When I think about retirement, I think sometimes about trying to find a city that I really like in part because I think it would be great to have five or six fantastic take-out places within a short distance.
This thought runs into the unfortunate reality that a lot of the cities that I’m thinking about may be out of my financial reach, at least in the gastronomic neighborhoods I’m dreaming of. Still.
One reason this is on my mind is that when you’re sick and you’re the family cook, good takeout is a blessed thing. We have a couple of go-to places out here in suburbia but the range is limited and the quality is mostly decent but not great. A week heavy in take-out tends to have a monotony to it because we know what the options are going to be and we tend to regret it when we decide to branch out and get something from a less-typical destination.
Last weekend, after my first two days of pretty bad covid (before I tested positive and knew that’s what it was) I woke up without a fever and thought, “Ok, great, all done with that, back to normal”.
So I braised two lamb shanks, made the braising liquid into a chile-inflected cream sauce, rolled out some pasta and made ravioli.
And then promptly felt like crap again the next day, and for most of last week, so I didn’t really cook again until the last few days. Part of the issue is not even “somebody else make dinner, please”, it’s that the refrigerator and the freezer have ingredients that I have plans for and that aren’t in the cooking repertoire of my family members. Hence, take-out ends up seeming like the best option in the interim, but most of what we can get that way is not necessarily some of the things I’d be craving as a sick person.
Anyway, this weekend I got back in the swing of cooking. I made a simple favorite one night—roast pork carnitas and homemade flour tortillas—and then more ambitiously last night worked up a lamb and white bean stew that came out really well. (It’s the time of year when having lamb around is easy to do because so many of the major religions feature it in their holiday menus.)
The question of what food makes you feel better in relationship to which kinds of illness is an interesting one. Like most people, there are times when I’m sick where I don’t really want anything, and not just when I’ve got some kind of GI-based illness. That’s when you realize how powerful your underlying appetite is in terms of driving a desire to eat, and very likely thus why some of the new pharmaceuticals aimed at weight control are effective—that the desire can just be turned off because you’re fatigued and have a headache is really striking.
But I also do find that some ailments really drive my food desires in particular directions. A bad sore throat with no other symptoms often makes me want soup, and curiously enough, I also find wine soothing. (For example, a really great hot-and-sour soup is really comforting to me for some reason, but the only place around here that makes it for take-out makes a really mediocre verson of it. Which is not comforting because I keep thinking about how much better it would be if I’d made it myself.) Soup or wine is absolutely not what soothes with a headache or even when I’m completely stuffed up. Then I often find bland but comforting carbs, no really strong flavors, to be a relief—but also ‘clean’ tastes like sushi or a simple salad do a lot for me then.
Anyway, cooking is also a source of relief and pleasure for me, so one of the losses from being sick is not feeling up to cooking. When I hit that point where I am just stir crazy from being inside for too long, I’m usually also at the point where I want to get something to cook and get to work in the kitchen.