Recipes for the gulag

As the person responsible for preparing and serving 95% of the food that my family consumes, I'm sometimes overwhelmed by the immediacy and relentlessness of the chore.  These people want to eat EVERY SINGLE DAY, several times per day.  It's exhausting.

If you ask most people who cook because they have to, and not because they want to, they will probably tell you that the actual cooking process is not so bad (and in fact, it can be rather pleasant at times.)  What's hard is the figuring out part: planning meals, securing ingredients, working planned menus and mealtimes around various schedule demands.  If someone showed up at my house every day and told me what to cook and when to cook it, and then handed me a bag filled with the necessary meal components, then I'd happily do the rest, even the cleaning-up part.  This hasn't happened yet, but hope springs eternal.  Someday...

My ever-sunny disposition and my persistently optimistic outlook don't stop me from being preoccupied (often) with plague, violent upheaval, complete social and political breakdown, and famine.  Especially famine.  At any given time in history, in some place in the world, people starve because there's no food, anywhere, and no hope of getting any.  Never mind unexpected deliveries of neatly packaged groceries with handy instructions; there's not so much as a slice of moldy bread or a wormy apple to be found, and people just literally die from hunger.

20th-century famines, so often manmade, are a particular preoccupation, as are the excesses of the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin (see previous paragraph re: sunny disposition/optimistic outlook.) When I'm not grieving for the purge victims, I'm worrying about the ones who starved during the Ukraine famine,  or the siege of Leningrad, or fill-in-the-blank Soviet hellhole.  Apparently, cannibalism was not uncommon in the Ukraine in 1933; meanwhile, in Leningrad during the siege, the rat problem was pretty well in hand.

It's dinner time again.  Thoughts of famine are a sure (though temporary) way to silence the internal complaint monologue about the fact that it's dinner time again.  It's helpful to imagine that you're cooking for the rat-hunting victims of the Leningrad siege, or for the unfortunate kulaks of Ukraine.  Sometimes, I imagine them sitting down to a meal with us, and marveling at the feast before them (This appears to work best when the meal involves potatoes, or bacon.  Not so much for salad or grilled salmon.)  I don't feel like cooking, because I never feel like cooking, but I feel like eating, and I feel lucky that thoughts of eating aren't limited to the abstract.  Bon appetit.