Here's a thing that can happen when you're feeling tired and down for no good reason, but you know you need to eat lunch. You look through the kitchen for a few minutes. Nothing looks good, even though you have enough food to feed an army consisting of far more than the two adults who actually live in the house. So you decide to go for emergency food and get out the backup package of mushroom pelmeny, exquisite and hand-shaped and local, and also a food only you will eat because you are the only person in the house who likes mushrooms. You drop the frozen pelmeny into a pot of boiling water with some salt.

What are you going to eat with them? Normally you'd have the energy to saute some onions in butter with salt and pepper and paprika, but not today, so you decide the plain yogurt in the fridge will make a good enough sauce. Still, you're really going to regret it if you don't eat some form of vegetable with your bowl of dumplings. There's cabbage in the crisper, so you get out a cutting board and shred a chunk. It can be a bed of raw crispy veg in the bottom of your bowl, and that will be okay. Wait, don't you have a container of shredded golden beet and carrot in the fridge for future salad applications? Why not use some of that? Those go into the bowl too.

By this time your pelmeny are boiling furiously and rising to the surface of the pan. You drain them and scoop a bunch of them into your bowl. A couple good spoonfuls of yogurt go on top. Good so far, but it needs one more thing, or else it'll be bland. So you grind a bunch of black pepper across the top of your bowl of pelmeny and yogurt and cabbage and beet and carrot. Wait, one more thing. You don't have any fresh dill, but you do have parsley. So you snip some parsley and scatter it across the top of your bowl.


By this time you are actually feeling like a human, even before you eat anything. You sit down to eat and discover that everything is totally delicious, and you eat it all, thinking that maybe next time you should add a little bit of spicy brown mustard too, and you go get a second helping of pelmeny and yogurt, at which point you realize that you're really going to need something to mop up all the delicious fragments of mushroom and carrot and beet and cabbage and sour cream and pepper off the side of the bowl. Then you remember that you also have a loaf of sourdough in the fridge, so you throw a piece in the toaster oven to get lovely and fragrant and golden brown and crisp. You mop up the side of the bowl with the bread and eat every last tiny bit, and you still want more.

I'm going to eat this so many times.

Have a nice lunch.