Yule and the Moon of the New Year
Sunday gratefuls: Ruthie’s troubles. Jon’s doing much better physically and fiscally. Gabe’s blossoming into a very sweet, kind kid. Bowe comes tomorrow for finishing work. Rigel wanted a different wet food. Salmon worked. That tenderloin primal and the roast last night. The induction stove.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Ruth, bright, loving. And, tortured.
Tarot: Two of vessels, attraction.
Beef primals. Who knew? These are the cuts that butchers use to divide up a carcass into particular sections. Chuck primals. Sirloin primals. And, tenderloin primals. My friends at Tony’s Market had a sale on primals last week. Bought a tenderloin primal. They will cut it up however you want. I chose two two pound roasts, several individual steaks, and two pounds of lean hamburger.
Tony’s left one of the tenderloin roasts unfrozen. The rest of the primal is in my freezer. I like Tony’s and Cook’s Venture, chickens, because they demand humane conditions for the livestock and natural feed.
The plan was to use this roast for first heat in the new, completed kitchen. Sigh. I went ahead anyhow. No hardware on the cabinets, therefore no stuff in cabinets. That meant I had to go looking through various boxes for: the skillet, the dutch oven, a spatter shield, Olive oil, cooking oil, brown sugar (failed on that one), the knives, a cookie sheet, a wire rack.
Hell, I was exhausted before I got to cooking. Earlier in the day I took the roast out and coated it with sea salt. Before I began assembling my cooking tools, I took it out of the refrigerator and let it warm up to room temperature.
At that point I decided to finally cut up all of the Chewy and Amazon boxes piled up in the sewing room. I moved them into the kitchen, got out my trusty pocket knife, and went to work. My kitchen window opens to the front of the house and is low to the ground. I positioned both recycling and garbage bins near the window, opened it, and lifted stuff out to the waiting maws of the plastic bins.
By the time I was done I was exhausted. Orgovyx and Erleada and cancer itself cause fatigue. I was fatigued. So I took a nap, then got up and did my find the cooking utensil walkabout.
The cooking wore me out, too. A while back I purchased two fatigue mats for the kitchen, but I can’t put them down until the kitchen gets finished. The mats will help.
Even though I’m the one saying it I gotta say that tenderloin roast was perfect. A nicely crusted exterior and a pink interior with no gray streaks. Yes! I fried up some potatoes, boiled some carrots and bathed them in butter and maple syrup. A lot of satisfied noises.
A glimmer of what can happen once the kitchen has drawers and cabinets filled with tools and foods.
Happy with the results so far. My plan is to start learning basic cooking techniques and move onto Italian and Korean cuisine. I want the Hermitage to be a place where good food and good times around the table are the norm. Last night fit that notion.
But. Ruth. In crisis. What a sweetheart and so hurt, so damaged from a tough, tough early life. I don’t know all the vectors that have harmed her, but I know some of them. All sad. All unnecessary. Yet, all impacting her now.
She spent the night on a psych ward at Children’s Hospital and will go somewhere else today. Makes me very sad.