Making stew

I have been cooking a lot of stew this winter. I am finally getting comfortable enough in the kitchen to go without recipes for some things, and stew is one of them. Brown some stew meat, remove it, add the onion and garlic and from there it is anyone’s guess. If I have carrot and celery, they usually make their way in. For the liquid it’s whatever I happen to have on hand — leftover red wine, some broth that needs to be used up, a bit of tomato sauce or paste, sure, why not? Herbs are the same, I just throw in whatever seems like a good idea. And usually my gut is pretty good these days, we end up with a nice meal after some time in the oven.

The past week my life has felt like I am making stew with it. Being unemployed and having my days quite wide open; I’ve been grabbing onto whatever is available at the moment. At times it’s talking with people about potential jobs, at others it’s reading and catching up on articles that I’ve tucked away, and at others, I choose to tune out with Adventure Time. I let myself wallow a bit in the last week, letting my emotions dictate my actions on the day. Also, I ate way too many cinnamon jelly candy hearts.

But now that I have wallowed a bit and mourned the loss of something great; I am feeling ready: Ready to get my body back in shape after several stressful weeks where I ate and drank the wrong things, ready to start digging in to see what I actually want to do next, ready to continue to iterate on my site, ready for new things. But having a week that felt like making stew was important, it was necessary, without it, I fear I wouldn’t be ready to make the choices I need to make going forward.