Honeyed Oatmeal

     The stuff just feels comforting on a sore throat: well-cooked oatmeal, sweetened with honey.  Tamara picked up a bottle of raw, local honey for me yesterday and I spent the afternoon sipping tea (Typhoo*) with honey: it's soothing and both the tea and the honey have some antiseptic properties.  It probably won't cure you, but it'll help keep things from getting worse.

     Likewise, I have been enjoying chewable vitamin supplements that claim to boost the immune system: a little extra zinc and vitamin C and so on can't hurt.

     This morning, I decided to try the honey in my breakfast coffee, which worked well.  I was already hankering for oatmeal, so that got a teaspoon of honey, too.  It was a real treat; I prefer well-cooked oatmeal and the warm cereal was simply wonderful.

     I'm still sick but I got a decent night's sleep last night and I'm not going to do much today -- marinate and slow simmer some stew beef for dinner, a project in which the biggest effort will be chopping vegetables, adding them to the pot and mostly ignoring them for a couple of hours.

     Cooking when I feel lousy can be a challenge.  The day I realized I was catching the cold, I picked up ingredients for variations on "red stew," the stuff Midwesterners call "mild chili."  It's not much like the Southwest dish; the starter had ground beef, chorizo, finely-chopped carrots, a handful of big cherry tomatoes, a little celery, a diced red pepper, a few ripe shishito peppers (hot pulp removed), a lot of diced Shitake mushrooms, a few sliced Castelvetrano olives, a couple of cans of mild chilis and a big box of strained tomatoes, simmered with a big bay leaf.  I made microwave cornbread to go with it; that would have worked better if the (sealed) baking powder hadn't expired in 2019.  Despite adding half again as much, beating in plenty of air and giving it extra time to work, the bread rose about half as much as it should have, a little more in the center.  Not quite brick-like but not light and airy.  It soaked up red stew just fine and tasted good.

     Last night, I added browned and crumbled andouille sausage, more fresh tomatoes and a white onion, diced and sauteed while some of the previous day's leftovers thawed in the microwave.  With a small can of tomato sauce, the result was still thick enough to stand a spoon in.  I broke a few salines into mine to add a little salt.  And there's still another night's worth of red stew frozen for later; I divided the original batch into two freezer bags.

NB: I have declined to publish a couple of recent comments that included political sentiments in response to non-political posts.  Politics in this country are badly screwed up and I'm tired of trying to put out fires with gasoline.  Dear Congress, Please Get Well Soon, we miss your limited but necessary functionality.
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* The company was bought up by an investment firm awhile back and some Brits aren't pleased with how that has affected the product.  They know their tea, but I haven't been unhappy with it compared to other locally-available alternatives, which include other UK imports.  The French know wine; the Scots know whiskey; the Brits know tea and the Jamaicans grow the best coffee.  I'm not saying you can't get good wine from California and Ethiopian chai is as nice a cuppa of the spiced stuff as anyone could brew -- but if you want an informed opinion on a beverage, ask the people who drink the most of it.