Close to Nowhere

I can't cook anymore and I'm blaming the pandemic. Have to blame something, right?

We don't have family dinners anymore. Both my brothers work in hospitals, so I never see them. Daughter Dana is a nurse, so she won't come into the house. My granddaughters and their families are always having to quarantine so I seldom see them.

There's no one to feed except son Kris and me. And he's a real pill to cook for!

He doesn't like anything but meat and potatoes. Except he won't eat potatoes because he has diabetes. He's picked out strange rules about what he'll eat and what he won't eat, so mostly he just makes himself a salad or a sandwich.

I like vegetables. I'm happiest with several different veggies and maybe some cornbread. I love Brussel sprouts and spinach (not together). Guess who doesn't like veggies?

I decided the other day that I needed fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy and English peas. Since I don't/can't go in a store, it took a bit before I was able to get some buttermilk. You cannot have fried chicken without buttermilk.

My potatoes were all small ones and it took forever to peel them. But the chicken was soaking in the buttermilk, so all was good.

The only thing I didn't ruin were the "sewer peas." Dana called the LeSueur brand of English peas "sewer peas" when she was little. To this day, I can only call them "sewer peas." They came out of the can and cooked nicely with a dab of butter.

I used to fry chicken and pork chops a lot, but apparently have completely forgotten how. The chicken was burned ­ black on one side even.

I make mashed potatoes a good bit. I like to have leftover mashed potatoes to make potato pancakes. I love potato pancakes.

I either didn't drain them well or I put too much milk in the potatoes. I had potato soup. I dumped some flour in their to try and thicken them up but it didn't work well. They tasted like glue.

But you really couldn't tell because once they were smothered with the pile of grease I called gravy you couldn't taste the potatoes anyway. And I make gravy often. Usually it tastes like gravy though.

I used to make fried chicken, etc., all the time. Sunday afternoons I often cooked like I was feeding a horde. With my two brothers, granddaughters and their husbands and often friends and/or their brothers, I really was cooking for a horde.

I loved it. I miss it. But apparently, I need to practice cooking again.

Wonder where I can find a horde to come over?