Lew Family Blog

Remember when small talk was nothing but weather? That's food now, am-I-right?

This was Monday, March 23, BTW.

Speaking of food and Monday, we got a lovely delivery of navel oranges and muffins from Poh-Poh and Gung-Gung on Monday. Excellent top-up for all the snacking that is happening.

Unsurprisingly, we've got more time for cooking. I even made homemade chicken fingers. a little too salty for my liking but everyone else thought they were amazing. I used the crispy fried chicken recipe from the Joy Of Cooking.

Kind a labour-intensive. flour-egg-flour-rest-flour-egg-flour for each piece.

Yep, deep fried. finished in the oven.

They were popular!

So just like the weather can mess up your day (snowy, icy commute,) food can, too. I was a little nervous about breaking the isolation for grocery shopping and it was okay until check out and then, ugh. The cashiers are not allowed to help you pack in your own bins/cloth bags, which makes sense. But then it took me forEVER to clear the conveyor from my over-packed cart with enough food for five people for more than a week. The only thing that helped was that they were only using every other cashier (to allow for more distancing) and so I could use the counter beside us. I'd put some stuff on the conveyor, go pack that once it was scanned, go back and put more on the conveyor, repeat until the cart was empty. Then I had to go try to pack the rest of the stuff AND fit it back into the cart. So sorry to the people behind me. Next time, I'll accept the plastic bags, which will definitely not then fit back in the cart and so I will just get a second cart and ask someone to watch one while I unload the other into the car. You live, you learn.

A few assorted comments about the experience.

Parking was free - thanks, Loblaws! and the parking lot was quite empty.
The store wasn't too crowded, even at the cash registers.
I didn't notice a lineup outside the door when I arrived but by the time I was done, there was one. They are limitting the number of people in the store at any one time.
There were just a few out-of-stock items that I wanted to buy. No eggs was the most disappointing.
No arborio rice was also disappointing. I have some lovely chicken stock and have been saving it for risotto. Naomi had also found a neat recipe in one of her cook books that needs it.
I spent nearly $500 even though there was very little meat available.
But shopping took me so long and they are so-well staffed that I decided to go back in after packing the car to see if they had restocked, which they had for: celery, fresh chicken (there was literally no fresh chicken when I went through the first time even with the 2 pack per customer limit), ground beef (limit 2 small packs per customer) and sugar, kinda.
Because of the the chicken limit, I went with the large pack of chicken breasts rather than the small pack of chicken thighs, which we all prefer.
The bunches of cilantro were huge. Enormous! Can I dry it? Freeze it? Make a tex-mex pesto?
Plain old granulated white sugar was one of the first things we ran out of. I substituted honey but felt sorry for myself. Even when I went back in, they didn't have any of the usual packs but they had restocked these and felt like I'd struck gold.

I'm using 1/2 a sugar packet per mug. I use a largish mug.

The trip and unloading took me well over two hours. Maybe three. almost two days later, I haven't quite finished freezing everything. But I did freeze some more bread and reminded myself of my Aunt Joan.

Don't worry, we're reusing those squares of parchment paper.

I don't think I've ever put so much thought into a grocery list. The kids were quite thoughtful with their suggestions and were very moderate in their treat requests even though I'd asked for their "wishlists." Here's the second draft and check-marked results.

One of the items is "dessert mixes" and it's hard to find many that aren't chocolatey. Naomi doesn't like chocolate at all. I found this.

It took 3 of our 11 eggs but Naomi made these all by herself.

not as photogenic as the package...

but really delicious!

The lemon squares were dessert on Wednesday when we had Adam's favourite meal for dinner: pork-and-rice-and-gravy. The side of cauliflower is not one of his favourites but it is one of mine. Sorry, no pics. On Tuesday, we had John's favourite meal. Tacos are perhaps the only dinner he truly likes.

Today, when we went on our walk, mom decided she wanted to show us part of the UofT campus. What we saw were

The weird tower things
Some big canons
The sundial
The meridian

Unfortunately, we don't have any photos of the canons or the sundial. When we got back we played a game of German bridge after Adam did his practice quiz and we ate dinner.
Editted by mom to add that we do have a photo of the cannon and the sundial and also pics of the kids learning some more card skills, notably shuffling.