Re-Confined

 Over the last few weeks I've been in the office a couple of times and started to carefully pick up bits of normal life. I've done some more interesting cooking whilst I've had time, but failed to write it up as I felt a bit of a fraud when getting all the ingredients was easy. We've even been away - up to Edinburgh, where every restaurant and cafe was organised and felt safe, then to Devon, which I have to be honest was less organised apart from in chain restaurants. 

Everything seemed fine until I started coughing, which means that we've got home and can't go out again (I have no other symptoms, it's totally just a cold but cautious is better). Having just been on holiday, that means there is not a lot of food in the house - not a complete disaster, as I managed to get a supermarket delivery slot for tomorrow morning, but does give a rather limited range of options for meals! I got to feel smug about having made soup for the freezer much earlier in the year, as that supplied lunch. Dinner was slightly more challenging.

There was half an onion in the fridge but sod all else that would make dinner in there, although obviously we had garlic. The cupboards had tinned tomatoes from my accidental massive over-stock in March and chickpeas, but that combination didn't inspire me particularly. Thankfully we've taken to having some frozen vegetables in stock, a bag of "Mediterranean roasted vegetables" came to my rescue this evening as did some chicken and I made a version of Heresy Pasta (beggars cannot be choosers). 

Incredibly easy - chop the onion and garlic, soften until translucent and then brown the chicken. Throw in a hefty splash of vermouth and a tin of chopped tomatoes, add as many frozen vegetables as you want and leave to simmer and thicken up whilst you cook your pasta. I added basil from the amazingly still not dead plant on the windowsill and forgot to take photos.

Lessons to be learned:

Re-stock when you finish things. Normally I have the base ingredients for a super lazy Thai Green Curry in the cupboard which was actually what I fancied this evening. Turns out we'd finished them and failed to buy more.

Don't assume you can get to the shops as you wish - delivery slots might be easy to get at the moment, but if they hadn't been then we'd have had zero fresh food. If we go away again then I'm organising a delivery for almost as soon as we get back.

Take cough medicine before you go to bed if you think you might need it, as waking up coughing at 5am is, to be frank, a bit shit.

Remember that a supermarket delivery is a good excuse to buy heavy things, buy a couple of bottles of wine while you're there.