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Catching up is hard to do
It's been a while since I've posted, but a day when I've been given an extra hour by the Johnson admistration seems like the ideal time to get caught up, while the start of a new month seems like a good time to commit to the blogging habit. It's been a while since I've posted, and there are various reasons for that. Here are a few.
Lauren had a long weekend with last Friday off, so we had planned a "Babymoon"--I'm not big on the name, but it's a good idea, getting away for a last little trip before we have a baby. We got a swanky hotel in downtown Chicago relatively inexpensively on Priceline, just for Friday night. We arrived early-ish Friday and went for an hour or so at the Museum of Science and Industry (which was free that day). We had dinner at Ed Debevic's, the classic Chicago landmark. It's a fun diner type of place with "Good food, fresh service"--i.e. the wait staff is rude to you (but in a fun and funny way!). We took a bus down, but realized it would make a nice walk back to our hotel, even for the pregnant lady.
Saturday, we walked down to Milennium Park and walked around the area. Eventually, we made our way to The Signature Room on the 95th floor of the Hancock building for our 2 p.m. reservation. Wow.
Apparently, as we returned late on Saturday, my wonderful and brilliant wife made a sharp turn over the curb at our driveway, which was neither wonderful nor beautiful, as the sidewall of one of our tires was punctured. And that's the sidewall, so it can't be patched. Did I mention that we just got four brand new tires in July? So I had to spend a few hours getting that taken care of this week--the upside was that the dealer where we took it was giving away free pumpkins. Also, the guy in parts tried to make me feel better by letting me know that since the tires were so new, there wouldn't be any problem with the different tread wear. Yeah, that's awesome.
Now, this isn't a reason why I haven't written, but we're in catch-up mode, so: Lauren and I eat lunch at the dining hall together most every day, as it's nice for me not to have to prepare two meals and it's no big deal for her to go from class to the dining hall or me to get a little dressed up to come eat with her. It's a nice chance to see each other in the middle of the day. It's also a dietary pitfall--or opportunity. The pitfall is that most of the dishes served in the hot line are fatty, meats and simple carbs, with occasionally some vegetables that don't look very good. At the same time, there is a salad bar, and I've decided to make it my opportunity. It's such a pain to keep fresh veggies at home, as they often don't get eaten and go bad on us. So every day at lunch for the last week or so I've been getting a bowl of veggies (mostly carrots, green peppers, and olives, with occasional cucumbers or fruit or other colors of peppers).
Speaking of food, we got a cow this week! That is, we got half a cow, in dinner-sized portions. I'm sure I've mentioned before the pastured chickens we got in the summer; this grass-fed beef comes from the same farm, and though we didn't actually meet our meat, we may well have seen it out in the farm's fields when we went to visit. It's meat we can support, raised humanely and given the kind of diet that cows are meant to eat. Grass-fed beef is, on the whole, leaner than corn-fed and the fat that there is has a better profile. The real thing it has going for it, though, is that it's good. At least, it is if it's prepared right, cooked slowly and not over-cooked. We can verify this on the basis of one meal, at least, as our Friday dinner (after getting the meat Thursday) was a pair of little inch-thick ribeyes, rubbed with salt, pepper, and garlic, quickly seared in a pan and then cooked for 25 minutes at 325. It was more done than I wanted it, but even at just a shade under well done, it was amazingly tasty meat. Also amazingly tasty was the apple bread pudding we made, topped with strawberry preserves.
To give you some idea of the economics of it, I'm pretty sure we put down $200 for a half, and then we ended up paying another $203 when we picked it up. You might wonder what, exactly, we got for that. In all the numbers I'm about to give, we have packages of meat that I don't have weighed, but they're basically a good meal. Each of the steaks is just the right size for two people, and the roasts are similarly small. So, here's what we have: 14 blade chuck roasts, 4 arm chuck roasts, 9 T-bone steaks, 8 sirloin steaks, 3 sirloin tips, 7 ribeyes, 4 round steaks, 5 cubed steaks, 2 swiss steaks, and 73 1-pound packs of hamburger. Oh, and a heart, neck, and oxtails. It's rather hard to figure out the cost and economy of it, since there are so many different cuts of meat. If we figure $4/lb for hamburger, that's almost $300 right there. [EDIT: Whoops. My calculations were WAY off, as the half was quite a bit more expensive than I was thinking--I didn't realize that we still owe money on it!] Granted, there are some cuts here that none of us would necessarily buy individually, but still, it seems like a good deal. More importantly, though, we feel like we're getting a quality of meat we couldn't get in stores, not only beef that's good (and judging by the steak, it was really good) but beef that we feel is more healthful for us.
The other side of this was that our 5-cu-foot upright freezer, even supplemented by our fridge's freezer, just wasn't enough space for all the meat we have (including the 6 chickens we still have), so we went to Lowe's and got a 9-cu-foot chest freezer on sale--with free delivery! So after going over there Friday evening, we had a freezer by Saturday afternoon--and it was just big enough, allowing us to turn off our other freezer (a good thing, since the door was a little big broken, even if still functional, to say nothing of saving a bit of electricity).
Speaking of meats, we also spent a good bit of our time this week making tamales. And we also got a brand new tamale steamer / stock pot: 32-quarts. Wow. Somehow I didn't realize how big that would be. We cooked up a whole chicken and a pork roast and made a ton of tamales. It took us days and days, though. Whew!
There's probably more to be said, but that's about as much as I can remember, and it's a good start toward daily blogging. I hope you've all been well while I've been gone.