1. Debbie, from my point of view, continues to tread water as she recovers from Covid. She's sleeping well at night, has an occasional and kind of phlegmy cough when she's up and sitting in the living room, and generally feels not great, but not awful.
Covid has Debbie craving beef. On Wednesday we had a lentil, tomato, rice soup/stew with ground beef and today Debbie asked me to prepare a pot roast.
Her request invigorated me.
So, I went to Yoke's to buy Debbie some over the counter medicine and some Vitamin C and to buy a chuck roast and other groceries we needed for dinner and beyond.
I knew Denise Hill was visiting from Florida and, lo and behold, she was at Yoke's, helping Rose do some shopping.
We had a superb visit near the produce area. We talked about a variety of things -- helping our parents as they get older, who Denise has visited on her trip, and other stuff -- and Denise made me very happy when she told me she plans to come to the All Class Reunion in July, 2023.
We went our separate ways after yakkin' for a while, but met up again in front of the store as Deni was loading up groceries in the car and helping Rose get settled in the passenger seat.
As I drove out of the Yoke's lot, it occurred to me that I don't remember a time in my nearly sixty-nine years when I didn't know Denise Hill. Our parents knew each other and were friends before we were born. In kindergarten, our school year ended with a pageant and Denise played the pageant's lead role as Mother Goose and I was her cat. Because Deni went to St. Rita's, Kellogg's Roman Catholic school, we weren't in school together until the ninth grade, but when it came time to graduate from KHS, Denice and I walked into the ceremony together and were seated side by side.
Great bridge.
Lots of water.
2. I broke my time of sequestration in the Vizio room, not only by going to Yoke's, but by doing some helpful cooking.
First, I mixed up oatmeal, honey, maple syrup, walnuts, melted butter, cinnamon, cloves, and vanilla extract in a bowl, spread it over parchment paper on baking sheet, and put in the oven for a half an hour and now we have a supply of granola.
Then I took the chuck roast out of the packaging and generously seasoned it on both sides with salt, black pepper, cinnamon, finely chopped garlic, and oregano. I heated up olive oil in the Dutch oven and seared both sides of the roast for about five minutes.
I had already roughly chopped onion, Yukon golds, and carrots. I'd also mixed up two cups of beef Better Than Bullion.
I removed the roast from the Dutch oven, put some bullion in it, and deglazed it. I returned the meat to the pot, surrounded it with potatoes and onions and on top of the meat I placed carrots, sliced mushrooms, and any potato and onion pieces that fit around the meat. I poured bullion over the meat and put the lid on the Dutch oven.
I braised the roast and vegetables in the oven for a couple of hours at 300 degrees F and it came out perfect.
The vegetables were tender, not mushy. The meat was moist and packed with flavor. I put the vegetables in a bowl, cut the meat into slices, and left the braising liquid in the Dutch oven on the stove top.
Debbie and I each made a puddle of the liquid in a bowl and added slices chuck roast and vegetable chunks.
Blasting the beef with cinnamon and oregano was not part of any recipe.
I just thought it would work and I was absolutely right. For decades, while I loved cinnamon, I had a very narrow understanding of its possibilities as a seasoning. Thanks to venturing out a bit into the cuisine of the Middle East, I've become more adventurous with cinnamon. Tonight's dinner helped seal in my mind once and for all that I think cinnamon and beef is an awesome pairing and that black pepper and oregano compliment the cinnamon deliciously.
Having it be cool enough to use the oven again and helping Debbie satisfy her Covid craving for beef uplifted me and I was ecstatic that this meal turned out to be so tasty.
3. Well, having busied myself with shopping, yakkin', and cooking, I didn't watch any fictional movies today.
I did, however, watch an interesting documentary exploring the life and work of Edgar G. Ulmer, the director of the B film noir movie I watched on Wednesday, Detour. I also watched a short documentary covering the ten year long project of restoring Detour from several degraded prints of the movie into the beautiful restored print I watched on the Criterion Channel.
Edgar G. Ulmer was known as the "King of the Bs", that is, the king of making feature movies with little money and in a brief amount of time, movies that were the B picture playing alongside a more lavish A picture when movie houses presented double features. I guess you could say it was the cinema's version of 45 rpm records -- they always featured a hit song on the A side and a lesser known song on the B side.
I'm not sure as I write this, how or where to find B movies of the 1930s and 1940s and beyond, but I'd sure like to. I think, but I'm not sure, that I saw a number of B movies on television when I was a kid when the local tv stations played movies in the afternoons during the week and on Saturdays. I know I saw some pretty cheap looking science fiction movies and, who knows?, maybe Detour got played and was interrupted by the tv station's host calling out Bingo numbers on cards we could get at the store or making calls to give away money to random people on a Dialing for Dollars break.
I'll start poking around and see if I can find B movies. Detour and this Edgar G. Ulmer documentary piqued my curiosity in a big way.
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