TCC, Day 13: Cheese and Ovens

Today the Brazos Valley had its first death from the corona virus. We were all sitting together in the living room when the alert came through. I think it took our collective breath away. Sometimes it still feels like we're living in a movie. Is this real life? Just this month we were planning trips and complaining about traffic. That happened in March.

Since it's Saturday Trey was home. It's so nice to have him home, but we have both discussed how grateful we are that he's essential personnel and gets to continue working every day. Plenty of people don't have that right now. But I sure did appreciate spending the day with him.

He made cheese enchiladas and guacamole for dinner, and it was delicious!

I only made one panic purchase when this whole business started: cheese.  That's logical, right? On several visits to the store there was no cheese to be found. Then on a trip to The Farm Parch I found cheese!  It was a miracle!

It was also a five pound bag. Or maybe ten pounds? I don't know. It was infant-sized. And I bought that bad boy anyway.

I think I remember my mother freezing shredded cheese when I was a kid. I googled it, and it's a thing. So today I used my handy-dandy vacuum sealer and froze the cheese in two cup packages for future use. It looks super weird, and I feel like a cheese-hoarder. Don't judge.

If you find yourself in desperate need of cheese, hit me up.

Unfortunately we realized today our oven is on the blink. The lights on the front are very dim and the temperature doesn't seem quite right. Our oven is 15 years old, so maybe it's time for a new one. How long do we wait before we decide it's essential for our oven to work correctly and venture out to the store and then allow delivery people into our home (if that's even a thing)? Maybe we just pretend we're on the frontier and have to guess at our oven temperature. That seems a frontier-y thing to do.

I made a lemon meringue pie. I was able to monitor the crust to be sure it cooked okay, so I only really needed to cook the meringue in the oven. I had it on 350 for about ten minutes, but it wasn't doing the job, so I decided to turn on the broiler and brown it a bit. I stood right there watching it the whole time, and the blasted thing still burned.

I said some bad words. But you better believe I'm taking off those burnt tips and eating that thing anyway.

The juxtaposition of the world today is not lost on me. Someone in our community died from a scary and contagious disease. I ate yummy guacamole and burned a pie. Life is weird.

The end.