Not recipes so much this time, but a short PSA for Americans, because the issues they're about to be facing are pretty much the exact ones we faced with Brexit over here, except worse.

With all the bullshit going on, there's a pretty good chance that produce is going to get mega-expensive over there. A lot of people talk about growing your own vegetable garden, without thinking about how the people who are going to be hit hardest by price increases probably don't have a house with a garden, or in fact a house at all, and many are lucky to have an entire apartment to themselves. That makes having a vegetable garden difficult ... but it doesn't make it impossible.

Storytime: when I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia a few years ago, I needed something. I didn't specifically know what I needed, but I knew in general. I was so angry and scared and ... well, mostly depressed. I'd been down the depression road before, and I recognised the signs well enough. I needed something to get me through the worst of it - something that I could look at and feel productive, like I wasn't a waste of space. And, most of all, something I'd have to actually continue getting out of bed in the morning for. Turned out that for me, the thing I needed was a garden.

I'm fortunate. I live in a decent-sized apartment with no flatmates, a few decent window ledges and even a balcony. Less fortunate in that all of it's north-facing and I live in the UK so it doesn't get a lot of sun at the best of times. Still, I've managed to get some pretty wonderful things out of my windowsill and balcony garden. Mostly herbs, which gives me cookery herbs, medicinal herbs, and just nice-tasting herbs for tea, but vegetables and fruit too. There are varieties of strawberries and tomatoes that do just fine in shaded areas, and peas and some varieties of lettuce will grow faster than you can eat them all. I haven't done so well that I could completely stop buying produce, but I'll get there one day.

I can't give you all the tips - it'll take too long. But I can give you some basic ones, and the titles of a few books that might be helpful for you overall. (I didn't link to the books because regional booksellers.)

Indoor Kitchen Gardening by Elizabeth Millard. This one lets you know how best to use the space you have available and how to take advantage of any lighting conditions you might have in your home.

No-Waste Kitchen Gardening by Katie Elzer-Peters. This one's particularly good because while some of the suggestions are better for outside, it's a guide to how you can grow more fruit and veg from the remnants of the stuff you bought - onions and stuff.

If you do have a balcony, best thing you can get is the humble grow-bag. It's basically like a pot, but ... fabric, sort of. They go well with "No-Waste Kitchen Gardening" because potatoes, onions, and carrots can be regrown from the leftovers of purchased ones, and if you can manage that, you've got a recursive source of staple vegetables.

Another good investment if you have a decent-sized balcony is a composter bin. Potting soil can be expensive, and turning your food waste into compost as well as a source of recursive vegetables will nourish your produce and help make a bag of potting soil stretch.

If you don't live directly in a city (and maybe even if you do, if you've got green spaces in your area), you could also look into foraging. I actually have a forager's guide, but it's for the UK. For Americans, I did a bit of a search and found the 50-State Foraging Guide, which gives basic information and information about regional foraging guides. If you've got the spoons for it, it's nice to be out in the fresh air foraging for things.

If you're going to try medicinal herbal teas, do your research and find a reputable guide. There are lots of them around, so read carefully and try to avoid ones that sound too ... witchy, I guess. I have a copy of Rosemary Gladstar's Medicinal Herbs, which I check against my copy of Culpeper's Complete Herbal - Culpeper's is old, but it's been an authority on herbal medicine for hundreds of years, so it's still pretty helpful.

Things are really tough for everyone right now, I know. There's so much going on, and so little of it's good, and it's easy to feel depressed and powerless. I honestly did find that growing things helped me feel less powerless on the whole. I'd made life happen! I'd created life out of dirt and water and hope. I've had mornings when my breakfast was alpine strawberries fresh off the plant. I've got coq au vin marinading in the fridge with three sprigs of thyme I got just by walking onto the balcony and snipping them off with the kitchen knife. I found there's no going back to dried oregano when you've had it fresh. I've learned how to dry various herbs and even my cayenne peppers. All of that was because I lavished love and attention on a pot of dirt. Which is how I think about it, because seeing an indoor garden for its mental health benefits is a lot better for ... well, the mental health ... than thinking about things like this being necessary because capitalism is bullshit and designed to crush us all.

To use the meme format: "I've only had my air fryer for a week and a half, but if anything happened to it, I would kill everyone in this room and then myself". I mean, not literally, but largely because I'm not in that place in my life anymore and live alone, but you get what I mean. I had some gift voucher and it was about enough to get myself a small air fryer - only two litre capacity. It seemed a good compromise; I didn't have to spend any money, I could see how an air fryer could or could not change my life, and I could get a new, bigger one if it worked out.

...Okay, I mostly got an air fryer so I could try this quasi-recipe that Jordan Howlett tripped over, so here's your recipe for the post:

I haven't tried that yet, but I will tell you this much: it has absolutely changed my life, and honestly, I think every spoonie should own one. Here's a few examples of why:

It's great for when the physical spoons are lacking. I'm not just talking about bad pain days, either. My experience with fibromyalgia has involved a fair few days where my grip strength is hit and miss, or when I have spasms so my motor control is equally hit and miss. But as long as you're keeping things in a single layer, you hardly even have to turn anything in an air fryer (though I grant it sometimes helps). No bending to put things into or pull things out the oven, no shoving things around a skillet, nothing like that. Just put a thing in the drawer, set it to the right parameters, and withdraw the drawer when done.

To add to that - little to no cleaning. You're using little to no oil, so all it takes is lining it with parchment and a quick wipe-down when done. Washing a skillet is hell on bad days, especially if your skillet is a good heavy one.

It's also great when mental spoons are lacking. My personal experience with a combination of ADHD and brain fog is that sometimes I forget when something's in the oven, mostly when I'm doing oven chips or something. Or I get a little unsure as to exactly how long a piece of meat should be in the oven for the level of done-ness I want. Or both. Either way, I could go to the rigamarole of getting an egg timer and setting it and the like ... or I could have a nice little machine that not only automatically beeps like the microwave when it's done, it also turns itself off like the microwave when it's done. So if I, say, got involved in something I couldn't easily pause because I didn't realise my food would be ready in two minutes, I don't have to worry about it burning.

There's an economic benefit as well. I'm single. I live alone. Even if I got (when I get) a larger air fryer, running one of those to cook a chicken leg quarter or a a salmon fillet has to be easier on the electric bill than doing it in a full-sized oven. Because of the size, it also pre-heats faster than a full-sized oven, just because there's less space to heat.

Seriously, I used it to cook salmon for dinner tonight. Done perfectly with little to no effort. Mine is small, but the basket is the perfect size for a serving of fish or a chicken leg quarter or just the right number of tater tots. Mostly I want a bigger one for when I have company or when I want to do chicken nuggets and tater tots. Also to make a decent-sized batch of potato chips, or frozen fries where I don't have to stop midway through to shake up the contents of the container because their shape doesn't lend well to a single layer in a basket that small. I worried about the space it took up until I learned that an air fryer can also serve as a dehydrator. So I could get rid of my dehydrator, put a good-sized air fryer in its place, and ... I dunno, keep the little one around for emergencies?

Less a recipe today and more a hopefully helpful hint on how to deal with the consequences of brain fog without too much in the way of excess pain.

See, I’m generally very proud of my cookware. I have a thing where I ask my parentals for a cooking essential or two every year, because I can’t really afford the good stuff and though I don’t ask specifically for the good stuff, they will tend to see it as an investment for me and treat me to something really nice. Which means I own a nearly humbling amount of Le Creuset cookware. Well, I mean, three pieces - two saucepans and a baking dish. For me on my part-time wage, it’s humbling. The saucepans in particular have lasted over a decade with barely any signs of wear and tear.

Except yesterday I was making lamb dopiaza - the recipe’s in here somewhere, and it is the easiest thing in the world. Except I was also making aloo gobi - a somewhat harder recipe but I may include it anyway - and, as it turns out, I was having a particularly bad day when it came to brain fog. Easiest recipe in the world and I nearly screwed it up twice. And then, when I was hyperfocusing on the aloo gobi, I forgot that when trying to boil off the excess liquid from the dopiaza, you are in fact supposed to stir it more often than when it was on low heat. End result: a tasty dopiaza but with burned crap at the bottom of my precious Le Creuset saucepan. And there was no earthly way I was going to be able to scrub that off under normal circumstances. The fact that the plumbing in this place is a little dicky at the moment when it comes to hot water did not help. But I had to do something. That’s my good saucepan. It’s the only one I have that’s the right size to boil up my pasta.

Thankfully, I am well-versed in Google-fu, and after some digging, and a little experimentation with what I found, my Le Creuset pot is now clean as it was when I started my experiments, the bottom isn’t scratched, I’m not in that much more pain than I was when I started cleaning, and I am so very relieved. So I thought I’d share. Basically, all you need is baking soda and tin (aluminium) foil.

Rinse out your pot/pan with hot water and drain

Sprinkle 2 tablespoons baking soda on the bottom of the pot and then add a couple of drops of water to make a paste

Let sit for a couple of minutes

Take a golf ball-sized wad of tin foil and scrub the bottom of the pot/pan

Rinse again; touch up with a bit more baking soda paste if required

Tin foil does the kind of solid job a wire scrubber will do without the kind of damage you can get with that kind of thing, and the baking soda fizzing breaks up the yick to make it easier to scub off. Apparently you can do a similar sort of thing by scrubbing the damp bottom of the pot with a dishwasher tablet, but I thought buying dishwasher tablets when I don’t have a dishwasher was a step too far. If you do have a dishwasher, give it a shot if you ever end up in that situation.

Food can be a struggle on really bad days, no matter what the circumstances are. You hurt too much to make something, or maybe it’s the thought of the dishes afterwards that’s too daunting to bear. Maybe you’re too brain-fogged for whatever reason to decide on a thing to actually make, or hyperfocused too long on something and come out of it so hungry that it’s turned to nausea and/or headache, and the thought of any real food is sickening. Either way, the problem’s the same - too much hunger, not enough spoons to fix the problem.

The way I’ve found to deal with that is to keep a small stock of emergengy calories on hand; the kind of thing that needs minor preparation at most, and at most one dish and a utensil. Most of them don’t even need that much. Sometimes, just the act of cramming some emergency calories into my face has unlocked enough spoons to be able to manage an actual meal. So here’s a list of the emergency calories that have been my saviours, particularly since my fibromyalgia diagnosis.

Peanuts: zero prep, zero utensil, zero spoons. Peanuts (and most other nuts, if you’ve got a peanut allergy) are high in protein and fat, because nut oil, and while not particularly high in carbs, they’ve got enough to be going on with. This makes them a quick-burn and a slow-burn food, and can be supplemented with other things that are higher in carbohydrates to get more of a quick pick-me-up. Thing is, it’s the longer-term energy that I tend to be going for when I shove a handful of peanuts into me, since I’m generally hoping that it’ll perk me up enough to make an actual meal. That’s why I keep a bag of salted peanuts in the cupboard; if I can’t make myself prepare anything and need something a little more substantial than the usual snack foods, I’ll just pour myself a handful and munch.

Dried fruit: zero prep, utensils, and spoons, at least in terms of consumption. I have a whole entry planned about why a dehydrator is the best investment anyone who lives with a really tight spoon budget can make, but if you don’t have one, store-bought dried fruit is fine. A little expensive, maybe, but sticking with raisins helps with that, and getting those little snack-boxes of raisins may end up a nice little nostalgia trip back to elementary school lunches and that one trick-or-treat house no one really wanted to go to because the raisins weren’t even chocolate-coated. For something that feels a little more prepared and tastes a little more interesting, mixing raisins and peanuts is really nice, giving an interesting range of textures and flavours. Sometimes a handful of peanuts plus a little box of raisins can unlock a whole spoon with which to cook an actual meal, I’ve found.

Potato chips: zero prep, utensils, and spoons. Maybe not the healthiest choice, but sometimes it’s the only choice. They recommend plain salted chips (or crisps) for chemotherapy patients for a reason; they’re easy on the stomach and help replenish lost salts. Whether they’re fixing a salt deficiency, fixing a blood sugar deficiency, or just a placebo, I don’t care; I find a little bag of crisps settles my stomach when I’ve left it too long between meals and have the nausea as a result.

Rice cakes or crackers: minimal-to-zero prep, utensils, and spoons. It all depends on how you’re eating them. You can have them plain - they even have flavoured rice cakes now - and that takes no spoons or anything. On the other hand, if you’re up to picking up a knife or pulling something out of the fridge, rice cakes and crackers are a good, light, easy-on-the-stomach alternative as a vessel for something that actually tastes of something. For instance:

Peanut butter: minimal prep, utensils, and spoons. Peanut butter (or any other nut butter, again accounting for allergies) can be eaten with a finger out of the jar if you’re really having a bad day, but if you can manage a spoon, just eating a couple of spoonfuls from the jar works just as well. There’s also the option of dipping something like dried banana or apple chips or something into the peanut butter and eating it that way, if you’ve gone the dried fruit route. However, if you can manage a knife and maybe a plate, this provides scope for peanut butter sandwiches or just peanut butter spread on rice cakes. If inspired that way, there could even be PB&J. It’s shelf-stable, so it doesn’t go bad very quickly, and has the same basic benefits as the nuts on their own. Maybe more sugar and/or salt, is all.

Sliced lunch meat: minimal-to-zero prep, utensils, and spoons. Like the rice cakes - in fact, part of why the rice cakes are there is because they can be part of a low-spoon charcuterie board sort of set-up. Way less expensive than Lunchables. Or, if you just need some protein that isn’t a nut, just roll up a piece of whatever lunch meat you’ve picked up and nosh away. Same basic thing as jerky or dried sausages, but both those can be kind of salty and a bit more effort to eat than someone might be up for, and both are a lot harder to put on a cracker.

Cheese: minimal-to-zero prep, utensils, and spoons. Whether real cheese, Kraft Singles, or some lactose-free version of cheese, it’s still got protein and fat and is useful for something you can just quickly eat right out of the fridge, or spread on crackers if it’s cream cheese or soft cheese, or slap together a cheese sandwich with. A versatile way of getting your protein in on the same tier as the lunch meat.

The deciding factors on all of these are how long they take to go bad. Fresh fruit is a great snack but any time you buy fruit, you’re making a commitment to either eating it all before it goes off or wasting food, and that latter’s a pretty common outcome, particularly when some of one’s symptoms can lead to forgetfulness. That’s another one I’ll point out in the dehydrator-related entry, but for now, sticking strictly with the basics - that these are good, solid snack options for days when there are just no spoons left, and are sometimes effective enough to replenish a spoon for cooking a real meal. Just the one, generally, but it’s like one of those tiny minor mana potions you get in video games; sometimes that one spoon is the difference between getting something done and not. It’s enough, sometimes.

I've been largely out of spoons lately, with weather changes, unexpected absences at work and resulting overtime, and all associated pain flares making most things difficult to impossible. I'm feeling better at the moment, so the next few posts are going to involve how I've survived the last few weeks. Because aches or no aches, we still need to eat, and UberEats is too damn expensive for all the time (especially with gluten intolerances).

Now, I've spent a good portion of my adult life fucking up potato salad. Somehow, I thought it was just ... potatoes, mayonnaise, done. Except ... not quite, apparently, because the mayonnaise would always seem to separate and it was never quite right. So I eventually started looking up recipes to find the common thread that makes other people's potato salad work when mine didn't. Took a good bit of searching, but I finally found it: vinegar. Or lemon juice - something acidic, anyway. As well as adding a certain amount of tart zinginess to the potato salad, it also seems to keep the mayonnaise creamy and smooth even when refrigeraged a few days. So while I got recipes from a lot of sources, I've never strictly used any of them, preferring to figure out the best way to do it by guess and by gosh so I can just thow everything together without thinking about it too much. So I'll give a basic overview and some notes for potential additions to jazz it up a bit. The great thing about potato salad is its versatility. Plus, potatoes are relatively cheap.

Here's what you'll need:

~2lbs (or 1kg-ish) potatoes

~1 cup mayonnaise

~1-2 tablespoons vinegar

Additions to taste (see notes)

The easiest way to do this in terms of potatoes is use baby new potatoes, cut into quarters. If you're doing anything larger, you probably want cubes about an inch square. Making sure the pieces are of uniform size is helpful. And I don't know how it is in other countries, but if you're in the UK, get more potatoes than you think you'll need. Our produce has been shit lately, and it's pretty standard to have to cut away bits of yick or just throw whole potatoes away.

Here's what you do:

Chop your potatoes and put them in to boil. Once boiled to reasonable softness (not mashable-soft, but not too firm either), drain and leave to cool and dry.

In a separate bowl, add the mayonnaise, vinegar, and whatever else you're putting into the dressing.

Add potatoes and fold until everything is fully covered.

Serve immediately and/or put in the fridge for later.

As I say, these are largely approximates because I measure it all by eye at the moment. It's pretty easy to get the hang of. Basically you want just enough vinegar to not have the mayonnaise swimming but enough to suit your tastes. And obviously you can jazz it up to suit you - here's some things that have been suggested in various recipes or just sound nice:

Hard-boiled egg

Crispy bacon bits

Dijon mustard

Chunks of dill pickle

Herbs and spices in general (paprika is usually suggested, as are chives, and obviously salt and pepper to taste, but I like adding onion salt, garlic pepper, and a little bit of celery salt)

Onions (I prefer green onions/scallions, but thin-sliced red onion can add some nice colour)

Honestly, play around with it, because potato salad is wonderfully versatile. Googling for recipes showed me that there are as many potato salad recipes as there are people, so I just left it at the absolute basics as a sort of a blank canvas to experiment on.

Potato salad lasts about five days in the fridge, and can be a meal in itself if done right, so it's great for a source of emergency calories. Enjoy!

A lot of effort goes into preparing even a seemingly simple meal, and spoonies probably know that better than anyone. However, there are a lot of labour-saving devices that, while occasionally expensive, make all the difference in the world when it comes to being able to prepare a proper meal on a day when the metaphorical spoons are in short supply. This is a list of all the labour-saving devices I’ve come to rely on in the kitchen - worthwhile investments all. A lot of people say that the people who use these things must be lazy, but if they don’t understand that some people are less able than others, then can, quite frankly, go fuck themselves. Sometimes you want a decent meal but your body won’t cooperate, and these can make the difference between actually getting a decent meal or subsisting on rice cakes and lunch meat for the eighth straight day.

Dehydrator: This is the biggest and most eclectic kitchen godsend, but believe me, it’s a very worthwhile purchase. When used in combination with some of the other items on this list, it’s basically an unlimited source of dried fruit and herbs, and will pay for itself in a surprisingly short amount of time. Fruit tends to be less expensive in bulk, but that also often means it goes bad before we can eat it. But put the fruit in the dehydrator - whether you’ve bought too many bananas or you found a packet of more exotic fruit at “reduced price for quick sale” because it’s about to go off - and the best-before date no longer applies, and you get to enjoy the fruit for longer. Which, as in my previous post, means there are emergency calories in the house whenever you need them. Side note: get a shelf dehydrator if possible. Stackable dehydrators are okay for fruit and do take up less space than shelf dehydrators, but stackable dehydrators have the heating element in the middle, which will not allow you to make fruit roll-ups if you want to. I have a stackable one but will be upgrading to a shelf dehydrator at the first opportunity.

Mandoline: No, not the musical instrument - that one doesn’t have an E. A mandoline is a slicer gadget, and often come as a combination slicer and chopper. I have a particularly nifty one from Toskope, which came with multiple slicing and julienneing attachments, two different dicer attachments, and an egg separator. As a quick anecdote, I’m having a pretty bad pain day, partly because I was obliged to commute, but because of my mandoline, I still managed to chop most of the vegetables required for what’s turning out to be a promising bolognaise sauce. Highly recommended.

Egg Slicer: Again, a little esoteric, especially when you already have a mandoline, but for some things, the mandoline slices too thin. For softer fruits and vegetables - for example, kiwi fruit or mushrooms - an egg slicer gives the perfect thickness of slice for most cooking or dehydrator use. One thing, though: do not cheap out on the egg slicer if you’re getting one. Quality tells, and my cheap egg slicer just gave up the ghost entirely when I used it to slice a half-dozen mushrooms. Go quality for all of these things.

Hand Blender: For this, go for one of the ones that comes with attachments for making it a food processor and / or a blender for smoothies. It takes up a lot less space that way and more to the point, it’s not as heavy as the standard hand mixer. The less weight you’re lugging around from place to place in the kitchen, the better.

Rice Cooker: Rice in and of itself is pretty easy, but every little helps, and just being able to pour rice and water into one appliance and come out with perfect rice at the other end is just one more unspent spoon that can be used elsewhere. If you can get a combination rice cooker / slow cooker, that’s even more ideal. (I currently have my eye on one of those. Next payday, perhaps.)

Baking Dish: Batch cooking is key when it comes to having good solid meals even on bad days. Cooking a batch meal on a good day means that leftovers go in the fridge or freezer for when you can’t even consider picking up anything more than a fork. A good baking dish is a good part of that - useful for lasagne, pasta bakes, cottage or shepherd’s pie, stuff like that. With the other labour-saving devices above, batch cooking of that sort tends to go easier, and means less cooking on the whole.

Roasting Tin: Same principle - mostly we think of roasts as big dinners with family, generally over the holidays, but they don’t have to be. I’ll be talking about how to make the most out of various roasts in another post, but the summary is that as well as a really nice ‘special’ meal after first cooking the roast, there’s a lot of things you can do with the leftover meat that can keep you fed for a week.

Storage: Talking about batch cooking and making your own dehydrated fruit - once you’ve done it, you’re going to need things to store them in. I seriously underestimated how much I’d need in the way of both microwave-safe containers and jars I’d need when I started on all of this. Jars are easy - most of the things I’ll be talking about making at home don’t need an air-tight jar, so just save what jars you get from the things you buy. Microwave-safe dishes are probably a little harder, but those don’t need to be too expensive. Mostly I save my takeout containers, when those are the plastic ones with the sealing lids, though it turns out that the corner shop near my house sells those on their own.

I actually ate more today than I did yesterday, probably for reasons of "Did not eat enough yesterday". And once again it was proven to me how useful it is to have emergency snacks in the house.

Decided to have actual lunch today, so I scarfed down some of the fried rice I made yesterday around midday. It was going to be a reiatively active day because I had to go out for supplies. My original plan was to roast up some duck legs. Unfortunately, by the time I came home, I was in not-inconsiderable pain and was in zero mood to actually cook the duck legs. They're fine until tomorrow, at least - longer if I put them in the freezer. Which I might do depending on if I get a yen to make the planned gluten-free pizza.

Anyway, dinner was late-ish (8pm or so) and instead of cooking like I meant to, I just microwaved up a baked potato, heated up some of my leftover chicken, and made a salad.

Then was hungry again and had some more of my chocolate digestives. And am weirdly still hungry. I think it's a protein thing. Not even the cookies are particularly satisfying. I'm thinking I might have to raid my emergency peanuts and, if that doesn't work, the sliced salami I keep for emergencies.

If I need protein this badly, the duck legs are a must tomorrow. Gluten-free pizza will probably have to wait, pepperoni or no pepperoni.