Tag: Cooking

Adjusting

English version

We’re now approaching almost a year and a half since the 2020 Pandemic started.   Putting all of the negative consequences of enforced isolation behind us, most people are beginning to exit from their cocoons and are trying to re-adjust to “normal” living.

It has been a long siege but for many retirees like us it hasn’t been so painful.   We were already used to having every day feel like a weekend so when the months just rolled by so quickly, it wasn’t such a terrible ordeal.  I believe the survival formula is to stay busy, do daily exercise, become a good cook if you weren’t already, and stay in touch with your friends and relatives (even if it’s by Zoom).  

Cooking has been part of our therapy. Here’s one of my favorite dishes: Baked eggplant topped with Meryl’s tomato sauce, a slice of turkey meatball and covered with mozzarella. Meryl calls it Aubergine Daniel.

We have been living in a South Florida family community for over twenty years.   It wasn’t unusual to see people moving in and out of our neighborhood during this time whom we had never known, but surprisingly in the past year, we have been getting to know more neighbors than ever before.  We now go on our early morning walks with a person who has lived down the block for as long as we’ve been here, but we hardly knew her or her husband. 

To keep things from getting boring, we’ve been trying to vary our morning exercise routine.  My wife has been trying for years to get me to go swimming in the community pool which is just a few minutes away.  It is warm and well-maintained, and early in the morning, there’s hardly ever anyone there.  I had always resisted going there because I didn’t want to bump into patients asking me for medical advice while I was trying to relax.

Our community pool. First time swimming there was this summer!
Since we have a lot of thunderstorms in the summer, we get treated to a lot of rainbows. Sometimes double ones, even once a triple!

At least once a week, we’ve been trying to go to the beach. The closest one is about 20 minutes away and if we get there early, there’s almost no one there. Recently, there has been someone learning Tai Chi. The ocean temperature is about 83 (perfect for me) but there have been some riptides and more seaweed than usual. Pure relaxation!

Watching Tai Chi at the beach

For as long as we’ve lived here, we’ve had a two-person kayak.  During the past year, we have taken it out on the lake more times than during the past twenty years.   It is so relaxing out in the middle of the lake which stretches over a mile through many of the neighborhoods in our community. 

Our lake
Admiring our neighbors’ backyards from our kayak

While kayaking, we have seen a different picture of many of the interesting places within our community.   Some people have done extensive landscaping in their backyards, making us regret that we had done nothing except planting a mango and a papaya tree just in the past three months.   If we had done this 20 years ago, we would be enjoying our harvests and could be sharing our bounty with our neighbors. 

One day last week as we were kayaking through an adjacent neighborhood, we saw some women knocking down ripe mangoes from their trees.   As we rowed closer to the shore, they called out to us and asked us if we wanted some.  They were some of the most delicious mangoes we had had in a long time.  And we met some very friendly neighbors in the process.

Our neighbors and their delicious mangoes!

Our two-story house has been a blessing.  In our second-floor office, both my wife and I have our main computers, but since the Pandemic, I’ve taken over the kitchen table with my laptop.  I feel inspired to write when I am looking out over the lake where I frequently observe such diverse wildlife activity.  (Check out the following link for a previous post: https://sincerelydrdan.com/2020/10/23/our-daily-wildlife-show/)

Just outside on our patio, we have a covered area which protects us from the sun.  We have had 90% of our meals out there since the Pandemic started.  For a while, we enjoyed bringing our breakfasts out on the second-floor balcony just outside our bedroom.  We loved to fantasize that we were on a cruise having our meals on our stateroom balcony.

Our “cruise balcony”

When it became hotter and more humid a few months ago, we returned to the cool shade of the downstairs table.  Not a day goes by that we don’t see one of our feathered friends walking or flying past us as we enjoy our meals. 

“Can you believe that we used to pay for those excursions on a cruise just to see a couple of birds?” my wife loves to ask.  By the time we would go out on a visit to a bird sanctuary or a nature preserve, they would all be within the shade of their favorite trees and frustratingly difficult to observe. 

I used to believe that it was only while traveling that I would learn more about the world we live in. Adjusting to the Pandemic has reminded me that if I keep an open-minded attitude, the old adage, “There’s no place like home,” rings true once again.     

Our Recent International Travels

English version

Ever since I retired six years ago, my wife, Meryl, and I have tried to check off the places on our international travel wish list.  Luckily, we made it to most of them over the past ten years.  During the three years before I stopped working, with an arrangement with my partners to work for two months and then take a month off, this reduced work schedule gave us an excellent opportunity to spend a month away from home in many different locations.  It also gave me a head start in getting used to full retirement.   

We live in Palm Beach County, the big blue county in the southeast end of the state.

Since we live in Florida, my wife thinks that it is criminal to leave “paradise” during our beautiful winter season (from November to April).  She reminds me that “people are paying big bucks to come down here” so it has always made sense for us to schedule our long trips in May-June and September-October.  We have found that those are the best times to avoid large crowds and the extreme heat (or cold) in certain places.  In addition, Florida in the summer, although hot and humid, is quieter and has less traffic.  You just need to know how and when to plan your time outside when it gets up to the high 80s by 9 am.

During the Pandemic, friends and relatives who know that we like to travel have asked me often how we have been adjusting.  After several months of self-imposed isolation, we have slowly been coming out of our cocoons.   We still have very limited in-person contact, but we have recently returned to doing our own grocery shopping instead of using the delivery services.  The social distancing and mask-wearing appears to be well-accepted so we are now comfortable in most supermarkets.

Costco, still our favorite

Going for even a 15-minute car ride now seems like an exciting field trip.  We try to schedule our Costco runs for the early morning “senior hours” when the store is much less crowded.  They have improved the flow so that you can get in and out in very short time.

Whole Foods Market
An extensive selection of cheeses from our favorite places

For a real treat with an international flavor, we go to Whole Foods where spending some time in the cheese section makes us feel as if we are on a foreign trip.  We have bought several Spanish and French varieties of sheep, goat and cow’s milk cheese.  It reminded us of when we had an extended stay in Valencia and Madrid and used to make tapas every afternoon. 

When we went to one of the local fruit and vegetable markets, Maria’s, we found that she had a large selection of Chinese and Thai greens.  This reminded us of the trip a few years ago to China and Thailand.   She also carries many Central and South American varieties of vegetables and fruits, making us nostalgic for the time we spent in Costa Rica, Ecuador and Peru. 

It’s all comes down to your attitude!   If you adjust your expectations, you find that you can satisfy your culinary interests by learning to cook many of the dishes you may have tasted during your travels.  There has been such an explosion of food blogs during the last year that you can find the recipes for almost every type of cuisine.   With some determination, along with the willingness to fail miserably, it has been an amazing experience to learn how to cook many foreign specialties. 

Cooking together

Our trips to the Chinese grocer or the Indian/Pakistani store have yielded us with the ingredients that we had thought we would never find here in the United States.  With some advice from our Chinese and Indian friends, we are now able to recreate some of the same meals that we enjoyed while traveling to those countries.  A recent find has been the snow pea greens that we loved in China and which are very easy to sautee with just a little garlic and olive oil.

We have joked that our favorite restaurant is now our backyard waterfront café.  Until the cold weather finally reached Florida in December, we had eaten every dinner for more than eight months on our patio overlooking the lake.  It has been a lot of fun cooking together most of the time, and on some nights, we surprise each other with new recipes that we have found on the internet. 

Our favorite restaurant, overlooking our lake.
We imagine that we are on a cruise.

I hope that we will be able to resume our travel plans in the future.  Who knows when that will be?   Until then, we’re having a great time, trying to make the best of this very bizarre situation.