the best 36-hour lockdown ever

At around 10 pm on Saturday night, Somi and I were one glass of Syrah down, and it had become very clear to us that we needed a snack. To two Koreans with healthy appetites for both food and drink, this came as no surprise. Koreans even have a word for food eaten as accessory to drink: an-joo. Traditionally, Koreans chase down their soju and bad domestic beer with snacks like dried squid and peanuts, kimchi pancakes, and spicy cod roe stew. Naturally, we would have been happy to pair any of these things with our bottle of Syrah. However, we live in Boston, and these are not the sorts of snacks that just show up on your doorstep when you need them to.

So we went down our list of options. Option #1: Sandwiches from Parish Cafe. Mmm, smoked turkey with bacon, havarti, and cranberry sauce would have been, no doubt, on the level of Divine Revelation. However, getting these sandwiches would have required leaving the building, and that made them much less appealing. Option #2: Buffalo wings from Rock Bottom Brewery, only about a block and a half away. Buffalo wings arguably meet all key an-joo criteria, but did we really want to know what Rock Bottom Brewery gets like on a Saturday night? Ew, most probably not. Also, going there would mean leaving the building. Option #3: A white spinach pizza from Upper Crust, purveyor of the kind of pizza with the kind of toppings (baby clams, portabello mushrooms, eggplant, asiago) that make Bostonians feel warm and fuzzy about themselves. The only problem was, our level of self-awareness is decently high, meaning we knew that we'd probably eat the whole pie between the two of us, and warm and fuzzy we certainly would not be feeling afterwards.

At this point, I peeled myself off the couch and walked over to the kitchen, to see what, if anything, the fridge would yield. Sigh. Wasn't looking good. A lonely block of tofu, a tub of Greek yogurt, a small jar of capers, butter, o.j., 2 leftover andouille sausages, half a pint of grape tomatoes, and an onion. Sigh. And then came the Divine Revelation: 2 leftover sausages, half a pint of grape tomatoes, and an onion?... thrown in a hot pan and jazzed up with some spices, that could be delicious! So that's exactly what we had. I sliced up the sausages and sauteed them with slices of onion, added equal amounts of chili powder, cayenne pepper, cumin, salt, and pepper, and threw in the grape tomatoes near the end. And I have to say, the resulting snack was everything that we were looking for, especially with a bit of ketchup and sriracha on the side. Thank God for lockdowns.