I sailed around all those bumps in the night to your beacon in the gloom

Despite this song repeatedly ending up on just about every writing playlist I put together for a span of many years, I’d forgotten about it until an artist I follow on Instagram posted an image using lyrics from one of their songs:

Anyway, here’s “One Crowded Hour” from Australian indie rock band Augie March. I’m sure I discovered their album Moo, You Bloody Choir back in ye olde days of LiveJournal music communities, and it quickly became a staple of my every-day listening back in 2006-7. The album still holds up well today. I’m looking forward to digging into their more recent stuff to see what I’ve missed out on over the past several years.

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If you’re not a foodie or a Chicagoan, you may not know about Alinea, which is a very highly-rated super fancy restaurant — think, like, super modern, small plate, molecular gastronomy. Meals there cost upwards of $200/person and reservations are made months in advance. The Chicago Tribune called it “one of the most expensive and acclaimed restaurants on earth”.

Well, as part of the shut-down of restaurants to in-house dining, the folks at Alinea decided to offer to-go orders of “comfort food”. This enables them to keep their staff working and also introduces their menu to a whole bunch of people who would otherwise never have been able to eat there, for one reason or another. (Aside from not wanting to drop $200+ on one meal, I also have the palate of a middle schooler, which doesn’t make small-plate-prix-fixe-uber-fancy something that’s in my wheelhouse.

Anyway, this week’s comfort food from Alinea was beef wellington and mashed potatoes, with creme brulee for dessert. They had add-on options for staff-chosen drinks to go with your meal, but I had several bottles of $10 wine from Walgreens just sitting around waiting for me to care about them.

The food — which came with instructions for both oven and microwave, which I honestly thought was very thoughtful, as not everyone may have access to an oven — was absolutely fantastic. I’m not even remotely approaching anything like a foodie, so I’ll leave food reviews to the professionals, but the beef and pastry were so tender and flaky, and I wish I had an endless supply of the creme brulee.

It was a nice change of pace from the frozen meals/canned stuff/cobbled together whatsits that I’ve been eating. The food, really, has been the most challenging part of this. No matter how hard I try, no matter how I try to simplify it, I don’t get any joy out of cooking, so the promise of a restaurant — even if it’s just fast food — helps break up the monotony of frozen meals and premade stuff. Getting a high-quality, but still affordable, meal was a remarkable way to end my Saturday.

Hope you’re all weathering this well and that you can find little bright spots — a good meal, the sounds of birds chirping, getting through your Netflix queue, whatever — in all of this.