After surgery, I expected an uphill journey to heal…I didn’t expect that some of the hardest days would involve simply getting through little colds & illnesses.

❤︎

This is the second week that I have been either fighting a stomach bug, or my belly has been mounting some sort of personal attack against me. It keeps having this up and down pattern, too, where I feel like I’m better for a day or two, only to be hit with nausea & dizziness & a lot of…well, let’s not go there.

When I’m feeling under the weather, especially when it’s abdominally related¹, I have trouble having any interest in cooking, let alone eating, practically anything. I even forget to buy groceries sometimes, because doing so just doesn’t occur to me.

Of course, life still goes on, and I do need to feed myself (as well as Mr. Scout and one especially loud kitten cat), so I usually lean in to the very easy or the very simple solution. To be honest, a lot of times this is either very easily cooked foods or whatever take~out I think my body will put up with—usually a cheeseburger Happy Set—along with lots of ginger ale.

Because I grew up in the States, my version of very easily cooked food is macaroni and cheese. However, because I went to culinary school, I often make proper macaroni and cheese when I’m not sick, complete with a bechamel-turned-just-slightly-orange~ish-mornay sauce poured generously over cooked pasta, then stirred with and topped with more cheese before baking and broiling. When I can’t be arsed to cook, I’m obviously not going to spend two hours cooking to feed myself when twenty minutes (or less!) will do. But because I’m living in Tokyo, the boxed mac & cheese of my youth isn’t always available…or it comes at a bit of a premium.

I tell ya…sometimes, cooking is either way too much work or it’s strangely difficult to make it less work.

Luckily, I discovered that iHerb—which has become many foreign residents of Japan’s go-to source of foreign treasures—not only carries Annie’s Shells & Cheese (which my hippie ass loooves), but the kind which comes in a slightly bigger box, packed with a squoozely bag of pre~made cheesy, orange sauce.

Oh. My. Gawds. Will you all think less of me if I admit that it’s often hard to decide whether I want what is, for all intents and purposes actual macaroni and cheese, or something that was (no pun intended) cooked up by Velveeta in the 1970s?

Listen: they are two different things, and they each have a place in my heart.

So, the last two weeks has been a lot of very easy meals for a few days, punctuated by a day or two of feeling better, and being way too ambitious because I’m happy that I want food with flavor. Grilled cheese, macaroni and cheese, crackers with cheese—hey I didn’t get fat not eating cheese!—followed by things like slowly marinated, barbecue chicken or chili lime flank steak with corn and avocado salad. Not to mention having fun going all out for Mr. Scout’s birthday, then wishing I had access to my favorite Campbell’s soup the very next day.

What do you like to eat when you aren’t feeling well? Do you bother with cooking, or is Chef Mike (as he’s known in fancy restaurants) your best friend? And what advice would you give someone for easy meals when they’re tragically lazy & they’ve run out of options?

Asking for a friend.

---

1. No fewer than four doctors thought that I had a duodenal ulcer (and treated me for such) for three. whole. years., during which I could barely stomach any food whatsoever, and very rarely cooked. When it was accidentally discovered that I had gallstones, and I needed surgery fairly quick~like, healing from that was a crash course in learning to eat again. Miraculously, I was not only able to eat all kinds of food once more after I was healed, but all symptoms of an ulcer had magically cleared up! ↩︎