Self-Isolation Dining Plus

First of all, Laurie and I would like to wish a very happy birthday to our son, David II out in Nebraska... Hope you have a great day D2!  Love from us both!

Now, onto the topic for the day...

Being self-isolated, (corona virus avoidance quarantine), one of my challenges is to avoid snacking all day out of boredom.  So far, we’re doing well in this regard, sticking to 2 meals daily, with perhaps a light midday snack.  Meals are however, one of the parts of the day that I really look forward to…

Sometimes we eat healthy, sometimes we convince ourselves (especially me), that we’re eating healthy and sometimes we just go for the gusto with pure comfort food!

Sliced tomatoes are one of our more frequent dinner time accompaniments.  I’ll bet you can tell me which of the servings shown above was mine!  Not so healthy with lots of French dressing and an over the top scattering of blue cheese crumbles.  Laurie used balsamic vinaigrette and she let me know that I’d put too much blue cheese on her tomatoes.  She ended up scraping some of it off on mine…

This was a comfort food type dinner… Who doesn’t like a quality grilled cheese sandwich?!  This was Laurie’s sandwich.  Each of these soul satisfying creations included 4 slices of sharp cheddar cheese and Laurie grilled them in lots of butter with plenty of pepper sprinkled on the bread. 

This is my uncut grilled cheese sandwich… Those spots doesn’t mean that it has some kind of disease!  I always sprinkle Tabasco on my grilled cheese before eating it… “Sadly”, Laurie couldn’t quite finish the second half of her sandwich and I ‘had’ to help her out if you know what I mean…

Kudos to Chef Laurie!  She makes the best grilled cheese sandwiches I’ve ever had.  It might have something to do with all the butter she uses…

…and then it was time for a healthy meal.  Generally we don’t cook fish at home.  We’re just not confident starting a seafood meal from scratch.  So, before the self-isolation we loaded up on seafood options…mostly from Costco.  In this case, we paired some very nice pre-seasoned salmon filets with a nice portion of steam-in-the-bag broccolini purchased from Ingles Supermarkets.

Broccolini is a trademarked name for a cultivated variety of cabbage which resembles broccoli.  Sometimes it’s called baby broccoli.  This vegetable is one of our favorites.  This vegetable is similar to broccoli but it has smaller florets and longer thinner stalks.  It is a hybrid of broccoli and gai lan.   (Chinese kale or Chinese broccoli) The entire plant is consumable and it has a sweet flavor with notes of both broccoli and asparagus.  Once it steamed, we add our Amish butter plus a bit of salt and pepper.

I do not like to let any food go to waste.  Wherever possible, I just add an egg to whatever it might be or alternatively just eat whatever it was cold or warmed up for breakfast.  It depends on how I feel at the time. 

In this case, Laurie hadn’t been able to finish her take-out portion of Chicken Alfredo from a local restaurant.  So, I just added parmesan to thicken it up a bit and provide more flavor, then I heated it up in a frying pan, adding an easy-over egg and Tabasco to cap it off.  It was one of the best ‘leftover’ breakfasts I’ve had in weeks! 

Self-isolation has led to my notice of pretty little things around the yard.  This little plant with the little yellow flowers popped up next to one of the boulders in our front yard.  I thought that it was a pretty little weed so I took this photo.

Since then, I have been informed that this plant is called'black medick', 'nonesuch' or 'hop clover'.  It belongs to the legume or clover family.  It is considered a ‘pioneer plant’, initiating plant growth in areas with poor soil or growing conditions.  That makes sense as this plant is growing in a bed of rocks!

The two photos above show wild violets at the edge of the woods and variegated ivy blooming on the forest floor.  They’re both just doing what they do in the spring and their little flowers are quite attractive.

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them…

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Stay Safe and Take Care, Big Daddy Dave