Sometimes it’s hard for me to not think about work on my days off. My brain always has a tendency to crunch on projects until they’ve met resolution, and it doesn’t help matters when my phone makes a cute electronic chime every time I receive a work email, eliciting a Pavlovian urge to check it. So even when I’m actively trying not to think about work during my weekend, I end up thinking about it anyway.

See: oysters.

I’ve had oysters on the brain all month in preparation for our annual Pinot Gris & Seafood Weekend. This year, we’ve decided that it would be both delicious and apropos to celebrate the fact that the gloomy and stormy weather in Oregon during January has the pleasant side effect of being ideal for the production of amazing local oysters. So we’re getting ourselves a boatload of Oregon Coast oysters, enlisting some skilled shuckers, and hauling a lot of vintage Pinot Gris from our wine library with the hopefully pleasant side effect of having a very great party in very un-great weather. You should really come. There’s probably no better way to spend what will very likely be another gloomy and stormy January weekend in Oregon.

So here I am, at home on a Wednesday, and I really want to have my own Pinot Gris & Seafood weekend. Alas, I can’t really justify the extravagance of oysters for a solo lunch in the middle of the week, probably like most normal people. If you can, you should email me so we can be friends. Luckily, I do have some Pinot Gris on hand—a pleasant side effect of working for a winery that makes a killer Pinot Gris. In lieu of real-deal oysters, I reach into the cupboard for my bottle of oyster sauce, a kind of condiment made from oysters commonly used in Dim Sum restaurants to make boringly healthy steamed greens taste really completely delicious. This is my gameplan. It’s not oysters on the half shell, but it’ll have to do.

I start with some baby bok choy languishing in the fridge, bought in a fit of healthy new year’s resolve last week. For what I’m about to do, you can use pretty much any kind of green veggie that can stand up to some hot water, like broccoli, if your grocery doesn’t stock baby bok choy or you’re somehow against how baby bok choy adorably resembles the little lop-ears of rabbits. I slice three of them lengthwise after a quick rinse, and put on a pot of water to boil. To make this a more substantial lunch, I reheat some brown rice also languishing in the fridge. I keep forgetting that this new apartment lacks a microwave, and that I keep neglecting to buy one, so I pile some on a plate and set it atop the undoubtedly building-code-violating gas heater in my living room. I wish I were joking about this, but it gets the job done in a pinch.

When the water boils, I plunge the baby bok choy into the pot, and let them linger for about two minutes, but not much longer. The idea is to blanch them just enough to take the hard crunch out of them. The ideal result will be a vegetable that’s silky but still al dente, not soggy. I drain them into a colander in the sink and shake off the water before plating them atop the now-warm rice. In a bowl, I use a fork to whisk a few glugs of oyster sauce together with just a drizzle of peanut oil to thin it out. You can use any kind of neutral (not olive) oil, and any brand of oyster sauce. Mine happens to come from Thailand and has illustrations of oysters on it, and a delightfully strange recursive photo of a woman standing over a wok yielding the very bottle of oyster sauce with the same photo on it. If you find that creepy, other brands found in grocery stores have cute drawings of pandas or tigers on the labels.

I pour the sauce over the veggies and rice, and finish by pouring myself a glass of our 2009 Willamette Valley Pinot Gris (I don’t have any back vintages to toast with, unfortunately). The sauce is kind of sweet and briny and the wine crisp and bracing. I eat the whole thing standing at my kitchen cart, alone on a Wednesday afternoon. The bok choy tastes too good to be healthy even if inwardly I know it is, and the wine makes it extra indulgent feeling. It’s certainly not the same as a big party with real oysters and library wine, but for my day off it will definitely do.