Irene Has a Cold, But She Still Ate

Today is a special day.  My friend Irene (pronounced EE-ray-Nee, like in that song by Caetano Veloso -- not because she's pretentious, but because she's Brazilian) heard about the blog and wanted to contribute. 

I was like, Irene, honey, you're an awesome cook and I loves ya to bits, but we neither work in the same office nor live anywhere close to each other.  But she was all, "I'll email you my pictures and tell you what the food was!" So I said OK.

Now a note about Irene:  she's an awesome cook and she was the only person I knew in grad school who knew how to make a proper quiche, so she's going to elevate the level of this blog quite a bit.  She's also an awesome photographer and will make me look bad.  But since no one's reading this, it doesn't matter.

Anyways, on with Irene's lunch.

As the title of the post indicates, Irene has a cold.  Hence, she didn't have a very complicated lunch.  The first picture she sent me was of this lovely clean bowl. 

I called her up and asked her what was up with the cute picture of the clean bowl. 

"Oh.  I washed my dish and fork before I remembered that I was supposed to take pictures of the finished food.  It was risi e bisi, because I'm sick and didn't want to make something too complicated."

There you have it:  When I'm sick, I make frozen fish sticks; when Irene is sick, she makes risi e bisi.  (Risi e bisi, btw, is the fancy Italian name for rice and green peas.  Knowing Irene, they were probably from frozen rather than from the can.)

Next she sent me the picture of her afternoon snack: a banana.  She said it was very sweet.  She couldn't really taste it since her nose is blocked.  She also lamented the slow decline of the banana and the sad news that they were going extinct because of some virus.

The last picture she sent me was of three Ricola wrappers.  "They're for my cough," she said. 

"Do they work for you," I asked.  "They don't work for me at all."

"I don't know.  They taste good, though, and make me feel better."


And there you have it:  The food Irene ate. 

She's very much into this, so I'm guessing her food will feature prominently here.  In fact, I'm guessing her food will appear more often than my food.  If anyone's reading this, you'll probably be happy about that because there are only so many pictures of coffee mugs and tupperware a person can handle.