Earlier this week an offensive conjunction of Murphy’s Law, Gennarino’s
Curse, and pernicious germs left Ale and me laid up with raffreddori. The germs and the Law responded well enough to
OTC medications, especially to copious doses of hiccupy-boozy Nyquil. The Curse, however, was less tractable and
only very grudgingly responded to the amulets I’d amassed about our bed. Who knows, maybe it felt insulted by my
assemblage of horns.
Anyway, for the first 48 hours, eating was out of the question
– even weak tea seemed distinctly unpalatable.
But at the end of those first 48 hours the hunger pangs started up,
ushering in a dilemma: what to eat, and who would cook? Ale’s something of a mamma’s boy (gross
understatement), so the who was clearly me, but not without a fair bit of
snapping and whining. The what was the
real problem.
I keep a few cartons of Pacific (or Imagine) organic
chicken broth on hand for use in stews and braises, but I’ve had reservations
about using it for soups, preferring instead to brew up quick batches of broth
in my trusty pressure cooker. After 48
hours of living with a cold and with a husband suffering from a cold, the
pressure cooker was not an option. So I
dumped a carton of the broth in a pan and when it began to boil dropped in a package
of pastina. The resulting zuppetta
(topped off with a light grating of Parmigiano) was surprisingly satisfying:
not too thick, lightly fragrant. There
are worse ways to reintroduce food to two still-queasy stomachs.
This morning I removed the last of the amulets from our
nightstands (accidentally poking Mimi with the six-inch, evil-repelling boar
tusk that my mom gave me many years ago when I left home). The bottles of germ-repelling, stupor-inducing Nyquil, however, I have not touched. If
an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, then ten fluid ounces must be
even better.
3:25:27 PM 
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