasked again with deciding whether we're comfortable sending our child to school in person, and like the last two times, I am expecting the choice will then be taken away from us again at the last minute. I have stopped giving our school district the benefit of the doubt with respect to their will and competence to provide a good education during this time. But she's doing okay in online school, even if it's not ideal. Her teacher is simply outstanding.

Donald Trump will no longer be President come January 20! I wish Joe Biden had made a more youthfully energetic choice as his special envoy for climate, but at least the President-elect has sent a clear signal that climate change is an important priority.

With hopes for vaccines in the upcoming year, I have allowed myself to start fantasizing about everything from visiting my mom, to going to the town pool next summer, to opening mail as soon as it comes through the slot. I am sort of touched by my own lack of ambition to do wild things when I get my freedom back -  I just want to do the things that used to be so pleasantly normal.

I have been lucky so far not to lose anyone I love to COVID-19, and even though anxiety still rolls in and out sometimes, there is plenty of happiness in my life now. In July, I started reading "The Goldfinch" and found the first sixty pages so traumatic that I had to put it aside; recently I picked it up again and proceeded without sobbing, and it's excellent.

And guess what's on the horizon? REAL MEAT CREATED IN A LAB!! What a crazy world we live in. I am genuinely ecstatic about it. Perhaps it will make cooking enjoyable again!