It’s rare, the days when I actually feel so terrible, so under-the-weather, that I do not go into work. Rarer still, however, are the days when I feel so terrible that I can’t be bothered doing anything other than curling up with some tea or coffee and sleeping most of the day away.
The last three days, have been worse, the kind of days where just sitting in a training for my day job has left me feeling so drained, I slept through most of the night. Monday night, David was forced to call for pizza, because I physically couldn’t move myself from bed or lift my head up. Yesterday, we made the journey to our nearest IHOP for Pancake Tuesday and enjoyed free pancakes, but then immediately returned home for sleep. Tonight is my third night of feeling too tired to move, much less to venture to make Green Thai Curry, which was my plan for the evening. Even after David pressed the tofu, I still couldn’t bring myself to do anything with it that would require effort, let alone digging out the food processor.
The thing about learning to cook–and by learning, I mean by buying quite a few cookbooks and just diving into them head first–is that you eventually figure out what goes with what, and how to throw items into a pot and come up with a satisfying meal. Since I was ill, I wanted something light but spicy, to ungunk the sinuses, something with fiber so I would feel full, but nothing heavy. And because it’s Ash Wednesday (and because I gave up animal products for Lent…more about that tomorrow) it needed to be free of meat.
Luckily, during my college years, I stocked up quite the collection of ramen, and managed to stumble out into the kitchen to the stove. Without setting myself on fire in my half-dizzy, half-delirious state of flu, was able to start the pot of water boiling. But just water plus flavoring plus noodles wasn’t going to do it for me tonight. So I ditched a cup of water and replaced it with a cup of veggie stock. To this, I added about a clove of minced garlic, a teaspoon of ginger paste, a tablespoon-ish of soy sauce, and a head of broccoli, which I pulled apart rather than chopped, as I’m feeling so crappy, chopping anything would have probably resulted in a few missing digits.
I brought all of this slowly to a boil, then threw in the noodles. Three minutes later, I poured the broth, noodles, and broccoli into a bowl and topped it with some asian chili sauce.
Quick, easy, and animal-free, plus it hit the spot. And it was all whipped up without a recipe.
The secret, my dears, is that I’ve been working on quite the number of Asian recipes recently. And when you’ve made enough of any one type of food, you start to learn what goes with what. Like my mother-in-law and her spag bol, which she rarely refers to in the cookbook any more, you start to learn through repetition what ingredients go with what to make the flavors you’re craving. This, of course, can be dangerous — you can get into a rut of making the same old thing the same old way by making the same old recipe over and over again — but if you learn to rely on gut instincts instead of recipes, the results can be a pleasant surprise right when you need them.
And by the way, within twenty minutes of eating tonight, my stomach felt a hundred times better, so feel free to steal my vegan cold and flu remedy whenever you need it.
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