The pandemic lifestyle has challenged each of us to adjust our routines and redefine our notion of normal.  Some of these changes have been tough; others have become positive ah-ha moments.

It’s 2:20 on a Monday afternoon.  Because I slept later than usual and thus ate a later=than-usual breakfast, the lunch debate at our house was just now happening.  Since it was so late in the day, we tossed around the idea of skipping lunch and eating an early dinner.  Then the reality of being hungry right now hit.  We decided that we would just have a small snack now and then eat an early dinner.

Then we remembered that Brooke needed to be picked up from work and we had small group meeting via Zoom in the evening as well.  Weber offered to go get something from a local restaurant.  With that comes the debate, one that could take until time for a midnight snack, what to get.  My instinct is always to dine out on foods that I don’t like to cook or can’t cook well.  Thanks to the pandemic, the list of things that I don’t cook as well has become a little shorter.  We entertained various possibilities and finally agreed that a good burger sounded tasty.  With the what to eat narrowed down, the only thing left was to determine whose burger we’d go get to bring home.

It then dawned on me.  We have ground beef; it’s frozen,  but that can be remedied by the touch of a couple  buttons and a few minutes in the microwave.  We have delicious pretzel buns in the freezer that can be toasted.    We have sliced smoked Gouda.  And bonus, we also have a bag of cauliflower tots in the freezer that I can drop into the air fryer.  The fridge contains  a wide selection of condiments – ketchup, mayo, and various kinds of mustard and relish.  And, we just picked fresh tomatoes from the garden this morning.  The only traditional burger dressing that we are lacking is lettuce…but wait, there is spinach in the garden.  That will work!

We can make a good burger at home on the grill.  We do it all the time…but always in the evening and almost always a weekend evening.  Throwing burgers on the grill in the middle of a Monday afternoon seemed like such a departure from a “normal” routine, but there was absolutely no reason that we couldn’t grill burgers at 2:30 on this Monday afternoon.

Weber fired up the grill, made, and cooked the burgers.  I threw the tots in the air fryer and the pretzel buns in the toaster oven.  Miraculously, everything finished cooking at the same time.

In a mere forty-fiver minutes, we decided what to eat for lunch, made burgers on the grill and tots, and ate…at home in the middle of a Monday afternoon.  

I realize that the oddity for me in this whole scenario is steeped in the long-held notion that Monday afternoons are the middle of the workday and burgers on the grill are what you do while relaxing over the weekend.  In my head, these two things don’t mix.  In reality, however, they mixed quite well!

Because of working from home, the lines between work and home are not just being blurred; in some cases they are being completely erased.  Though our Monday afternoon burgers are a positive effect of this, there are also negative effects as well.  it is important for all of us to strive to maintain a healthy mental balance between work and home during this time when neither location or clocks are helping or reminding us to do so.  Creating this kind of healthy balance just might mean eating outside of the lines!

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As I’m sitting at the kitchen counter writing this, the local news is running a story about the fact that many restaurants and service businesses are adding as much as a 26% “COVID service charge” to their customers’ bills.  Though I understand that most businesses are struggling to make it during these strange times, so are their customers.  Being hit with these unexpected costs after eating a meal or getting a haircut is a gut punch to many consumers.  This is yet another reason to prepare and eat meals at home.  Not only do we know exactly what is going into our bodies, we also know what is coming out of our bank accounts!