You know what I SHOULD have done?!

I really wish I’d thought to take pictures earlier today. Being nudged to do it now is like…you know how sometimes somebody will just be, you know, gah! and you really wish you could think of a really good zinger to hit them with but you can’t, and then two days later you sit up in bed at 2:35 in the morning and shout, “You know what I should have said?!” and you have this incredibly clever snark-back that you totally wish you’d said?

Yeah. Kind of feel that way about taking a picture of the Costco cart right now. And/or the back of Homer the Odyssey. And/or the kitchen table before I got stuff shuffled away to its many places of repose…because there are many, many places where food goes around here.

We have two refrigerators, one in the house and one out in the garage, plus a large stand-up freezer out in the garage. We also have a second set of kitchen-like cabinets out in the garage, and a tall wire rack in the playroom right by the kitchen where I keep a lot of the bulk flour, rice, beans, sugar etc. etc. etc.

Everything has a place, and nothing is ever in its place. Ever. I’m constantly changing things on myself, and then getting pissed off because nothing is where I think it is.

It’s a sick, sad cycle, it truly is.

At the moment, I think my kitchen looks fairly normal. Everything is put away somewhere, even if “somewhere” is a big cooler.

Which is where much of the meat is, actually, with defrosting chicken acting as the ice for everything else. (By the way: don’t mix raw meats up in a cooler all willy-nilly. I’ve got these guys separated from each other in sealed plastic trash bags, so if anything leaks it won’t get any further than, well, itself…I don’t want my raw chicken fraternizing with the ground beef, ya know?)

Today was really all about planning and acquisition of what-all I didn’t already have, plus a little tiny bit of actual preparation. I’ve got nine dinner entrees and eight lunches for the two of us done, all of them pork, all of them on the very simple side of the difficulty scale.

I bought two pork loins, about eight pounds each. (Yeah, not the little ones – the big ones.) One sharp knife later, they turned into 42 pork chops (about half an inch thick and a bit bigger than my palm – and for $2.49 a pound instead of $4.49), a pile of tiny bite-sized pieces and a larger pile of cubes.

For the chops, eighteen went into three gallon-sized Ziploc bags and were doused with a honey-ginger-garlic marinade; another eighteen went into three other Ziplocs and were drenched with an orange-cranberry-cinnamon marinade. Then all six Ziplocs migrated out to the big freezer to spend a couple hours on an empty shelf to quick freeze. (The cool thing about the Ziplocs is that if you freeze them flat, you can then stack your meals up in pretty minimal amounts of space. Same thing for Food Saver bags.)

The last six got eaten for dinner tonight. Because I know one of you is going to notice that the math doesn’t line up there.

The bite-sized pieces spent about half an hour marinating in the honey-ginger-garlic stuff while I got some bread started, then got stir-fried, spread out on a tray and put in the freezer to harden up. What I’m after is the ability to put the whole mess into a single Tupperware in the freezer while still being able to grab just a few bits out at one time – those are going to be lunches for the husband and myself, to go over rice laced with whatever I’m pulling out of the garden. (Peas and spinach right now…but a couple heads of broccoli look like they might be ready soon.)

Then I turned the cubes into three dinner’s worth of pork pie filling. It’s going to cool overnight in the fridge, and then I’ll split it up into Ziplocs as well and freeze them flat…that way, I can either make a traditional pie crust to put it in, or I can top it with mashed potatoes, or I can make a sweet potato topping…or just leave it as is and call it stew.

Which fools nobody but I like to pretend it does.

And then I made dinner-tonight-dinner, and put the bread into the oven, and then everybody ate and the bread came out of the oven and I set some beans soaking and called it a day.

Because it was a day.

And now it is night.

And tomorrow is another day…a day on which I want to get together stuff with beef, and stuff with chicken, and stuff with ham, and vegetable stuff, and pastry stuff, and bread stuff, and cookie stuff, too…

Yeah.

Think I’ll go put the camera’s battery in the charger. It’s going to have a busy day tomorrow…