Frantic Friday

I woke up quite early to a very chilly bed. I scrambled to the thermostat and it displayed seventeen Celsius. That’s pushing the limits. I’m risking catching a night chill at this rate! I might have to consider turning the heat on. I’m holding out as long as I can to avoid having to pay the exorbitant taxes to heat my home. While I was up I checked my washed hat and was pleasantly surprised by the results. Not perfectly new but pretty close. From the sweat stained and dirty beginnings it is just needed some extra care on the “bill” to be excellent. I’m going to try it with another hat as a second repetition to this experiment.

With all the pre-dawn excitement igniting me I quickly made, consumed, and cleaned up my traditional breakfast. It feels like this no coffee thing has taken pretty well. Before I left the kitchen I had one more task to complete though. I butchered two thick chicken breasts down into chicken tenders. I had consulted with the Chef the previous day to inquire about methodology. I packed my trimmed down breasts into a container and added enough pickle juice to cover them. I was supposed to brine the chicken for at least eight hours so early in the morning was best. I’m not fond enough of pickles to have started this process the previous night. I’ll get to why in a few jumps down the page. For now you are probably concerned about the nearly dry pickles still in the jar. Don’t be, they will be delivered to the Chef as recompense for his advice in the coming days, well before they dry out. And between us, if they dried out and never met a human mouth, all the better. You’ll recall that I exceptionally hate pickles, almost as much as I hate onions. Same rationale, the slimy feel but crisp texture. The tangy taste from the actual pickle does not please me either. And maybe a bit of stretch reason is that I’ve often encountered them in sandwiches or burgers as a most unpleasant surprise. Oddly, I love dill pickle chips. I’m a complicated man with many layers, like and onion. See what I did there…..

This Friday morning progressed like many do. Calls, emails, trying to tie up loose ends. I’ve been keeping my inbox (ie to-do list) fairly tight through the pre-harvest season. I’ve got a couple of fairly large files to generate in the next week but otherwise I’m keeping on top of most things. There is that frustrating, lingering issue that began early September that is still on-going. I don’t like things like that where I’m the one at fault and the face to the customer, but I really have no control over the deliverable aspect of the issue. This one has gone global with teams in Asia working on parts of it. I’m not sure how that happened but I will continue to increasingly rudely request updates. The customer is getting increasingly pissed off and as a result so am I. Either way, compartmentalizing that stressful issue, I had a personal errand to run on my lunch hour. I had placed another Sysco at Home order. The Chef and I needed a restock on the sausage rounds for breakfast samidges and with my new found propencity for air fryer chicken wings I decided to get a supply, that being the 10lb box pictured below. They are classified as jumbo which doesn’t do them justice. Fun that I got jumbo wings on the same day that the Leafs signed Jumbo Joe. Happily, everything was able to be broken down and stowed in the freezer.

The remainder of the afternoon went by fairly quickly. I had a couple of calls with folks and got caught up on most of the things in my inbox, getting the count to under ten again. I shared some information with customers and tried to give status reports on everything lingering. Towards the end of the day I set about reverse engineering a data file that was made annually until 2018. I had some numbers and wanted to generate data for the last two years to bring the file up to date. Some things got left behind during the transition and we don’t have the same resources we had to cover everything off so that is the result. Slowly but surely we’re getting back up to speed. I sort of got lost in that last Excel puzzle and the next thing I knew it was nearly six bells and time for the family meal. We were doing our second air fryer meal together. As I mentioned a fortnight ago, we all have the same air fryer and cookbook so someone picks a recipe and we get two weeks to gather the required ingredients to prepare it together on a video chat. I was the last to the party and everyone had started without me, typical. I was still two minutes ahead of the agreed upon start time if anyone wonders where I got my penchant for being early from. As you may have guessed, we made pickle brined chicken tenders. The hint was in the brining of chicken tenders earlier. Some of players had full meals built around this. I did not. Although I did make some tots to enjoy at breakfast tomorrow, since I was in the mood to cook. I could have ignored copyright law and posted the recipe but basically you brine then bread then fry. It’s not super complicated. I managed to get an action shot of that process.

This will show up differently in mobile than on a computer but I’ll try and give a rundown of who made which version. My parents showed their dip and they use stone plates with blue on them. Maybe they cooked theirs a bit less. The sister in Sudbury has round plates with a pattern and she cooked her tenders all the way through. My plate is round with no pattern and I garnished with some parsley flakes. The sister in America has square plates with a pattern and made salad with her tenders. I snapped a quick picture of the McCain’s cheesy tots I made. I couldn’t help myself and had a few. They were magnificent, crisp outer shell and soft, comforting innards. Those ones are probably the best I’ve ever had, no joke. The rest of my night was spent listening that audiobook Theodore Complete put me on in the dark mostly. I fell victim to sleep just after nine and slept like a corpse for most of the night.