Cooking at Home. Planning and Time.

When the Coronavirus pandemic started I made a huge shift in my eating habits. Overnight I went from dining out in restaurants 12 times a week— basically most lunches and dinners— to cooking and eating every meal at home. I didn't eat restaurant food at all for the first month. Since then, and especially since getting vaccinated over a year ago now, I've eased back toward my old habits. I haven't gone back to dining out 12 times a week but I'm getting close. Lately I've been dining out, say, 10 times a week.

Lately my cooking habits have regressed, too. Instead of preparing delicious, made-from-scratch meals several times a week, like I did early in the pandemic, I've shifted to making mostly convenience meals: heat-and-eat meals, microwaveable food, etc.

This week I decided I can do better. I used to do better! So I know I definitely can. It just takes... planning. And time.



Tuesday I made myself a steak dinner. I defrosted and grilled some short rib I've had in the freezer for... ugh, over a year. (I wrote the date on the freezer bag I packed it in.) That tells you how far behind my old cooking cadence I've fallen. On the side I made creamed spinach from a can of plain spinach, adding butter and cheese to it in a saucepan, and heated a roll of French bread in the stove. Not pictured: the 2½ glasses of Cabernet Franc I drank with it. 🥩🍷😋

Making this meal proved two things. ...Well, three. It was delicious. But other than that it proved two things.

First, cooking real meals at home takes planning and time. Before you can eat the meal you have to buy the food. Then you have to prep it. Then you have to cook it. The steak, for example, I already had in the freezer. But I had to plan ahead to defrost it. I started that Sunday night. But then I had such a long workday on Monday I was left with no time to dress it... or to refill the propane tank for the grill outside! So I put off making my steak dinner until Tuesday. Tuesday it almost didn't happen, either. But late in the afternoon I carved out time to buy gas and I switched my plan from marinating the meat hours in advance (I had no time to do that) to using a last-minute salt and pepper rub instead.

The second lesson is kind of embedded in the first: While cooking takes planning and time, it's doable... when planned ahead. You've got to buy the food or defrost it ahead of time. If there are prep steps like marinating meat, you've got to plan those into the schedule. And when unplanned stuff happens like working stretching 'til after 6pm with no break, as it did on Monday for me, you've got to be ready to call an audible... like "I'll make the steak on Tuesday; let's go out for pizza tonight."

That Monday night pizza was awesome, BTW. But so was the Tuesday steak dinner. And it was actually way cheaper, even though it was prime meat, because I cooked it myself instead of paying a restaurant.

WTF, Pants?!?

I've remarked various times about how I gauge the unofficial start of summer and winter by when I start wearing shorts and running the A/C daily, or start wearing long pants and running the heat daily. By this standard, summer began on March 22 this year. But here we are on June 17 and... I'm wearing pants for the first time in nearly 3 months. WTF?!?!

Yeah, the weather's cool today across California. There's, like, a freak cool air mass over us. Here in the heart of Silicon Valley it's only supposed to reach a high of 69° today. When I went out shortly after 11am I was wearing not only trousers and a long sleeve shirt but a light jacket— because clouds outside were keeping the temps barely above 60° and threatening rain. For context, the average high for this date is 81° and rain in June is almost unheard-of.

Avoiding Assumptions Clash in Gaming with Good Descriptions

There's a common pitfall in roleplaying games call assumptions clash. The game master (GM) and players arrive at a point in the story where they have sharply conflicting beliefs about what ought to happen next. It happens because they've based their expectations on assumptions that do not match.

The simplistic solution to assumptions clash is, "Communicate!" But brief or ineffective communication is sometimes worse than no communication. I thought about this today when Gnome Stew, a gaming blog I read, ran the article "Elements of Description". The author gave tips for describing scenes more effectively. I posted comments about how this relates to assumptions clash there, which I'll share (with some modification) here.

As a player and a GM I'm sensitive to simple descriptions of a scene that can wind up misleading others because they embed assumptions. For example, a memorable confusion occurred years ago at the gaming table when the GM described, "You're at the edge of a clearing in the middle of the forest. In the middle of the clearing is a log house. Smoke rises from a stone chimney."

Moments later the PCs were attacked by two ogres in the woods. They inferred, correctly, that the ogres lived in the house and were patrolling the area. They figured it was a fight they could handle. But then when in round 2 of the combat the GM described 30 more ogres running out of the house to join the fight, the players called a foul.

"How can 30 ogres fit in a log cabin?"

"I didn't say it was a cabin, I said it was a house."

"Okay, but you didn't say it was a huge house, like big enough for an entire tribe of ogres!"

The players made a near-fatal decision for their characters to fight the pair of ogres (rather than, say, run) because they didn't believe there could be 30 more ready to join the fight. There was an assumptions clash about what "house" meant. Clearly the GM should have given a clearer description: something like, "At the center of the clearing is a crudely made wooden house. It is large, at least 100 feet across, with a slanted roof rising 30 feet high at the center. Smoke wafts from a single, large chimney in the middle." The players then could've formed better expectations of the potential for a large number of enemies to emerge.

BTW, I was the GM in this story. 😳 I gave an overly brief description because I was busy juggling multiple mental tasks— describing the scene, looking up my notes, drawing a map, and answering player questions. I've made a practice since then of putting description keywords in my notes so I make sure I say things like, "A large, rambling house, over 200 feet wide," rather than just, "A house."

The players share responsibility for communication, too, BTW. No player at the table asked, "How big is this house?" When I'm a player I always try to ask for description like this, to ensure we're not head for an assumptions clash.