Last week I tried the very easy flatbread recipe I found online. The only thing simpler would be to eat whole wheat flour with a spoon. It’s just whole wheat flour, water, and olive oil, plus I added a couple of pinches of dried ground rosemary in honor of my father, who is partial to rosemary. You mix the ingredients together with a wooden spoon, turn the ball of dough onto a greased cookie sheet, mash the dough out to the edges of the cookie sheet with your hands, and bake for 25 minutes.
I was very pleased with the result. The flavor was excellent. The texture was what you might call robust. This might not be the best bread for someone with a precarious dental or denture situation, but as far as I’m currently concerned, the only thing missing was holes for oil to collect in; it just runs off. In case one of these days I want to make yeast bread, with its superior ability to receive and retain EVOO, I ordered a couple of stainless steel loaf pans. A health food store nearby had Red Star yeast packets. I ordered some whole wheat flour from King Arthur, which may take weeks to arrive.
A week after I sent the stuff in to establish my MDiv equivalency pursuant to becoming board certified as a chaplain, I checked with my friend there—the woman who has been patiently answering questions for me for more than two years now—to make sure it had arrived. Answer: who knows? They are all working from home, so maybe it was in their mailbox and maybe it wasn’t. She said she is going into the office once a week and would let me know. She emailed several days later to say there was no sign of my envelope at the office, but they are having mail forwarded to one person, so maybe it’s in that person’s mailbox. Let’s hope so, since my packet included some original documents. I did scan them before sending, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world if they disappeared.
In any event, this whole process, already years long, is clearly becoming even more attenuated, so, since there doesn’t seem to be any rush, I have gone ahead and restored my weekly sabbath day, which I had put on hold. I had been using sabbath days to clean the house and do some reading and maybe see a friend or talk on the phone, but another thing I can now do on the sabbath is to iron my work shirts, since my shirt lady has closed her shop. It takes me a very long time to iron a shirt, like half an hour, so I have also ordered a couple of mock turtlenecks from Lands’ End, to see if they might look nice enough for work. Also I emailed a chaplain I know who also wears button-down shirts to work to see who his shirt lady is, and he sent me a couple of recommendations.
At the end of a workday in April, when I was about to drop my procedure mask into the bin to be cleaned for reuse, the temperature-taking lady told me I could keep it if I wanted, perhaps to use for walking around my neighborhood. I actually did not want a COVID-19-encrusted mask, but I thought it was quite generous of my employer to make the offer, given the shortage.
When I made my weekly trip to Rainbow, I found things had changed again. It required about 45 minutes of standing in line to get into the store, but this time I brought my longest bungee cord and hung my panniers around my neck, so that I could read a magazine while I waited.
The first time I went there in the COVID-19 era, many things in the bulk section were covered with brown paper, but I could put others in the containers I’d brought. The following week, I had to use their new containers, and they had started to package up some bulk items. On this most recent trip, I found that nothing whatsoever from home is welcome, including brown paper grocery bags, and that there is no self-serve in the bulk area at all. They have packaged up what are presumably the most popular items. I cannot imagine how much work that has entailed. So, for instance, where there are normally 20 choices of beans, now there are three kinds packed in paper bags. They also had packaged up active dry yeast, so I got some, just in case.
In the produce section, you can’t even tell there is a pandemic, except that there are no bulk salad greens, and there is a box for discarding gloves. But everything is well stocked and there are plenty of packaged salad greens, as well as bunches of all sorts of greens.
There is still no packaged flour, but they had packaged up some bulk whole wheat flour, so I bought some of that. There was plenty of bread. I bought one loaf. There was toilet paper! Not a lot, and each customer is limited to two rolls, which I bought. The particular sauerkraut I favor is cleaned out. There was just one jar left, my least favorite flavor. This was an opportunity to try something new. I bought one jar each from two other makers, and when I tasted one of them, I immediately thought it was superb. Maybe I won’t go back to my former favorite.
I now have plenty of bread, and plenty of stuff with which to make bread, plus some in transit, which is kind of silly, because if it becomes impossible to get one, it will probably be impossible to get the other. I’ll either have way more than needed, or zilch.
Before I went to Rainbow, the CDC had just advised that people not even go to the grocery store for the next two weeks. I hope everyone in my family follows that advice. The reason I didn’t is that we are not having any particular surge here, and my greatest risk by far is that I work in a hospital. Going to Rainbow seems not terribly risky in comparison, since they are making social distancing so easy. I wore gloves and also a doubled bandanna over my nose and mouth. I plan to sew a couple of cloth masks soon.
Another thing that was different in Rainbow was a line of yellow tape next to the cash register saying to keep that area clear: to load the conveyor belt from as far back as possible, and then rush to the far end of the station to bag your stuff up, stepping as briefly as possible to the card reader to pay.
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