Day 74 in what I am now calling Safer-at-Home here in Panama City Beach, Florida. This morning’s statistics fo COVID-19 in Bay County are 97 cases and 3 deaths and for Florida are 51,746 cases and 2,252 deaths. We definitely are not flattening the curve, and I am still taking a wait and see attitude.
I am having a pretty low key weekend. I did watch a pretty good movie on Netflix entitled The Half of It, written and directed by Alice Wu. It was a coming-of -age movie, which can be pretty sappy, but not in this case. I especially enjoyed the writing.
My cooking was a disaster this weekend. First I tried to cook a whole chicken in my Instant Pot (IP). I was able to sear it on both sides in the IP, even though it was 5 pounds and a challenge to flip. I added all the ingredients and then set the temperature and the time and went about cleaning up the kitchen. After I sat back down in living room and was petting Moonie, the cat, I looked up and I saw steam coming from the IP. Oops that wasn’t suppose to be happening. I got up and shut it down and transferred the chicken to a pan to put into the oven and finished cooking it that way.
The next day, I made bone broth with the carcass and the vegetable remnants I have been accumulating in the freezer. That went well thank goodness. Once the broth was cool enough to sift out the bones and cooked vegetables I set about to make a Tex-Mex soup with gluten free corn dumplings. Once the soup had cooked for a little bit I dropped in the corn dumpling and let them cook for 20 minutes. Well I was not happy with the dumplings, the texture was kind of soggy and the the taste was bland. The soup was good though. This morning I cooked some of the dumplings in bacon fat and ate it with my egg and sliced tomato and I like it this way a lot better. Of course anything tastes better in bacon fat. I am not sure that I will try another corn dumpling recipe.
Today I worked in the studio starting a sample for my Freebie Friday Zoom event on Friday. While I was working I listened to The Great Alone by Kristen Hannah. It is a story about a teenager living with a father who suffered from PTSD and is abusive physically to her mother and and I would say mentally abusive to her. I had to turn it off as it was just too intense. I did turn it back on and listened some more. I do this with movies sometimes also. Since it is my turn to pick the next book when my book club meets in June, I had thought about this book, as it is well written and I love the description she portrays of Alaska, but I think I will look for something lighter since life is so intense now.
Stay Safe, Stay Healthy
