Cooking When Exhausted

I had an exhausting day on Thursday. It involved talking to a lot of people over the course of a long work day, and afterwards there has been much wondering if I said the right things, or if (when) I didn't, whether my statements were within the margin of forgivable imperfection. [edit: This post makes more sense if you know that I was at a job interview. I couldn't say that publicly at the time I wrote it.]

I got home around 6 and wanted to collapse. I tried to do so. I lay down on my bed with my eyes open for awhile, but I soon realized my mind was too active for me to be still. I was thinking that I did not want to fall asleep yet because it would mess up my sleep during the night. I was thinking I should contact my friends about our possible plans for Friday night, except I might be too tired to keep those plans. I was thinking that now might be the only time over the next few days that I'd have time to cook up my CSA vegetables into something I could eat over the next week. And that maybe I ought to have dinner. So I did.

What I made for dinner was more or less this salad, with some substitutions based on what I had in the house. The recipe is an arugula and fennel salad with quinoa and tofu, in an orange dressing. I had green lettuce, fennel, and spring onions in my CSA box, so I used the green parts of the onions in place of chives and the lettuce in place of arugula. Bingo - one recipe that uses 3 of my CSA vegetables! I also roasted the fennel, just because I thought it would taste better that way. I had to buy oranges to make the dressing. Mostly I want to avoid recipes where, in order to use up the produce I have, I need to buy just as many new items. But this only required one additional produce item, and I didn't mind having to buy tofu and quinoa. I liked having the salad turn out so high in protein.

To some extent, cooking despite being exhausted and fit to collapse is just a sign of me being restless and agitated. But I also like to think it's a suitable response to exhaustion in a way, because I'm doing something to take care of myself. The salad was healthy and nutritious, and preparing it did make me feel taken care of, which was a relief after a day spent trying to impress other people. I also think sometimes cooking (or preparing food, I should say, as parts of the salad were raw rather than cooked) helps calm my mind so I can then sleep better. It gets me focused on something, and gets my mind away from wherever it was racing to before, but now I'm thinking about something that isn't going to keep me awake. I mean, how much can you think about chopping lettuce and squeezing oranges once you're done doing it? It doesn't leave one with a lot to ponder.

Because I was in restless multitasking mode, and because I also had strawberries and rhubarb in my CSA box, I made muffins while the tofu was marinating. Look how bright those strawberries are!

 Now in addition to my nutritious salad, I have a somewhat healthy treat, for breakfast or snack.

Recipe here. I used brown rice syrup instead of brown sugar (a little healthier, but less sweet, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend this substitution) and decreased the milk by 1/3 cup to account for the liquid sweetener. I left out the cardamom because I didn't have it and left out the oat topping because I was a little lazy. I had, after all, had a long and tiring day.