23 March, morning

More grim news everywhere. Rumor has it a statewide shelter-in-place order is
coming today, effective tonight. I suspect that'll be when the mild pandemonium
hits. Happily we're in a pretty good place in terms of food (and toilet
paper...) and are prepared to not go anywhere for... a while, if necessary.

The comparatively low amount of flour we had on hand was starting to worry me,
so I set about trying to figure out how I could get more. Ten pounds seems like
a lot, but I'd forgotten both just how good fresh bread is... and how much
flour it takes. I thought I'd just go on regular Amazon and order some... nope.
They were out of basically everything except weird artisinal nut flours. I'm
not picky, I'll happily work with cake, bread, or all-purpose flour, but
$12/pound almond flour is a bit of a stretch. In any event, after poking around
several places, discovered I could get some from Whole Foods, delivered via
Amazon's Prime Now. So I got six more pounds of (annoyingly expensive organic
heirloom hippie-dippie) flour delivered yesterday, along with random fresh
vegetables they had, and some milk to bake with.

I think we're in a position now where we can go four, five, maaaaybe six weeks
on what we have on hand, though things will be a bit grim and dire at the end
there, if we can't source at least a little fruit and vegetables along the way.
If things aren't super bad, I'm hoping we can remain isolated as long as
necessary, with roughly weekly deliveries of fruit and produce. But we'll see
how things turn out, I guess. Looking at what's happening in, for example,
Italy, and looking at how competently our government here is handling things,
I'm not super optimistic that deliveries will remain available indefinitely.

Made a pork and bean soup last night, with some very old beans we had laying
around. They took far longer than I'd hoped to cook, but it worked out fine,
and there are leftovers. Hopefully the fresher beans we've stocked up on won't
take two hours to cook.

Fried three rashers of bacon and made a half-batch of pancakes for breakfast
for the two of us. Ate all the bacon, but have leftover pancakes. It was a nice
way to start the week.

I (obviously) have the Internet at my disposal, but I'm mostly relying on two
1930s/1940s cookbooks for recipes, in part because they include a lot of
thrifty recipes for using leftovers. For instance, in addition to regular
pancakes, there are recipes for pancakes that include leftover rice or
potatoes, which I expect we'll find ourselves with in coming weeks. We actually
have a little leftover rice right now, from dinner the other night, but it's
earmarked for lunch today...

It snowed overnight, and is now cloudy and overcast, which isn't making things
any more cheerful. But we're doing fine, nevertheless. Hopefully you are as
well.

More as time and developments permit.