I’ve been sick :(
Today is the first day since last weekend that I’ve felt good enough to sit at my computer. It has been so long since I’ve been sick that I’ve forgotten just how much it can take out of you. I started sniffling and coughing a week ago yesterday and on Sunday when I woke up, my entire body ached as if I can spend the entire day lifting too much weight at the gym. By midday, my true love told me I looked like death and I should go to bed. We skipped lunch, I went upstairs and stayed there until 9ish the next morning. On the whole, Monday wasn’t a whole lot better. After some internet research and testing, we determined that, despite having had a flu shot, I had the flu.
While nursing me, it turns out that my true love came down with a cold. The difference between the flu and a cold is subtle, but the flu involves a fever and a cold doesn’t – that’s how you can tell them apart. So on Tuesday, when I begin to think I can be ambulatory again, she’s hacking as bad as I did a day earlier. As my flu symptoms began receding, I managed to catch her cold and went down again for a day or so. Yuck.
Anyway, we’re both OK and getting ready to re-enter the world, but as we do, I wanted to talk a bit about food and illness. We can start with that old saying “feed a cold and starve a fever” and while that may have merited some consideration back in the days when people thought in terms of the four humours, the medical community doesn’t give it much credit these days. The general consensus is that we need to eat through illness in order to give the body energy to fight off whatever is afflicting it.
I have to tell you, though, that on Sunday, when my flu symptoms were at their strongest, the very idea of food almost made me keel over. When I did finally get out of bed, however, I was absolutely ravenous but my hunger was very focused. I needed something that was not fatty, not very acidic, not very spicy, but still had flavor and depth. And I needed bread. Lots of bread. I wound up eating nearly an entire demi-baguette and a decent sized bowl of mushroom barley soup (I don’t have a picture so I’ll have to make it again and share it with you). For the next few days, lunch and dinner were both smaller and less adventurous than usual but I’ve never consumed so much bread. Dinner rolls, baguettes, Italian loaves – if I could find it, I ate it.
We’re both still a bit under the weather and it was only today that I really felt like I had the energy to actually cook something, as opposed to buying something already prepared. I made a pot roast with carrots and potatoes which was delicious and filling and nutritious but didn’t have the edge I usually like to have in my cooking. Sometimes, I guess, you just need something big and round and full of flavor.