Blast and damn! Twin Rambles: Eat ‘n’ sleep

YOU SLEEP NEVER! #TROLLBRAIN

In an epic feat of combined “just not paying attention” and “WOOPS LOL YOLO”-minded thinking, I’ve flipped my body clock upside down again. Tonight I’m going to go to bed at a REASONABLE HOUR—I’ve scheduled Jeannie to boot me offline and shut down at the appropriate time.

100 Things is tomorrow. I will go back to twice-weekly updates eventually, when my leg’s managed a little better.

I’m also battling an interesting problem lately: my digestion. For once in my life, it’s behaving in a way my doctor would describe as ‘normally.’ Fact is, I DUNNO IF I LIKE IT. On the one hand, it now takes me much, much less food to get the “oh sweet mercy I am FULL” signal, but on the other hand, this means that I’m stopping to eat a little snack every couple of hours.

“Oh, it’s two hours since your last meal? I AM STOMACH, AND I SHALL SING FOR YOU THE SONG OF MY PEOPLE.” I usually combat this with either a trio of those nutritional cookies or a pair of apples. About calorically equal, depending on whether I’m craving a sugar fix or a sour fix.

CULINARY BREAKTHROUGH!

I got the most ludicrously strong craving last night for steak. Sirloin steak. I needed it then, and I needed it to be the best steak EVER. I borrowed my stepmom’s recipe, hacking up onion and garlic and then dousing the entire filet in liquid smoke before putting it in a low oven for three hours. …Incidentally, during this time, the fire alarm went off. I have a sneaking suspicion that someone smelled the bottle of liquid smoke that broke in my apartment and just KNEW someone was burning things up! NOPE. Just me cookin’ steak. No, you cannot have any, alarm-puller. You mad?

When I deglazed the pan, I noticed something—the resultant liquid, used as a baste during the cooking process, could make an awesome gravy.

*record scratch*

Dude. Don’t wreck my discs.

Problem with that is I’ve never been able to make a gravy that wasn’t depressingly bland and tasteless. But I tried it again—less water at the start, actually using salt (surprise! A lot of the flavor of gravy is depends on salt), stirring the whole time…eventually the gravy took shape. It was dark, brown, and rich. But the last time I had bland tasteless gravy it was that color, too. So I taste it.

“…Mother of fish, this is actually GOOD.”

I’d finally figured out how to make a good gravy.

*record scratch*

HEY, KNOCK IT OFF. THOSE ARE EXPENSIVE.
Anyway, I know what you’re thinking—“But Rai, gravies are so BASIC! Didn’t you learn those first?”

Actually, with the way I learned how to cook, a lot of the basics were outright skipped. Lots of the family didn’t have much confidence in my skills, so I had to show my initiative by ‘accidentally’ letting my ‘watching Food Network’ notes get seen. And when I asked about making an edible gravy, I either got a strange look or an outright disbelieving declaration of “YOU COOK SUSHI, YOU MUST KNOW SOMETHING SO BASIC AS GRAVY.” Funny thing is, a lot of the harder things to get are quite basic. Like gravies. They require a delicate sort of touch and significant intuition with handling heat. Anyone whose mom effortlessly whips up a delicious batch of brown gravy for the meatloaf and mashed taters? That took practice, lots of practice, to be able to make it look THAT DAMN BRAINLESS. Me, I was schecking my skillet temperature, the flame on the stove, the radiant heat off the oven, the stove flame again, then looking across at the bubbles on the top of the flour and flipping some over to see if it was close to the color I wanted yet…I gotta tell you, I wasn’t that OCD making crème brûlée.

*checks the records* Good. No damage.

I am officially OUTTA HERE for the evening. I have to readjust my body clock—and adjust to this being my last dose of head pills. This morning’s persistent hallucination? The walls had pulsing veins. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve stopped being frightened of them (mostly) to being fascinated, wondering how I could work something like what I’m (technically not) seeing into my writing somewhere.