While I was away on my work trip last week, Chris decided to defrost some of the chicken drumsticks in our freezer and make a Malaysian-style curry. There weren’t a lot of drumsticks, so he decided to ration them out to make them last at least five days. So when I came back with Kaia after picking her up from daycare, he had prepared our dinner bowls, but only his bowl had a drumstick in it, and mine did not. Kaia had a drumstick with some chicken pieces torn off it on her dinner plate.

“How come there’s only one drum stick you warmed up?” I asked him.

“Well, I want to make the chicken last because there weren’t that many drumsticks and we don’t have that much (cooked) food left, so we can share one,” he responded.

I always thought that wherever we lived was always “food rich.” It doesn’t matter what point of time you are referring to: we usually have a freezer brimming with frozen meat, seafood, and vegetables, amongst other ingredients I use for cooking, whether it’s frozen cubes of stock, tomato onion masala, curry leaves, frozen shredded coconut or purple yam. I have from-scratch made sauces and pickled things in our fridge, plus plenty of fresh produce in the vegetable and fruit drawers. Some food in the freezer is ready to eat once you pop it into the oven for 25 minutes, while others (like my zongzi and banh chung from Chinatown) are ready after you steam them for 15-20 minutes. Our pantry is stocked well with plenty of dried noodles, pasta, mushrooms, and canned goods. But this chicken drumstick incident honestly seemed completely ridiculous and made me feel like we were extremely food poor. Where the hell had our life gone awry where two grown-ass adults living in a luxury apartment building in the middle of Manhattan were sharing a SINGLE chicken drumstick for dinner…?

I gave Chris some grief about this and shared my sentiments above. He proceeded to not get another drumstick. Instead, he simply took one small bite of the drumstick, then put it in my bowl. No, that did NOT make a difference with my sentiments.

This is what happens when I am not here to cook regularly. We end up with faux food rationing, and I cannot handle it. It’s a good thing I am back to take care of the food preparation in this house.