Convolescence Food Journal

My new life with no complexity of palate.

I had Covid this week and lost most of my sense smell and taste. I now lack complexity of palate and can no longer pick up on flavors aside from acidity, heat, and sweetness. I’m having a hard time articulating the difference between the way I taste food now as opposed to the way I tasted food last week. An example would be, I can’t taste thyme or sage or vanilla. But I can identify the part of my tongue that’s activated. I can taste “umami” and vinegar.

The first day I felt ill, I made chicken soup with ginger, turmeric, onion, carrots, and garlic. I used a whole chicken and a teaspoon of MSG. When it was done, I took the chicken out and immersion blended the vegetables into the stock. Then I added cooked orzo and the chicken. Despite using a ton of ginger, I couldn’t taste the soup, didn’t want to eat it, and had so much of it I had to freeze three quarts. The site of it now distresses me and makes me feel wasteful and gluttonous.

(The second photo shows the stock cooked down. I forgot to mention the shitaki mushrooms, which I couldn’t taste.)

Despite having no palate, i had cravings. I wanted “fitness bread,” which is just the dark, chewy rye bread you’d find at any German grocery store. I ate this with Havarti cheese and sliced cucumber. Or Good Culture cottage cheese, which is all over Tiktok. Most of my TikTok feed is women slapping cottage cheese on bread with some kind of vegetal or sticky much and topping it with olive oil and salt. It’s kind of obscene. But I’ve always liked cottage cheese with scallion, tomato, cucumber, sprouts, and salt, and pepper. One food influencer with expendable income for Whole Foods oddities, eats cottage cheese with handfuls of Cheez-Its and tomato. So I had some with a handful of cheddar-cauliflower crackers, which are a faux healthfood supermarket substitute for Cheez-Its. Obviously, Cheez-Its taste better

For a snack, I eat mini peppers, caper berries, and sometimes I make a plate with these hard flatbread crackers someone brought me over the holidays. I add labneh with olive oil and flaky salt (the fucking flaky salt again) and raspberry jam on the other side of the plate (I don’t like mixing my food, I live to see the elements separate). I can’t taste the raspberry but I can tell the jam is sweet. I can perceive the bitterness of the olive oil, the saltiness, and the textural contrast between the crackers and dip.

One day I impulse bought grapes on sale and then didn’t want to eat them so I cooked them down and strained the pulp, which I’ll use to make a grape curd later this week.

(Grape pulp for everyone’s favorite desser, grape curd.)

Then I had the idea to take the leftover lemon and ginger from the soup to make a copycat Starbucks “health bomb”, which I saw on TikTok. This appealed to me because the Poog podcast ladies drink a whole lemon blended in water every morning. I was eager to watch the lemon get pulverized and I took a video but I can’t embed videos on my phone right now.

This is the COVID experience I never had because back in 2020/21 I was so restless, going from sublet to sublet and unable to nest. Now I’m having a real bourgeois COVID, watching sourdough baking videos and ordering kitchen tools and drawing Epsom salt baths. And I can’t say I’m not still antsy and dysthemic but it’s different now that my life isn’t completely upended.

(Blood Orange, old and impotent jalapeño, drops of finishing olive oil from that green squeeze bottle now so ubiquitous. Flaky salt and spicy vinegar honey.)