Dear J,

Last time I wrote to you, I said something about feeling the urge to get an oar in, to steer myself out of the slough of despair. Occurred to me in retrospect that only using one oar, you’re doomed to go in circles. Whoops?

This week, I kept the pantry stocked, the house reasonably clean and even got laundry (my ancient nemesis) sorted.

Today we’re doing another pot roast. Same recipe as last time, but tweaked to address the issues last time, when the roast, potatoes and carrots cooked down too far, giving us something more hash-like than a pot roast, salty and spicy but not appropriately savory. So we used liberal amounts of beef stock to replace a thick beef consumme. I was less extravagant with pre-sear salting of the roast. We cut back on onions, and now…. we wait.

P and I have talked about establishing a tradition of big Sunday dinners that we prep together. This kitchen is big enough that we can work together easily; while I seared the beef and threw stuff into the Dutch oven, he cheerfully peeled and chopped potatoes and onions.

We didn’t talk about politics.

We’ve been watching the Mandalorian (Star Wars) TV series on Disney+, and Netflix released a holiday episode of the Great British Baking Show. We theorize about what differentiates winners from all the other super talented bakers who appear on the show. We also speculate inappropriately about the private lives of contestants and (after this last season) attempt to identify why the most recent seasons aren’t quite as magical as earlier ones. (I blame the people casting the hosts!)

I ran across an article today talking about the woman who wrote Harriet the Spy. I didn’t know that she died so young (45?) or that she was a lesbian. Irony: she took very little satisfaction from having written something I adored as a kid. She wrote another book, I guess, a YA novel about a girl falling for another girl… but the manuscript has vanished, and her estate apparently was happy to disappear any evidence of the author’s ‘scandalous’ love life.

We have made progress, darn it. A hundred years ago women couldn’t vote. Twenty years ago the idea of gay marriage was shocking to people.

Some things just take time. Like a pot roast?

::hugs:: 

C/