COVID19 Cannot Stop Me

This stupid virus that has taken over the lives of everyone around the world has stopped me from doing a lot of things. But there are things it has not stopped me from. Though I do need to be stopped, from all of these things:

Baking bread

I have never baked so much bread before. My motto has become, “So many bread recipes, so little time.” At least once a week, I make some kind of bread. Rustic Rosemary bread. Crispy, buttery focaccia. Chewy and salty soft pretzels dipped in cheesy queso. Flaky biscuits. But look at these pretzels. 

When I am not baking bread, I am dreaming about what I am going to make next.  It must stop. No, really, it must. I’ve eaten more bread in the past few weeks than I have eaten in 3 years since I started eating semi-low carb. (Why can’t bread be low carb???) Pinning bread recipes on Pinterest has become my favorite pandemic pastime.  

I made my own sourdough starter. I decided to do this a few weeks ago when yeast was nowhere to be found. My first batch failed. My second batch failed when I accidentally sort of cooked it in the microwave. My third batch is awesome. So awesome that I named it. Apparently, it is a thing to name your sourdough starter. It requires so much feeding and attention in the beginning that it is starting to feel like I got a new pet, so why not name it? I named mine Margie, after my grandma, because for now, it is happily bubbling and growing in her pretty pink Depression glass jar. 

I am pretty sure I check on it to see how it is doing more times a day than I checked on my kids when they were babies.

I have officially lost it, right? I am naming sourdough starter and calling it happy. 

Making unhealthy things that are not bread

I’ve made homemade ice cream. Twice. I’ve baked cookies and made too many grilled cheese sandwiches to count. Thank goodness butter has not been in short supply yet. This is why I have taken up running and walking and biking.

Shopping for things I do NOT need

I cannot stop shopping for stupid stuff. Make it stop. Somedays I wish Amazon would go out of business. I do not need 3 or 4 more cookbooks. I really don’t. I have a pretty extensive collection already, plus, hello, Pinterest. Who really needs cookbooks anymore? Apparently, I do. 

This is another reason why I have taken up biking and walking and running. 

For 8 weeks, or maybe more, I lost track, there was not a package of toilet paper to be found in any store or online. Who in the world would have ever thought OFFICE MAX would sell out of toilet paper?? Who would have thought I would have looked for toilet paper at Office Max? I had plenty so I shouldn’t have been concerned. But oh, those empty shelves made me feel very concerned. Then, my supply started to dwindle a bit, and even though I still had plenty, I started looking for it. We want what we can’t have, right? 

Weeks and weeks later, I saw one lonely jumbo package of Northern on the shelf, and I grabbed it. My daughter laughed at me and said, “Mom, you do not need that!” I bought it anyway. Now, every time I go to a store, I look at the toilet paper aisle and buy a pack if there are any (only one though, because thank goodness for me, there is a limit of one). I don’t need it. But I buy it anyway. I am starting to feel like a doomsday prepper, only instead of hoarding food, I am hoarding toilet paper. (Nope, not showing a photo of that. I gotta draw the crazy line somewhere!)

One day in the future, my grandchildren, if I have them, will ask their parents, “Why does Grandma always have so much toilet paper?” In hushed voices, my children will tell them, “It’s okay, honey, she's really not crazy. She lived through the pandemic of 2020 when everyone was afraid they would run out of toilet paper.”

Speaking of hoarding, I also keep buying flour whenever I see it. It is scarce in the stores. But hello, my sourdough starter needs to be "fed" a good amount of fresh flour every day. Some people keep their starter going for years. Decades. I did not know this until recently. Now that I DO know this, I do not want to run out of flour. I don’t want Margie to fizzle out simply because the store shelves where flour belongs are empty. 

I’m pretty sure Margie will not fizzle out anytime soon. And if she does, well, I’ve got plenty of yeast now, because I am sort of hoarding that, too, now that it is sometimes on the shelf.

And I guess I need to find some more things to bake so that flour doesn’t go to waste once my starter is going and starts to live in the refrigerator where it only will need to be fed once a week.

And hopefully, one day, vegetables will be scarce so I will at least have something healthy to hoard.