It’s been a long week here at the Visible household. The flu got us, one by one, taking my boyfriend first, and then me as soon as it was through with him. Some other dramas took place, a few weirdnesses, a couple of stressors. Nothing major; just a long week.
Up until today I was feeling pretty rough, so I spent a lot of time in bed. Now, combine that with the fact that I’ve been sleeping late, and a big strong glass of green tea of dubious origin and staggering caffeine content way too late at night, add in a novel and a few levels of Diablo II, and you’ve got insomnia.
It’s nice, though, these days. In the days before the VisiBoyfriend came along, insomnia nights were terrors, lonely distraught vigils beset by self-doubt and all sorts of angstiness. Now, I just don’t sleep. No biggie.
I’m in the middle of kicking some skeletal ass deep in the second level of The Cave,when it comes to me that I bought a pork butt. A big, four pound pork roast, for no earthly reason except that it was on sale for about seventy cents a pound. And it occurred to me that I am the proud owner of a trough-sized crock pot. Somewhere between quaffing a healing potion and checking my inventory, it suddenly dawned on me that if I were to put the roast in the crockpot at about five a.m., it’d have twelve full hours to cook before dinner tomorrow night.
I continued on my ass-kicking endeavors for a bit, until it was past four, and went to work. Started the broiler, sliced some garlic. Washed the roast. Gave it a salt and pepper rubdown, then tucked garlic slices into little slits I cut all over the roast’s surface. Put it under the broiler for fifteen minutes. Laid a bed of sliced onion in the crockpot in the meantime. Out of the broiler, into the pot, there to be joined by bay leaves, clove, more onion, hot water, and soy sauce.
It looked magnificent. Really; the browning from the broiler, the onions festooning its surface in their circular cheerfulness, the tiny touches of green the bay leaves contributed, all of it amounted to a picture that, in my massively sleep-deprived state, moved me nearly to tears. The onions probably had a lot to do with it.
And I did it all without even waking the dogs.
It will cook all day while I get a protracted nap; it’ll simmer while I get blearily ready to face whatever remains of the day when I wake up. It’ll be poaching itself in its succulent juices when I come home from tomorrow’s expedition north, bearing a barbeque grill. And it’ll be ready when my boyfriend gets home from work, and our friend and barbeque donor arrives.
There’s something really strange about putting dinner together at five a.m. It feels like I took a sleepless night, and wrestled a prize from it. I can’t wait to smell that roast cooking all day tomorrow.
