It is wildly easier to cook dinner every night when I'm working from home. There are so many easy choices that just require temporal spacing over an afternoon or whatever.

I think it was about 2 months into the pandemic when this finally occurred to me.

I make homemade pizza every week now, because making the dough in the mid-afternoon takes 5 minutes. I never made pizza in the before times-- who had time to wait for the dough to rise?

That's easily one of my top 5 pandemic silver linings.

I've been making pizzas that were pretty good but got a stone this weekend and it came out amazing last night- the kids said it was as good as getting from a restaurant and I should make it every night.
Bread in general is super easy working from home and having a bread machine to knead and rise. We want to have burgers tonight but are out of buns so I'll just throw ingredients in now and throw the balls in the oven half an hour before dinner.

Oh yeah, the stone makes a huge difference. That, and "00" pizza flour.

Of course, now I want to get an outdoor pizza oven, which no doubt I'll end up getting just in time to get vaccinated and stop working from home.

Do you have any advice for handling people who interrupt you with "drop what you're doing" phone calls, when those people are your co-workers? Because I sure would prefer those people to email me.

Yes! Make your outgoing message something passive-aggressive about how the best way to reach you is over email, and here's my email address.

(Step 2: never ever check your voicemail. That works for me at least, but I work somewhere with low standards.)

Protip: Don't give them my email address.

For all these months of WFH, my email signature continues to show my desk number, never my cell. (On the rare occasion someone leaves a message at my desk, I get an email with the recording attached.)

I have never gotten a useful call from outside the organization on my desk phone. For my first few months I kept getting prescription robocalls for whoever had the number before me. We do use phones internally because there are topics where it is recommended to avoid an electronic record.

Like how often we used to go to Chipotle.

It's all about calling people while walking around outside.

8: I use my computer as a phone now. This was something available to our corporate parent for a decade, but it took the pandemic to give my subsidiary access.

I also get my work voicemails forwarded as an attachment.

I like both insights! On work from home, another thing that's reasonable is to pop a load in the washer, or transfer wash to the dryer during the work day. It makes it easy to push a load or two through each week without wasting weekend time -- particularly since the mechanics of loading the washer and dryer are each less than 5 minute tasks. Even hanging clothes from the dryer isn't that long -- easy enough to do on lunch break--but it can also be a quick transition from workday to home mode when you log off in the evening.

Woah, you guys still wash your clothes?

14: Not all of us have trained our pets to lick them clean yet. It's a work in progress!

14: As far as my boss knows.

I have been feeling frustrated with the dynamic described in the OP.

When I worked in the office for lunch I would often grab an on-the-go lunch and take a 35-40 minute walk (eating while I walked). At home I can often grab something from the fridge, but if I spend 10-15 minutes making a simple lunch, and maybe another 10-15 minutes washing dishes or doing clean-up, I never get outside. That's one of the elements that leaves me feeling like I'm getting less exercise in my day-to-day routine.

Being able to do laundry during the day is nice.

One of the advantages of working from home is saving money and time on school lunches. No more packing up anything or adding dollars to a lunch card. The kids get beans from a can which they have to open for themselves.

The kids get beans from a can which they have to open for themselves.

How many hours did it take your kid to figure out how to use a can opener?

He just assumed they could.

17: I go for a longer power walk in the morning than I used to, but now I don't walk otherwise. Today, I went for a 10 minute regular walk as a lunch break.

He can always ask the neighbors to borrow their can open until he can buy his own. He isn't supposed to use ours.

I was taking walks in the evening, but now that it gets dark so early, I take walks during my work day. My walks aren't very long, and no one notices that I'm gone.

I go walking after dark every day.

I wear a Biden-Harris hat so people know I'm good.

I'm fine with a hat that says "definitely not a cop, maybe a neoliberal."

It is wildly easier to cook dinner every night when I'm working from home.

The flip side of this, for me at least, is that you get bored of your own cooking a lot more when you're not alternating with lunches from other places (let alone proper restaurant meals). I finally snapped a few months ago and went crazy with restaurant DIY kits, which pretty much tripled my food budget.

I see it as a personal duty to eat enough take-out and delivery food to do my part to protect the local non-asshole restaurant community. The food budget is about the same, but the alcohol budget is way down.

Also, so sick of home cooking.

I just combined my food and alcohol budgets by dumping a shot of mescal into the marinade for tonight's chicken. We'll see how it turns out.

On the topic of mostly nonpolitical news: NMM to Kimye.

I had to google that.

I mean, I'd probably get divorced if my wife loudly supported Trump or get left by her if I did.

Re: cooking, AJ can work from home roughly 50% of the time, so the amount of homemade bread he makes is a constant delight. We didn't eat out much before, and I like to cook, but what's getting me is that we have been really limiting our shopping trips. Rather than two trips per week (usually to two stores on the weekend), we went to every other week on a weekday, as early as possible, and now are shooting for once every three weeks (that got us one trip about a week before Christmas and not again until late this week). The food the third week is like my Midwestern childhood - frozen vegetables, lots of canned goods. All fresh fruit is apples and oranges. I've been trying to figure out ways to make stuff taste a bit fresher when it's all coming from frozen. (Herbs blended with oil and frozen is a good trick.)
At any rate, we're probably overthinking our limited errands, but the grocery stores here are a shitshow and anxiety-provoking, so it seems less crazy than somewhere where mask compliance is better.

31: I'm not saying she's a gold digger.

Based on gossip blind items, I think Kanye is going to come out a lot worse in the public eye.

34: The secret is potatoes and onion and carrots. Also, blueberries keep more than a week.

Also, we go to the store once a week.

34. Yikes, the stores sound rough. Stay healthy and stay sane

We have a bunch of cans of beans I bought early in the quarantine because I wanted to spite Goya by stocking up on competitors.

The science fiction of my youth didn't prepare me for how prominent beans would be in our current discourse.

Study the parts. Study the can.

I find it quite hard to cook as much as I would like, or as well as I would like. I'm constantly amazed at how much time some people have (no aspersions cast on anyone in this thread) when "working from home". I'm full on 8hr+ days, and then once you factor in childcare (even though my wife is doing the lion's share of this) and home schooling (ditto), I don't have time to cook anything that I can't bang out in 20-30 minutes, max.

Also, with my wife and son being home all the time, I'm not getting enough of the foods I personally want to eat at the time I want to eat them. Neither of them are big meat eaters and it's (literally) a constant struggle for me to get enough protein in.* Previously, that'd be fine, as I worked near a load of excellent street food places and could fill up on tasty hot food at lunch time. That also worked a lot better for me in terms of weight loss, where I had a big cooked high-protein lunch and then just grazed on something light in the evening.

* I need to just go out and buy a load of precooked roast meats or whatever, I guess. Doesn't fill me with excitement, though.

Maybe consider a sous vide stick? It reduces active cooking time on most meat to a couple minutes of searing and however long it takes you to season and put the meat in a bag.

re: 44

Yeah, I guess. Might work. I did think of it once before (pre-Covid) but then it fell off my radar.

43: am constantly hungry these days bc water cold and protein works pretty well for staving off pangs, so offer:

eggs are super helpful on the need-more-protein front and i'm particularly enjoying duck eggs at the moment, so delicious! leftover cooked veggies from dinner tossed with kimchi and seared in a small pan, move the veggies to the edges and crack that duck egg in the middle, liberally salt (smoked salt particularly good with kimchi) and pepper pepper pepper, get it onto the plate while the yolk is still runny - ahhhh.

oatmeal has a surprisingly decent amount of protein, put steel cut oats in a thermos the night before with boiling water, in the morning heat up, add some nut butter and a couple of chopped dates and you're set. clutch the hot bowl to your freezing fingers if you are just back from a swim lol.

to be fair, by the end of this winter of swimming i'm going to be appx. 63.7% nut butter what with the predictable mid-afternoon "neeeeeeed foooooood nooooow" raid on the kitchen between conference calls. thank god for large vats of peanut butter from rainbow grocery.

i've struggled to find delicious deployments for tofu. i was putting the soft stuff in passionfruit-orange-yogurt smoothies but honestly that's too much faff for an afternoon snack. cooking with it is frustrating, it seems dedicated to sticking to pans, unless presumably you use nonstick or several gallons of oil (no thanks on both fronts). still searching in hope though, as it;s relatively cheap.

and of course my first love - beans and tortillas (proper masa ones probably not that easy to track down in the uk) or beans and rice, have nailed cooking brown rice too so yuuuuum is pretty much always at hand. a bean-kimchi taco is a noble snack. speaking of which, feeling a bit peckish ...

i've got a sous vide stick (aka "the whizzer") but again, kind of a faff although for batch cooking on the weekends would probably work pretty well. also not super enthused with cooking in plastic, so have used glass with enough liquid to be consistent with the conductivity principle of the thing. it is great for culturing creme fraiche in a chilly san francisco kitchen.

I eat steel cut oats most mornings now that I'm home and have a stove nearby.

mobes i love that i natter on about fucking oats n eggs while the goddam derangedtroopers are storming the capitol and you actually read and respond!

btw johnson mill wool hunting pants excellent (esp at $17!) but unlined, not clear yet if silk knit underneath needed, and if so whether can be reasonably efficiently pulled over salty damp legs. also - 33 min in 53 f water with virtually no claw today, woo hoo! further reporting on totally inconsequential subjects to follow.

I can't imagine putting down an armed mob without oatmeal for breakfast. I don't feel ready for exertion with other breakfast foods