Welcome to The Savory City. Follow our adventures on food, drink, travel & healthy living in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
Love,
Grant &Teresa
All in Shelter-in-Place
I wrote in our Day 14 blog post about our first experience ordering groceries from Amazon Fresh. I also promised that I would share information about local businesses that offer grocery delivery and pick-up services.
I wrote in yesterday’s post about a lightened laundry load being a silver lining of this shelter-in-place mandate. Another silver lining: I get a chance to practice cutting Grant’s hair, while knowing that if I messed it up, at least it would grow back by the time we have to see another human being.
Now, for the first time, I am absolutely killing it in the laundry game. I am the queen of laundry. I am a laundry ninja.
Being under a shelter-in-place mandate means I feel a little less guilty about movie marathons. Translation: We’re rewatching the Marvel movies in order.
We haven’t had chicken nuggets since we started our diet a couple of months ago, so today I experimented with the ingredients we had in our pantry. They’re pretty simple to make and they turned out wonderfully. We air-fried the nuggets in our Instant Pot air fryer, but you can also fry these traditionally in a skillet.
Bay Area health officials today extended their COVID-19 stay-at-home order through May 3. The announcement affects the six counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara, as well as the city of Berkeley.
Grant and I ordered our first Amazon Fresh delivery the other night. Here’s how it went.
With the initial national social distancing guidelines set to expire Tuesday, the president today announced that the guidelines would be extended through April 30.
I discovered a great autoimmune protocol (AIP) recipe for cassava flour pancakes by Michele at Thriving on Paleo. I made a batch last Saturday and we loved it so much that I made another batch today. We topped our pancakes with some mixed berries and a syrup I made by heating honey and date syrup over the stove.
We also realize we have a lot to be grateful for even now in this strange, new, quarantine life we’re living.
We’re nearing the end of our second week of working from home, which means Grant and I have logged a considerable number of hours working two feet apart. In that time, we’ve discovered a lot about each other’s work styles. Here are some tips we’d like to share with other coworking couples.
Grant and I went out today for the first time since our mandatory shutdown for a chiropractor appointment. We couldn’t have picked a more beautiful day to go out. It’s been rainy and drizzly the past few days, which turned our hills a gorgeous shade of green. I’m really happy we got a chance to see the hills this way before they turn brown for the summer.
We’ve set phone reminders to take a two-minute fitness break at the top of every hour. As soon as the alarm goes off, we get out of our seats and do a mini fitness circuit. We try to mix up the routine every day, but it usually includes a quick set of crunches, push-ups, free weights and stretches. I’m not a huge fitness nut, so doing small bursts of workouts periodically makes exercising feel more manageable to me.
What goes better with self-isolation than comfort food? Today we’re sharing the recipe to one of our favorite meals, the Creamy Instant Pot Mushroom Chicken by Autoimmune Wellness.
I took the opportunity to have a reading weekend. I settled in with a cup of tea, a warm blanket and an ebook from the library, The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman.
AIP removes food sources of inflammation to help heal the gut and improve the immune system. The idea is to remove inflammation triggers completely from one’s diet and then after a few months, slowly reintroduce ingredients one at a time to see how the body handles them.
As our first week of being at home draws to a close, we reflect on how important it is to maintain relationships in these strange times. It’s a reminder that being apart doesn’t necessarily mean social isolation.
Today is Day 3 of our mandatory shut-in, but we’ve been self-isolating for the past six days. Six days of gloomy skies and not going out were starting to take a toll on me. I had hoped that today’s good weather would mark a turn for the better, at least in terms of allowing us to get outside. I dreamed of fresh air and the chance to stretch my legs.
We had to find a work space solution that works for both an editor and a salesman. Our solution: three laptops, one monitor, a keyboard, a mouse and two 12-can boxes of La Croix. For the next three weeks, or possibly longer, those are the building blocks of our new home office (aka our dining room).
As we read about people being confined or forced to stay in their homes, we asked ourselves whether we were prepared in case we find ourselves in a similar situation. We answered honestly: We were not.
