Welcome to The Savory City. Follow our adventures on food, drink, travel & healthy living in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
Love,
Grant &Teresa
All in Quarantine
Six Bay Area counties and the city of Berkeley today officially announced that shelter-in-place orders will extend until May 31, as they alluded to earlier this week. The public health officers also announced that starting May 4 certain COVID-19 restrictions will be eased, such as allowing all construction to resume, as well as some outdoor businesses and activities.
We’ve been under the shelter-in-place order for more than a month now and I’ve been reading about how staying home for prolonged periods can affect people’s moods and perceptions of time. For example, it’s common for people to feel like each day blends into the next and it’s easy to get confused about what day of the week it is. We’ve lost our normal routines and the events that help us mentally mark the passage of time.
Six Bay Area counties and the city of Berkeley today announced that they would extend and revise the current shelter-in-place orders through the end of May. The previous order was scheduled to expire May 3, but it looks like we’ll have to stay home for an additional four weeks after that, at least.
What are the two most important things when celebrating a birthday? Loved ones and food. I had plenty of both today.
It’s gotten progressively warmer here in the Bay Area, reaching about 85 degrees Fahrenheit today where we are. We have our shorts on and the fan oscillating constantly. In a non-pandemic world, it would be the perfect weekend to go camping, fishing or golfing. Even though it feels like all of those things are so far away right now, I know we’ll be doing the things we love as soon as the world is safe again.
My birthday isn’t until Sunday, but my friends surprised me with an early celebration. They coordinated with Grant to send me takeout from one of my favorite local restaurants, Andaman Thai. They sent me beef pad Thai, tamarind prawns, chicken yellow curry, Thai barbecue chicken and coconut rice. What a feast! Enough food to last for a couple of days. I know it’s more than just because I haven’t had spicy food, real curry or rice in a while…it was amazing!
All major sports are on hold indefinitely. That’s why Grant and I are all in for the NFL draft this year.
It’s a great excuse to put on a jersey and root for our teams. We’re very much looking forward to the return of football, whenever that happens.
Cue in: Paleo on the Go. It’s a meal delivery service that is fully compliant to the AIP lifestyle! What? I know. It sounds too good to be true, but it’s the real deal.
Grant and I went out to the grocery store today for the first time since our shelter-in-place mandate more than a month ago. We’ve mostly been surviving with the help of grocery delivery services, like Amazon Fresh and Instacart. But, we’ve been running low on supplies lately and when our Amazon Fresh delivery was canceled yesterday, we decided to take matters into our own hands. We took our masks and a small bottle of hand sanitizer down to our local Whole Foods, in search of more rations.
Have you finished watching virtually everything on Netflix? We have, too. That’s why I was happy to see that the Globe Theatre in London is offering free streaming of their productions on YouTube. I’ve always dreamed of seeing a play at the Globe Theatre one day. This will definitely do for now.
It’s a beautiful spring evening, perfect for a garden date night. We’ll be enjoying a nice conversation over a plate of fried chicken dumplings. Happy Sunday!
I bought Grant a four-pack of Star Wars jigsaw puzzles for Christmas this year and we now finally have time to work on them. Thanks, lockdown! We finished the first one, a 300-piece poster for the first Star Wars movie. The weirdest part: three pieces were duplicates. I wonder if there’s someone out there missing these three pieces.
Christmas came early to our quarantine household when our shipment of cassava flour tortillas from Siete Foods arrived today. These are the only tortillas we’ve been able to find that are compliant to our autoimmune protocol (AIP) diet and we easily go through a pack or more a week. They’re light, delicious and perfect for easy AIP dinners. We keep our tacos pretty simple with just shrimp or chicken, some chopped greens and a squeeze of lime.
One of the projects I started even before our shelter-in-place mandate was researching my family tree. I’ve always been interested in family history and stories, so now that I have much more time at home, I figured it’s a great time to pick up this project again.
After a month of working from home, I realized that one of the things I miss most about my office is my ergonomic work station. I had an adjustable standup desk and an office chair with lumbar support. Working from my kitchen table isn’t nearly as ergonomic and it’s definitely taking a toll on my neck and shoulders.
While humans stay indoors, nature recovers. This is a theme I’ve seen and read about in the news a lot lately. My friend shared an L.A. Times article with me today called, “Coyotes, Bobcats and Bears: Wildlife is Reclaiming Yosemite National Park.” The article talks about how animals are thriving in the people-less Yosemite and how the bear population has apparently quadrupled. There was also a Business Insider article with photos showing how the stay-at-home order has significantly reduced smog in Los Angeles.
Ever since we’ve been on the autoimmune protocol (AIP) diet, grains, dairy, and seeds are off-limits to us. So, I decided to make my own AIP-compliant bagels and cream cheese. The tapioca and cassava flour make these bagels a little chewier than traditional bagels, so I like making them a little bit smaller. The cream cheese is fantastic. It has the creamy, subtly tangy taste that I love.
I recently opened my Nextdoor app and found a new feature called Help Map. It allows people to offer their services to the elderly and other neighbors in need, whether it’s running essential errands or doing phone check-ins.
I wrote on Tuesday about having to postpone the birthday trip I had planned for Grant. He knew I was planning a vacation for us, but the location and itinerary were a surprise. Rather than cut out the trip completely from his birthday week, I decided to create a travel brochure of the trip I had planned and present the brochure to him as part of his gift. It’s a promise that we’ll take the trip as soon as it’s safe to do so.
