Cooking Alone (Day 3)
The main task I have given myself for today was going to the market and buying some food for the pets, and I mean cat and dog kibble and some cracked corn and chicken feed for the chickens. While I was already outside anyway, I also set out to buy some extra groceries so that I can make some more dishes I have been looking forward to trying. Although the buying food for the pets came along alright, the buying groceries part is what tested my sanity for today.
Today, I really wanted to make some Beef Stroganoff for dinner based on the recipie I have seen from a Life of Boris cooking video. I dunno, it was always something I wanted to try. One of the main ingredients for stroganoff was Sour Cream. I thought it would be quite easy for me to get some sour cream, I mean, its a basic dairy item that's related to yogurt, there should be some in like the nearest grocery store right? HAHAHAAA... Oh how wrong I fucking was.
I have spent around 2 hours of my life driving around to 3 grocery stores just finding sour cream. I first went to DALI, which is basically a supermarket trying to cosplay as a convenience store, was... honestly not surpising since I go there often to buy snacks and their fridge section mostly has yogurt drinks, BUT I SWEAR, they ADVERTISED having sour cream at some point... I guess that ended at some point. I got some garlic and a junkfood there, so it wasn't a full loss.
The next place I went to was a nearby SM Hypermarket. Originally I was headed to Waltermart; however, on the way there, I saw the green SM SuperMarket and thought "WAIT, WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT BEFORE?", and so went there, feeling like an idiot for not thinking of the easier solution. SM Hypermarket is an SM institution, they have it "ALL FOR YOU!", of course they would have a tub of sour cream in their refridgerated dairy section! YES!!! YES! YEEEEEEEEEEEAAA-- They didn't. I was dissapointed once more, because when I asked one of the staff there if tghere was any sour cream, I was immediately told they were out of stock. How unfortunate. This wasn't a total loss either because I bought some chicken bullion cubes for a different thing I wanted to cook, some ready to eat spaghetti sauce for the leftover pasta, and some frozen cream dory fish because I suddenly felt like making fish and chips all of a sudden.
It was on that point after driving out of SM Hypermarket with my MSG Chicken Cubes, sauce, and frozen fish that I realized that I had sunk a lot of money buying additional groceries I probably didnt need. Hell, I forgot to mention that I straight up got a small box of flour as well. From what I remember, I have spent over a thousand pesos on random bullshit, most of which was from my own personal coffers rather than the money my parents gave me. The only time I actually spent the money parents gave me was on the pet food resupply runm which was around half of the extra 1k my mom gave me. So I had a random assortment of groceries, and I was down over a thousand pesos.... I REALLY needed to find some fucking sour cream. It was around 3PM, I needed to get home pronto to give my chickens their afternoon feed.
There was one place left that could save me now: Waltermart. Basically its own department store and grocers, Walter was the place my family always went to whenever we needed groceries. And I needed groceries. The moment I stepped in there, I immediately dashed to the refrigerators to see.... Nothing. just yogurt. No sour cream... fuck. The closest I have gotten to sour cream after askig an employee was being led to the seasonings and spices aisle and being handed a packet of sour cream and onion flavor powder....... not what I was looking for.... At that point, I basically just, walked around the aisles of the large supermarket thinking about what I should do next. I didn't have much time since I had veg and fish sitting in the car, along side the schedule of feeding the chickens. I simply looked up what could be good substitutes for sour cream in making stroganoff, and sure enough, greek yogurt was a suitable subtitute. Defeated, I headed back to the yogurt fridge and picked out my plastic container of greek yogurt. Along with that, I picked up a couple cans of ground pork for myself and a single serving pack of Japanese Curry for when I decide to make katsu curry (or fried breaded pork belly tbh)
Regardless of how I felt, which was mostly defeated and angry that I wasted so much time, energy, and dieseln trying to find sour cream for it to mysteriously not exist for that particular day, I headed home with the complete ingrediets needed to make some Beef Stroganoff. I watched the Life of Boris recipie I mentioned earlier and got to cooking as Boris instructed. Despite using cheap substitutes, such as Margarine instead of Butter, and of course, Greek Yogurt instead of Sour Cream, it still felt like a step closer for me, to becoming a Gopnik-Approved Cheeki Breeki Slav Superstar, like Boris. It tasted... okay. I felt like the flavors would've been a lot stronger with actual sour cream, but the yogurt did the trick for the time being. Instead of rice, which I was too lazy to make, I instead opted to serve it on the lagely untouched leftover pasta my parents left over and I feared would go to waste if I didn't at least try to eat it.
Apart from the cooking, groceries, and the routine feeding of the pets, today was probably the least productive so far. I didn't really do any cleaning, nor did I pull out my bike from the bodega to fix since I was mostly so fixated over my whole sour cream fiasco. In the quiet moments after dinner, I mostly had nothing else to do except watch youtube videos from my bed set up in the living room. After a while, the audio of the youtube videos I had on autoplay pretty much turned into very muted and muffled background noise as I went back into my thoughts. The only thing consistently popping up was the fact I felt lonely. That has been a pretty consistent thought in general, but it has become more persistent in getting my attention.
It's not really that hard to see why. All my classmates and friends are either in classes or busy with their own things and so aren't that available to chatting up with. The same can go with my parents; although I very frequently send them updates of how things are going, there wasn't really much interaction beyond those updates. For most of the day, I am mostly just alone with my own thoughts. When the tasks are either all done or designated as stuff I will do tomorrow, there isn't much else other than "God, I'm lonely, aren't I?". And that's completely different from the lonely jokes I have told myself during the drive earlier in the day. That shit was just me acknowledging that the reason why I'm able to go on this whole absurdist shit pile of a side quest that I was alone, and so I can afford to invest as much mental energy into something so stupid since I didn't have to think about company or anything aside from the chickens I have to feed.
No, this was straight up sad thoughts. Once again seeing the fact that I am stuck inside my own isolated little bubble, away from everyone else. Any attempt of reaching out was completely moot, not because of myself nor anyone I was trying to reach out to, but because of the coincidence of life or personal stuff that either reasonably made people unavailable or uninterested in the conversation. It was just me, alone in the house with nothing else to do other than clean, rinse, and clean again. I honestly dunno how else to describe it, I just felt lonely and on my own. For an era that constantly touts "being connected always", it sure does a better job at making people feel lonely and isolated instead. Regardless, I'm sort of used to it at this point. There isn't really much else I could do except whatever I could actually do within my area of actionability. Cook, clean, sleep, feed animals, walk around and probably buy something.
Honestly, writing this blog does really help with the loneliness thing. It's sort of like making a message in a bottle. I'm just typing all the thoughts and feelings randomly into the keyboard, and once I have said all the pieces I wanted to say, I press the "publish" button and throw it all out there for somebody somehwere to see. I have no idea who they are, or where, or why, or how, but I know somebody probably read the ramblings of a 22 year old nerd living alone whining about being lonely and not being able to find sour cream in the grocers.
Around some point at midnight, the internet was cut off somehow. If you are seeing this, I probably uploaded this using my phone's hot spot cos PLDT decided to shoot itself in the foot. Luckily, Blogger didnt randomly die so I can keep on typing, but nothing I typed will be saved until I actually get an internet connection going. Hahaha... life finds random ways to both be awesome and suck hard, I love it. Maybe it'll kick back on in the morning, who knows. If it doesn't, well at least I have a bunch of things to do to keep my head off the phone. Plus, I downloaded the whole Space King YouTube series by FlashGitz and the all of Life of Boris' cooking videos in playlists, so I probably have enough content to watch in a loop until the internet decides to kick back on.
Currently it is 1AM and I think the only thing I can do left after uploading this post is to go to bed... maybe after watching some Instagram reels, I dunno. I'm chronically online, sue me lmao.
Anyways, that's all for now. I hope ya'll have a nice day
-- YugiBearz
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