It was on my ever-expanding 'to-do' list to:
- clean the exercise/craft/currently used for storage room so I could get in those three days of exercise sessions (in the three days left of this week; now two),
- find that info I should have mailed out days ago for my husband.
- catch up on Bible reading--to keep that promise I made and...
- do the other hundred things I should be doing (Instead of sleeping in).
A call at around 11:30’ish woke me up from a very strange dream. It was from my best friend, who you know has been up and busy for hours. Hyper person she is who can live on almost no sleep!
How could I have slept in SO long? It might have something to do with staying up so late...Aimee.
What to do about dinner now? With the oven temporarily out of order and a good roast ready to go to waste, that means stovetop cooking. But my only recipe for pot roast requires oven cooking...oh oh.
I know!! The wise and wonderful source of 'all' information--the Internet--must have an answer for my dinner dilemma. Good thing as my best source--my knows how to cook everything, was once a restaurant cook, hyper, needs no sleep best friend is in her meeting by now.
Onto the web via a very slow modem I go and about 1/4 hour later (or more) I've found the perfect recipe for my beef bottom round roast. No time for breakfast this is going to take some time…need to lose weight anyway.
A quick review of the list of ingredients needed showed me to be missing some. But we women are all a 'mother of invention', right?? Besides it's way too cold and wet to run to the store when one can substitute in your very own nice, dry, warm home kitchen..maybe.
Red wine becomes Marsala cooking wine (and you thought that was just for Chicken Marsala, not!) In goes the fresh herbs that say best used by---yesterday. Shouldn’t be a problem. Add A-1 sauce--hey everything is good with that stuff, yep. No parsnip -- oh well I've never ever cooked and probably not even eaten one. No garlic--no problem--the fresh stuff makes me sick anyway-- ah I know...the all time love of my life (besides my hubby that is) Greek seasoning has it in the ingredients list in doable, smaller amounts. Looks like it's a go on the roast! Yippee!
Good thing because it is really late now. Great move about the getting up 'early' bit goal, Aimee. This calls for a long, long time of cooking to become something not akin to shoe leather. And hubby person does not do tough meat-ever!
Ah--the positive self talk in a woman's day to day existence!
But soon--well actually after quite a bit of prep--the roast is happily simmering away (in chef-talk it's being braised)
Now what to do in the hours I have left? Consider that since dinner is cooking on the stovetop I can't really disappear to the exercise room to clean it up. Not since our recent bad run on dying kitchen appliances; nope- I don't dare leave my one remaining, very precious and probably fragile stovetop burner alone. And my dog can't be trusted to not let the roast burn if the liquid level "that should cover up to 1/4 of the roast" drops precipitously. Well not yet..
So I busy myself with more Internet cooking research, a few quick tasks here and there (mostly here) and those few hours pass by rapidly and then…the man cub is home.
I add the required can of tomatoes (although I think the sauce was better without it), the cut up potatoes (that seemed a tiny bit frozen--oh oh) and the rest of the listed ingredients and voila ½ hour later the dinner presentation is complete and pretty good (you can tell if the man cub takes a second helping it's OK) but I do need more specific information so the nightly question...
“Grade please?” I ask him. He is a man who has to be primed to answer questions a wife needs to know. And besides I must sub-conciously miss the days of my performance job reviews. Well maybe not.
And the roast passes!! A repeat performance is called for. And all is well in my little queen-dom!
But then I realize...Thanksgiving Day dinner is coming really, really soon..and we have company coming...oh boy.
Blessings anyway, Aimee
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