Our family has been battling the sickness lately—influenza type B for those curious. Apparently it’s been going around lately and this just happened to be one of those times it got us good. In the scheme of trying to stay alive and not fall behind in the various channels of life, our cooking and cleaning became a reflection of our perfect mastery of adulthood. Not convinced? Good, you shouldn’t be.

Our dishes got stacked up and it was all we could do to keep the germy kids’ cups rolling through the dishwasher before they were needed—which was almost immediately. Every day. Life consisted of creating mountains of tissues and then wading through them in order to find the standby box of clean tissues. 

We were not having a great time. 

We were blessed by some friends of ours who gave us some chicken stock to make soup from. We made a great chicken noodle soup with butter noodles and veggies, along with some tender white breast meat which definitely helped get us on the road to recovery. For as deep as we were all hurting, though, it would have helped to have a keg of chicken stock.

Having made such a lovely soup, I thought to myself it would have made a good food article, but in our drab state, I could think only about eating and didn’t take pictures of our lovely cuisine.

A few days later we were struggling to figure out a dinner option and landed on goulash. Knowing I had already squandered one opportunity for this month’s food topic, I corrected my ways and took a photo—required for the completion of a food column.

Wanting to use some of the excess pasta in the pantry, we used some elbow macaroni, ground venison, carrots and cauliflower, plus some diced tomatoes for sauce. 

We cheated since we didn’t feel well, and used a bag of mixed veggies that could be pre-steamed in the microwave.

To be more culinarily correct, you could peel and chop a handful of large carrots, and head and stem a head of broccoli and cauliflower each. 

When it was all said and done, we had enough goulash for half a dozen meals each. I won’t say the kids loved it, because honestly they haven’t loved much of anything while they’ve been feeling under the weather, but we got them to eat some and that was good enough just like the rest of our week: Good enough.

The way out here it isn’t always sunshine and rainbows and filet mignon. Sometimes the best you can hope for is just good enough.