My First Post-Pandemic Cold + A Soup Recipe/Cure Without Chicken

I learned to cook in Amsterdam at the Kosmos

From the time I moved to L.A. to work for Warner Bros, til I retired, I only ever worked in one building. It’s adjacent to the Warner lot in Burbank and it looks like a redwood ski chalet. But it was an office building, beautiful and well-lit but an office building with more than 100 people. And once or, sometimes, twice a year I would catch a cold that was going around the office. Every year. It was a drag. I hated it. But since the onset of COVID in 2019 I haven’t had a cold— or anything else contagious. That’s because I was the first person in L.A. to wear a mask and… I still wear it sometimes, though not as scrupulously as I used to. And now I eat in restaurants a lot more than is probably safe. I even went on a plane trip to Thailand a few weeks ago. Life is returning to some kind of normal.

I have a cold right now. I forgot what they were like. And this is a bad one. I’m blowing my nose so much that my sides hurt. I just ordered 8 more boxes of Kleenex. The first night I woke up with a fever and a sore throat. But the sore throat is gone and the fever… may have been because I had two comforters over me. Of course I took a COVID test— two of them. Totally negative.

But I still have this damn cold. I feel like shit. It’s hot in the house and I feel cold. I’m tired and lethargic. I’m having trouble doing my blogging. I want to go back to sleep. I wouldn’t mind being pampered but I have no one to pamper me and Roland’s response is to text me things like “Plague, Plague.”

My friend David got married in Mexico City over the weekend and I didn’t go but he and his wife are coming up to L.A. tomorrow for a few days. I suggested we go have dinner. But I can’t chance getting them sick, especially because his wife is pregnant. Same with Dan and Heather. No, they're not pregnant; but they want to have dinner this week too. Unfortunately, there's no way of knowing when I’ll be better.

I made a nice vegan minestrone for dinner just now. I used almost all the veggies left in the house: an onion, 2 celery stalks, an orange bell pepper, tomatoes, garlic, black lacinto kale, and, star of the show, a turnip. And I soaked some green lentils and some wakame seaweed and threw them in too. I used smoked black peppercorns, smoked paprika, salt of course when I was roasting the veggies, oregano, basil, turmeric, black cumin, parsley, basil… I don’t think there was anything else and, to be honest, the parsley was kind of gratuitous. I know from experience it smells great but I can’t smell anything. It’ll simmer on a low lite all day on top of a heat diffuser on my stove top.

Back to the cold for a minute. It seems to be at its worst in the morning and then gets progressively better as the day wears on.

We ate the minestrone. It was delicious. I put some nutritional yeast on top of it when I served it. It’s much more delicious— think savory, umami flavor— than cheese. And where cheese is harmful, nutritional yeast (nooch) is very healthy, a complete protein, meaning it contains all nine essential amino acids required by the body. It’s also a great source of Vitamin B12, thiamine (B1), riboflavin (B2), niacin (B3), pantothenic acid (B5), pyridoxine (B6) and folic acid (B9). On top of that, nutritional yeast is a good source of fiber as well as zinc, selenium, iron, manganese, copper and phosphorus. I hope that soup cures my cold.

UPDATE: It did. I was significantly better by the time I sent to sleep and had my best sleep in a week. The morning after and I'd say I'm 80% better