I made a pizza last night that was *chef’s kiss.*
[Grain of salt warning here: it was an amazing pizza according to my skills and abilities, and the limitations of my oven. In the — waves arms enthusiastically — universe of pizza, it’s more likely a mediocre (at best) pizza. But hey, we do what we can.]
I’m struggling with burnout at the moment. Not from doing too much over a short period of time, but from doing the same thing over and over for a very long period of time. I am learning that the slow drip will get you eventually, as surely as the too much/too fast/too often pattern will. One of the things I’m trying to do to alleviate the burnout is eliminate some of the choices I find myself making every day/every week/every month. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful to have options, but when you’re wading through them all the time at the expense of things you want or need to be doing, they start weighing on you… it seems counterintuitive, I know.
But it’s actually pretty straightforward. I am the meal planner in my house. Over time, I’ve developed a list of about 30 meals to choose from, and I sit down every week before shopping to figure out what we’re going to have that we haven’t had in a while, that I can find ingredients for and have time to cook on any given day. And then I shop, and hopefully find what I need (or do more shopping until I do). And then, if I haven’t chosen wisely, we end up eating a rice-based meal three times in one week, or I end up cooking 90 minutes to 2 hours a day for a few days in a row to accommodate the schedule. I’m trying to streamline that situation, at least for the time being, so I don’t have to do a lot of extra shopping, and don’t have spend more than an hour a day on dinner.
If we have pizza every Tuesday, I don’t have to worry about what I’m shopping for/cooking on that night. I know that during lunch on Monday, I need to make some dough to ferment in the fridge until Tuesday night. On Tuesday I can prepare or gather the toppings and then it’s just a matter of actually making the pizza. It’s one less thing to fret over for me. And pizza is nice because you don’t have to have the same toppings every time, so it has the potential to be a little bit different each time you eat it. (That satisfies my husband’s interest in novelty.)
So anyway, back to last night’s pizza.
DELICIOUS. And the crust, which I have been working on for a while, turned out really well (even when baked in a home oven). The “ricotta” is mild and creamy. Other toppings include roasted garlic (YUM), lemon zest, olive oil and red pepper flakes, which give it a delightful little kick at the end.
It was also 90 degrees yesterday, and I had the oven on to 500°F, which I don’t recommend. So it’s back to the drawing board for me, because I need to find another solution for Tuesday nights for the next several weeks.
I’m thinking our theme will be “snacks for dinner” and will feature vegan nachos, an occasional charcuterie board (with meats for Dana and cheeses for me), mezze plates with hummus and olives, dumplings using pre-made wrappers… or maybe we’ll just have sandwiches… we’ll see.
Sigh. Time to start wading through the options.
[Little bit of background: I don’t eat meat. My husband can’t eat dairy — he’s lactose intolerant enough that ingesting any dairy at all acts like food poison to his system. We’re not easy to feed, admittedly, but we’ve found that between the two of us, he has the harder time, because Americans basically put milk/butter in or on everything. The plus side to all of this is that I have become reasonably good at cooking vegan food that we like. We aren’t vegan, but plant-based food checks all of our boxes.]
Carmen Yount 