Weekend blog-a-log

Hello and Happy Sunday everyone. Hands up who’s bored? Me for one. What a boring weekend. They all seem to be the same these days. I feel like life is passing me by in its nothingness direction, where we are all stuck in this limbo of sort of coming out of lockdown but really not. And we can’t relax about it yet, who knows which way it will go. It’s becoming apparent that normal life will be far from normal for a very long time.

I’ve been trying to keep busy since this whole thing started. The cooking, gardening and blogging have definitely been enjoyable and helped me to pass the time. My new little side project as you know is trying to save items from the bin, being somewhat embarrassed by how much waste The Waffle Household creates. So for this week I can report that the most satisfying success I have had with this was some couscous which was left over and normally I would have thrown in the bin. Instead I made it into this lovely salad for lunch which I took to work on Friday. Added to the couscous was some celery which probably would have gone off in the fridge, some cherry tomatoes, a bit of olive oil, a chopped up left over arancini ball filled with mozzarella cheese and some black pepper. Overall it was a tasty lunch, probably quite healthy, and I do like lunches that I eat with my own fork at the moment rather than sandwiches which means fingers handling the food and a lot of paranoid hand washing on my part.

I have also saved some blank pages from my old address book at work and stapled them into a scrap notebook. I remember a colleague doing this with scrap paper many years ago but I couldn’t be bothered to start this until now.

A huge amount of our waste is packaging and I’m trying to think of new ways to use this. I saved a plastic punnet from some mushrooms and thought this might be useful for growing some seedlings in. Similarly a plastic tube my effervescent Vitamin C came in. I thought maybe a container for shampoo for holidays for that one, if indeed we ever get to go on any of those. So those two items are washed and ready/cluttering up my cupboard until I need them. I did have a big sort out of the cupboard yesterday though. I found a camera and an iPod I will probably sell online since I now use my phone for all my photos and music.

One thing I’ve learnt from the lockdown experience is to be less fussy about things, not that I thought of myself as a particularly fussy person before. But I am making do with things that are actually perfectly fine for the job, like using vegetable stock if I don’t have any fish stock in a recipe, for example. I am buying less clothes as I am going out and to the office less and really what’s important is to just have something clean and tidy to wear. I am also aware that if I buy new clothes, I will have to clear out some old clothes, and these will just sit in a pile with the other boxes already waiting to go to the charity shop when it eventually opens again. A friend of mine has taken to filling up her car with stuff ready to go.

It has really surprised me that the older generation are finding it unacceptable not to have their usual favourite brands of foodstuffs if they are sold out at this time. Surely the war was a lot worse than this?! I guess old people just don’t like change. “No, lobster bisque?” declared my mother this weekend in most dramatic fashion “oh, what a shame!” My mother in law was similarly extremely shocked one week that there were no cornflakes. How could this be? “No cornflakes!?!” she was incredulous. It is hard to explain why, what can you say, except there is a global pandemic and life is not normal any more. My husband will only ever be freaking out if there is no beer. Seeing beers lined up in the fridge is his comfort blanket. He likes to check on them, making sure there are plenty. I buy more and more each week, and then find he has topped up the fridge with some more he has risked his life for by going into a shop, just in case the number of unopened beers fell below 10 at any time. Heaven forbid!