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I’ve been asked by more than one person if it’s harder to be vegan while sheltering-in-place.

The question kind of made me pause, because I forget that a lot of people think vegan food is esoteric or hard to find; one person however was specifically asking if I was having a hard time finding fresh produce. I also paused at that because I don’t eat nearly as much fresh produce as I should.

To further understanding of my people and to give everyone more food ideas, allow me to share some of the easy meals I have been eating during this intense and uncertain time that you might also enjoy. These aren’t meant to be precise recipes.

Bountiful Quinoa

Cook up 1 cup of quinoa per the package directions, but instead of water use vegetable broth (or add a couple tablespoons of veg broth powder to the water).

Meanwhile cook a diced onion and 2-3 cloves of garlic (you could also use garlic powder if that’s what you have) until soft in, eh, let’s say 3 tablespoons of oil. Add in two medium diced zucchini, two medium diced yellow squash, and cook until all soft and nice. If you can’t find these particular veggies use whatever your store has in stock.

I add a good shaking of this wonderful garlic herb seasoning blend to the veg while it cooks (all FreshJax products I’ve tried so far are *chef’s kiss* and they come in nice big jars). Then add a can of drained and rinsed black beans. Stir in the cooked quinoa and sprinkle chopped nuts (whatever you have or can get; I keep pecans around for my oatmeal). This makes a TON of food; I was able to eat it for five meals, and it kept quite nicely in the fridge.

BBQ Tofu Business

Tofu has been hard to find around here so when I get it, I buy two or three and freeze them. Fu that’s been frozen and thawed actually has a meatier texture! I take a block and press it for 20 minutes (I have a press but you could just as easily wrap it in a kitchen towel and press under some heavy cans), then dice up.

Toss yer fu in a combination of 2T olive oil, 2T soy sauce, 1T nutritional yeast, and 1T “poultry” seasoning or the aforementioned garlic-herb mix. If you don’t have nooch just go with the oil, soy, and whatever seasonings you like. Then lay it all out on a foil-lined, rimmed baking pan. Add to the pan a head of cauliflower that’s been separated into bite-sized florets and tossed in olive oil and salt/pepper. Bake the whole thing at 425F for 30-35 minutes, turning once.

Dump the whole thing into a bowl and squirt in as much barbecue sauce as pleases you. Consume in mass quantities. You can also leave off the sauce and just eat it like it is; it’s delicious. But the BBQ sauce makes it dynamite for me, southern gal that I am. (Make sure you read your sauce label to be sure it doesn’t have honey in it.) I can eat the entire recipe in one sitting if I’m not careful. If you can’t find cauliflower use broccoli – the pic to the left is actually green cauliflower, which was the only thing the store had that day.

Heckin’ Easy Curry

Of course I could tell you about how in India curry powder isn’t a thing and people make their own spice blends, and how the mass-marketed yellow sadness called “curry powder” is a relic of British imperialism, but if that’s what you have in your pantry, by all means, go for it. I have a couple of different curry blends from various spice purveyors, and honestly, as much as I’d like to say I blend and toast my own spices that would be a huge lie. I do that for special dishes where a more delicate touch is required. For a good old weeknight curry just use something in a jar. I recommend this, or this.

So start with an onion, diced up, and cook it in a couple tablespoons of oil along with 3-4 cloves of minced garlic and, if you have it, a 1″ knob or so of grated fresh ginger. This is awesome but if you don’t have ginger, no biggie. Add about 2 tablespoons of whatever curry spices you’re using and cook until your house smells like paradise. If you want this mess spicier add in a minced Serrano or other chile.

Now add some veg – whatever you’ve got is awesome, but my favorites are potatoes, cauliflower, and carrots, maybe a nice zucchini. You can also use bags of frozen mixed vegetables of whatever kind you’ve got. I almost always have a bag of frozen Broccoli Normandy, which is brocc, cauliflower, and carrots. If you only have one kind of veg, just use that! There’s no Curry Police outside. They’re in quarantine.

Throw that into the pot with the onion-spice mixture and add some wet stuff, say a 14oz can of crushed tomatoes and 2 cups of veg broth, or a bigger can of tomatoes and less broth, or tomatoes and water, whatever is on hand. Cook the whole mess together for 30-45 minutes or until the taters are cooked, which will depend on the size of the dice. Frozen veg cooks faster because it’s not 100% raw, so you could put the potato in for 10 minutes before adding the frozen stuff. Keep an eye on things because tomatoes cooking tend to explode all over.

When everything seems done stir in a can of coconut milk. (Or don’t, if you don’t have it, it’ll be tasty either way.) Heat it all through, serve with rice, or some manner of flat bread – roti is usually hard to find in megamarts but I won’t tell if you use tortillas. The whole wheat ones are strikingly similar. Just saying.

There are a lot of lists like this running around at the moment, but as I’m a single person without kids or a partner (I live with a roommate but we are not a couple) my list might look quite different from that of a mom of two or a health worker’s right now, so, everyone’s mileage will vary.

I find I’m relying on a lot of cheap psychological tricks these days, like making the bed, to keep up my sense of normalcy (even though nothing about any of this is normal). Here are some of the things I’ve made it a point to keep doing (or not doing) as the madness unfolds:

Meditation and Prayer

I group these together because they’re two parts of the same practice for me. I actually really enjoy meditation when I get into it, and I’ve bumped up the length of my daily sits to compensate for how much longer it takes me to settle my mind these days. I start out doing a toes-to-head body relaxation, silently asking a blessing on each part of my body (including a number of key organs, like my lungs, which remain stalwart and healthy); then I sit and talk to Deity in whatever way feels right. Usually this ends up being a round with my prayer beads, repeating four or five lines of a prayer. When I finish that I just sit, and try to rest in the Source for as long as I can.

Even if I can’t concentrate for crap, I try to stay with the whole session, and not lose patience with myself. It might seem like we all have tons of quiet space these days, but even if we don’t have a lot of outward activity, finding quiet on the inside is a whole different pile of puppies.

My Day Job

It’s funny – I was so burnt out on my day job before all this, because the first quarter of the year is utterly bananaballs in that particular industry. I had scheduled two days off way back in early March when things still made sense. I argued with myself on whether to take them or not – on the one hand it’s not like I could go anywhere on “vacation,” but on the other, burnt out is burnt out and work from home is still WORK.

Well, I took the two days, and they sucked. I had emotional lows and was bored and listless for most of the time I was awake, which wasn’t a lot. It turns out I need that structure and routine even more now. I like my day job okay, and my company is doing pretty well by us right now; I don’t think I’ll be taking another day off until we’re out of shelter-in-place unless I actually feel ill.

Avoiding the Ever-Living Shit out of the News

I swear if I have to see that goddamn smug orange clown face one more time I’ll wind up on the news myself! The weaponized soullessness of Republican “leadership” has left me so viscerally angry…and I can’t live like that, not when I have fewer constructive outlets. I try to stick to local news, as it affects me most immediately. Washington isn’t doing shit for us, our local governments are. Maybe making themselves perniciously useless is how they plan to have “small government,” whatever. If I want to poison myself I’ll just drink. At least that starts out fun.

“Making” the Bed

I don’t make my bed as a general rule, and I haven’t started per se so much as I try to pull the blankets up and at least cover up the sheets when I get up for work. It’s an interior signal that I’m “at the office” now. It also keeps the near-microscopic cat litter bits that always end up in the bed at bay for a while longer.

Using My Planner

I’ve always said that planning for me is less about productivity and more about sanity. I use my lists and calendars to anchor myself in time and space, to remind myself I was here and I did things. Coupled with the creativity I apply to my bullet journal, I rely on my planner to help me remember every day is not the same, time hasn’t evaporated completely, and this is not forever. I don’t look farther ahead than this month but I try to keep at least a page per week of things I’d like to do and things I’ve done. I don’t worry too much about actually checking everything off. Again, it’s a grounding exercise more than anything else.

Drinking Cold Brew, Literally, By the Gallon

It’s not much, but I try to order things from local places when I can, and one that I’ve been really enjoying is the cold brew from Epoch Coffee, a place a dear friend and I always went to on Thursday nights for a writerdate. They’re delivering cold brew by the gallon as well as some baked goods and packaged coffees, and using the proceeds to help maintain health insurance for their employees. Not only do I get to caffeinate with abandon, I can contribute a tiny bit to alleviating the strain of all this on a few people. I also try to shop frequently at Rabbit Food, our local vegan grocery store which thank God is still open for all my vegan junk food and specialty item needs. Buy local! Do it a lot if you can!

I’m not really sure what kind of writer I am these days.

You might know that up until recently I’ve been dealing with a depressive…episode? I’m not sure what to call something that lasts more than five years. During this half a decade it felt like all the things I recognized about myself from my early 30s just sort of…stopped. Spirituality. Dancing. Blogging. Anything that used to matter to me – anything I used to write about! – stopped mattering.

In the last half of 2019 and the first bit of 2020 things started getting better. There were three primary driving forces, though I have no idea if any one was more influential than the others. First, I started attending a Unitarian Universalist church a year ago, and my growing involvement with it started pulling me out of my cave, pushing me to make friends, to join in the world again. Second, I started meditating and studying tarot again, which along with church drew me back to my spiritual life. And third, I got on a combination of psych meds that WORKS. Having been on over two dozen meds and combinations of meds in the last 22 years I had about given up on anything better than baseline survival punctuated with the occasional week or two of high functioning before the inevitable, and despair-inducing, slide back into the pit. Now I measure my days from a baseline of “not bad” instead of just “alive.”

I joined church teams, I contemplated doing YouTube videos. I redid my website yet again with a fresher look. I was developing a social life again, being brave again, testing my edges.

Enter COVID-19.

As I said in my last post I am very lucky. I am not currently in danger of losing my job. I don’t have to parent during all this. I have plenty to eat and a world of entertainment at my fingertips. While I have health issues none of them really put me at greater risk for serious complications should I come down with La Rona. Aside from my student loans (LOL) all my bills are paid and I have health insurance. I can work from home pretty easily and it’s actually been kind of nice, although I miss daily interactions with my team.

When it comes to my greater work, though – by which I mean writing – I have no idea what to do with myself.

I was in the middle of a LGBTQ romance novel about werewolves that I was already growing frustrated with; I have no desire to work on it. I abandoned the fourth…fifth? attempt at starting Shadow World 8. The nonfiction project I was outlining has about as much appeal as a finger in the eye right now.

And yes, I know I don’t have to do anything. It’s not about productivity, in this case, it’s that writing is in my blood and I haven’t been letting my blood speak. I feel itchy on the inside when I’m not writing. But even before all this craziness I was in a weird place where I just…don’t know what kind of writer I am anymore.

I feel like I’m no longer on the path I was before this bout of depression started, and what started it was, largely, disillusionment over my writing career that cascaded into a ditch full of shit. So trying to write the kinds of things I used to seems a bit regressive.

(Do not take this as an indicator that I’m abandoning the Shadow World series, I am absolutely not. But no, I have no idea whatsoever when book 8 will be out, sorry guys.)

It’s easy to say “write what you want to write,” or “write what you wish you could read,” or any of the zillion other bits of helpful advice (that was sarcasm) people love to give writers. I’ve never been a Morning Pages, writing “practice” kind of gal. Writing and I have a relationship that I think ensures I’ll never be Stephen King and churn out an entire book a year. The mere thought makes me want to autodefenestrate. I think it also means I’ll never be able to get by without a day job.

I guess I’m having something of a creative identity crisis.

Not knowing what to say, how to be of service, what I need to express, or where I want to go, the obvious solution was to start blogging again, hahaha. I’m hoping to keep this up, and it’ll likely be kind of random both in frequency and subject matter (so really not all that different from Before). Right now I feel like I need to both chronicle my weird internal spooling and my experience of the world as much as I can.

So welcome back, friends, and thanks for still being here. Hope you’ll stick around. Should be weird.