OK, these days Covid-19 makes all the headlines and the news. And we as seniors, let alone with pre-existing conditions fit into the high-risk group. We hunkered down, walking in our quiet neighborhood and greeting our neighbours from at least 2 metres distance, but one family or another will usually move to the other side of the street before we ever say hello. These are the times.
In the best of the times, I usually have supplies that will last us for 2 weeks. We live in Canada: snowstorms and ice storms can lock us down for quite some time. Remember the ice storm of 2014? We were without power and were iced-in for 5 days. I also have lived under communism, when food supplies have been scarce, through the changes of the 1990s when for a time period there was simply no food anywhere. I have been in lines for 6 to 10 hours to buy bread and feed my kids. I also remember as a child that we had food rationing: A bottle of oil for family of 4, a kilo of flower, a kilo of sugar (my mom used to bake a lot back then) …. So, I know something about panic and human behaviour.
Every year I go through my 2 weeks food supply, check the expiry date and use the items expiring in the current year, replacing them with new ones. My food supplies are mainly canned fish – sardines, tuna and salmon. A few canned vegetables and a case of canned soups – tomato and mushroom. I have some pasta, rice, dry beans and lentils.
So long before all this started here in Canada, sometime in early February, I looked through my pantry, released all 2020 canned supplies for use, went to Costco and refilled my pantry (it is all organized by expiration year). OK, I also got my regular supply of toilet paper, Kleenex, a pack of Costco pasta, replenished my supplies of dry beans and lentils. My small freezer was kind of full with my frozen bread, 2 Costco bags of frozen vegetables, some of my herbs I froze last fall and some frozen fish and shrimps that I keep for when I am lazy to go out and shop. Back then no one was panic buying.
But now when we are told to sit tight, when Alex’s doctor called him a week ago and told him to be extra vigilant, I decided it was time to use some of my supplies. I had some leftovers of fresh produce from over a week ago: rapini, onions, garlic. As many of you know, I create my own recipes as I go. I asked Alex to chop me an onion, some garlic and the rapini that were at their last legs. I still had to figure out what I was going to do with all this. It can make a good addition to pasta. But … browsing through my 2020 pantry supply I picked up a tin of sardines. Hmmm, I wonder how this will fit.
I decided to use the full pack (500g) of pasta. As I fried the onions and added the garlic and the rapini I was almost ready to add the tomato sauce. This would be a nice pasta sauce. But too trivial.
So, I grabbed 2 tins of sardines, mixed them with the rapini, added a few cherry tomatoes that were in my fridge, crying for me to pick them… Salt and pepper – all looked and tasted delicious.
Perhaps a can of mushroom soup will go with all these and add some moisture. And so I and added it to the mix. Hmmm…. By that time the pasta was ready to go in the mix. So there I had three meals for the two of us.
My approximate recipe is:
1 bunch of rapini
1 big onion
2-3 garlic cloves (you can skip this if garlic is your enemy)
A handful of cherry tomatoes
Salt and pepper to taste
(You can add zucchini, peppers and other vegetables lying in your fridge and getting ripe)
1 can of mushroom soup
2 cans of sardines (mine were in soy sauce). If sardines are not your friend use tuna or anther canned fish you keep in your pantry.
500 g of pasta
Cook the chopped onions to golden, then stir the chopped garlic in, add the rapini (and other veggies if you want) and cook them on medium heat until done (about 10 min). Add the little tomatoes – halved. Add the mushroom soup. Reduce the heat to minimum and stir until all is warmed and bubbling.
In parallel cook your pasta based on the instructions of the package. Once it is cooked drain and mix it in the large pan with the vegetables-sardines sauce. It is simply delicious!
Bon Appetit.
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