At the start of the pandemic, our managers/leadership at the bank sent us care packages. I think it's always hard to come up with good things to send for these sorts of packages. Anyway, one of the things they sent us was a collection of recipes that are, purportedly, favorites from each of the managers. I'd scanned the packet, seen a few too many recipes that called for things like "ranch flavor packets," and put it in my pile of recipe print-offs. I came back to it while organizing this past week.

Here's the thing, recipes can be really personal and honestly the printed package was the most touching part of all the things they sent. Even if there was no way in hell I was making some of these recipes and even if the content of certain people's "favorite recipes" certainly seemed to correlate with, well...their tendencies towards inactivity, shall we say? OK, yes, I mean that the fat person on the leadership team had 3 different recipes for dips among her contribution. What I'm saying is that the recipes and the effort they represented were touching regardless of how much you could snark at them, if you wanted to.

So the other night I made "Ronald's Favorite Sheet Pan Chicken With Potatoes, Dill, Arugula and Garlic Yogurt." The garlic yogurt is really a toum,, and the recipe called for harissa -- I've never used harissa in a recipe before, actually, wasn't familiar with it outside of the context that I'd seen harissa flavored olive oil at a speciality shop.

For the first time in my life I had reason to shop at the local Middle Eastern/halal grocery store. A small can of harissa goes for $1.49.

It was worth it.

And besides that, the recipe really was pretty delicious.

There are a few more out of that packet I'm going to try to make over the next few days/weeks. And I am gonna let each person know when I've tried one of their contributions. I feel like they tried hard to be real people for us, and I want to acknowledge that and recognize it in return.