Stewing in My Own Juices
2 Feb
Rhett,
As I mentioned yesterday, the flu I’ve been fighting has adversely affected my desire to prepare meals. Ordinarily, I’m a fair-to-middling home cook. There’s something about transforming raw ingredients into finished dishes that always impresses me. It’s like a non-lucrative form of alchemy.
Although my heart wasn’t in it, I made the effort to make stew the other night. Nothing fancy: some beef, carrots, onions, parsnips, tomatoes and garlic, with a little salt, pepper and rosemary for seasoning. I made a big batch so we’d have meals at the ready when we didn’t feel like making anything. All this to say: I had leftover stew for lunch.
It was good — if anything, the flavour had intensified overnight. The only thing keeping it from being perfect was my microwave anxiety. I hate having people wait for me to do things. It probably dates back to lining up for the water fountain in elementary school. The taunt “save some for the fishes” rings in my ears to this day. The problem with the microwave at the office is that it is both low in power and high in popularity. After keeping a crowd of coworkers waiting for 5 minutes, I took my still only lukewarm dish out of the microwave and back to my desk. It would have been better hot.
Very best,
Brendan
