It’s Wednesday night. I haven’t been out of the house since Monday morning and am starting to get a little kooky. Monday and Tuesday most of us were sick. This morning I woke up feeling a little better but my car wasn’t — its battery was completely dead. So no escape for me.

My appetite has been nonexistent, so dinners have been utilitarian and kid-geared this week. But tonight I made pumpkin French toast for the first time (Jessica Seinfeld, again) and eggs and turkey bacon. Only my daughter and I ate the French toast, but it was good. The kids finished up dinner with a round of cereal, which was like their fifth serving of the stuff today. Between cereal and Slim-Fast, we go through 4 gallons of milk a week.

I hope I start feeling 100% again soon because I feel like my concentration is shot. I also really want to enjoy food again. My first post-illness meal shall be pad thai and shrimp rolls from Fusion Bay, a phenomenally good restaurant in town, and a McDonald’s milkshake. Not together.

On the frugality front, I had to purchase a new humidifier yesterday. I swear that I will take good care of this one, and clean it regularly, and not let the kids break it, so that it doesn’t join the ranks of the undead humidifiers that I just cleaned out of the attic.

I kept picking up this book today and reading pages here and there:

This was a gift from my cousin who is a wonderful cook. She also studied at this author’s cooking school in Ireland. The book talks about things like foraging, making your own butter, keeping chickens, making “crackling,” which I last heard about in the Little House on the Prairie books, canning, preserving, and more. It’s 600 pages long. It’s filled with all these anecdotes and memories of her life growing up in Ireland in the countryside. I haven’t yet used any of the recipes but I just love reading it. It’s so soothing to read a sentence like, “If I’m to choose the most forgotten or neglected of the beans, I’d say scarlet runners.”  I guess it just makes me happy to know that someone preserved all this knowledge of yore. Right this moment I wish we could all be transplanted to a farm so that the kids could wake up in the morning and go check the henhouse for eggs…