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Shrimp Cocktail Is An Anytime Food
Reject the holiday paradigm!
It’s the first week of the new year and to borrow a line from a 2000s Ben Gibbard-vocalized song, I don’t feel any different. If I were a person capable of the concept known as relaxing, or maybe if I didn’t have COVID right before Christmas, or perhaps if I hadn’t returned from a 10 day isolation to find an unpleasant fruit fly infestation in my apartment, I would have started the new year refreshed, or just ready to start a new project. Instead, I have hurtled into 2022 the same way I left 2021: exhausted, bracing for bad news, and craving a baked good only I am capable of making myself.
Some longtime readers may remember how burned out I was throughout 2021 on cooking and baking. With a few notable exceptions, I felt very little joy or motivation to make food beyond the bare criteria of doing it to feed myself. In the fall, when it got slightly cold outside and I stopped wanting to eat only salads, dips, and salads as dips, the nesting bug finally hit me, and I did a bunch of things I’d been meaning to do since I moved into this apartment — I scrubbed out my dutch oven and reseasoned my cast iron skillet, and then I cleaned my stovetop and the kitchen sink, all valiant efforts to make my apartment feel more homey and less new construction utilitarian, a place where I would actually want to cook and bake.
