Wednesday - 19th

All the beans are still in the bag: no one in my family is sick, everyone is proceeding according to the new normal.

And, there is sunshine!

And, we are warming up this week! The kittens are sunning themselves, the cheepers are enjoying their own special resting spot by the hydrangeas.

You can almost (but not quite) forget that we are living in very abnormal times.

As you would expect, the farmhouse breakfast routine remains undisturbed. I wait for him, he comes down, we dig into our bowls of fruit and today -- our bowls of oatmeal.






And then come the screen time hours. FaceTime chats, zoom calls, texts, emails. Not ever phone calls anymore (except with my mom). Or at least not ones that require me holding an actual phone. The computer or tablet has seized most of our waking hours. Almost surreptitiously, Amazon has become the supplier of all stuff,  and the computer has turned into our important information source, and our instrument of social connection. Gone is the guilt that once came with "too much screen time." These days, we are ever so grateful for all that the internet can offer. For better or worse, it is as much a regular feature of our mornings as is the first morning meal.





The afternoon, however, belongs to Snowdrop. Sunshine, or partial sunshine, pushes us outside.  Well, it pushes me outside. She's anxious to retreat to the farmhouse. So many books to read! Snacks to devour! But when she hears Ed is out in the field, clearing what is to be the tomato patch, she wants to join in the effort.

All photos are from our time out in the field.






"Can I pet a chicken?"






(milkweed seeds)











(First farmette flower!)






Evening. You'd think I'd join the legions who are cooking up a storm during their confinement. Not so. Despite all those years of restaurant cooking, of family cooking, of just lots and lots of cooking, the idea of teaching myself something new with new combinations of rarely used by me ingredients is just not taking hold right now. I want the familiar. I want the predictable, the known, the tried and true.

So once again I bake a frittata. And not even a novel one. The usual -- with cheeper eggs, spinach, mushrooms, potato and two kinds of cheeses.





I suppose if I had my grandma's recipe for pierogi, I'd make them now. But I don't. I may be the only Pole alive who has never made pierogi. Instead, there's a cheesy frittata browning in the oven right now.