Complaints Yielded Results

I do believe all my complaining about winter arriving early and Montana not understanding how a calendar works has actually paid off. The snow has melted away, thanks to the wind, rain, and warmer (above freezing!) temperatures. Don’t ruin my joy at this by telling me snow is still in the forecast.

The unraked (I’ll be honest, the unmowed and therefore not sucked up) leaves were actually dried enough to be blowing about the yard last Sunday. The riding mower may come out of storage this week to take care of most of those leaves. I hope to not face that mess next spring. It’s good to have plans, isn’t it?

As of just a few days ago (Oct. 28), the leaf monitors were telling us the ground was bone-dry down to 40” deep. The bits of rain we had, added to the melted snow, now shows up as moisture at the 8” depth. Farther down is still thoroughly dry. I’d much rather have rain than snow to wet that ground all the way down because rain doesn’t require shoveling, plus it is usually warmer. Yes, I do know that rain at this time of year can cause icy roads and treacherous driving conditions. But if you combine snow with the winds we get, you’ll still have treacherous driving conditions, and it can be deadly cold.

On Sunday, while in a grocery store (we were in Billings for a medical procedure), a stranger started a conversation with us by asking, “What? Are you eating again? Didn’t you just eat yesterday?” I replied that we’d just eaten that morning, and that it’s a hard habit to break. He agreed, then went on to criticize my choice of pomegranates, saying they’re too much work for not enough return. I happen to love pomegranates, and always look forward to their arrival in the stores at this time of year. This boisterous gentleman went on to tell us his grandmother used to make pomegranate jelly. “Can you imagine how much work that must have been?” I don’t ever plan to make pomegranate jelly, hadn’t known there was such a thing, but I will go on taking the time to dismantle them in order to savor the pips.

Last week I found a large package of chuck roast steak in the freezer. It’s a rather tough cut of meat, hardly deserving the name “steak.” However, soaking it in the sugar-free barbeque sauce I found at one of our local grocers, and cooking it in the InstaPot, held above water on the rack, made it fork tender.

While the steak cooked, I roasted a pan of veggies. I cut several garden carrots on the bias, cut 10 small shallots in half, and chopped broccoli and cauliflower into bite-size pieces. Those were all tossed with olive oil and sprinkled with my dried parsley and thyme, as well as some Himalayan pink sea salt and a generous sprinkle of freshly ground black pepper. They were arranged in a single layer atop tin foil on a rimmed baking sheet. (Dennis got a couple small white potatoes, quartered and drizzled with ghee, kept separate from my veggies on the same sheet. He did eat a few shallots.) The veggies roasted at 400° in the oven while the steak finished cooking and the pot depressurized. Fresh pears were our dessert.

Meals don’t need to be terribly complicated to be healthy and delicious.