Before I talk meat…

Your enthusiastic response to my plea for good book suggestions was so encouraging. First thing Saturday morning, I made a list of your recommendations. I researched books on Amazon. Then I headed into town to run errands and stop by the library. But woe—whoa—it was not to be. Our library, it so happens, doesn’t open until noon on Saturdays. I was crushed.

Back home, I logged onto the library website and put entirely too many books on hold. Then I considered my options. A couple of you talked about rereading certain authors. This is not a new idea—I know plenty of people who reread their favorites every couple years—but this time I heard it differently and I was like, Well yeah, I don’t even know what my favorite books are about anymore. So I nabbed Bean Trees off my shelf and dived in. Let the party begin!

Now. For the meat.

Breaking news: I finally figured out how to cook venison.

I’m timid around meat—afraid I’ll ruin an expensive cut with my limited know-how—and even though venison isn’t expensive and should therefore be less stressful, it makes me tense up even more because I’ve always thought of it as an inferior product. It has that gamey taste that everyone rolls their eyes about, and you have to know how to mask it just so or you end up with a bunch of tough meat that tastes like road kill.

Not that I’ve ever eaten road kill.

It’s not like anyone is ever out to acquire a nice cut of venison for a cookout, right? I know this because if it were so, they’d sell it in stores. But no. People just happen to have a hunter or two in the house and a freezer full of the stuff and then they are forced to figure out a way to use it up.

The thing is, I’ve always known venison can be really good. I’ve known this because people with discerning palates have told me so. I’ve just never actually experienced it firsthand. So last fall when our neighbors offered us a piece of fresh venison, I, buoyed by an eternal and unfounded optimism, said, Sure, why not. I’d figure something out.

The “piece” of fresh venison ended up being about half a deer. I stared at the pile of deer parts piled on the kitchen table, gulped, and handed my daughter a knife. A few hours later and we had a hefty stash of cubed venison in the freezer. (Thanks to The Google, the bloodier meat got soaked in salt water to remove the gamey taste. It worked.)

Yesterday I thawed three of the packs and turned them into pulled venison and it was fabulous.

Fabulous as in, I am so glad I have more venison in the freezer.

Fabulous as in, my husband said, “No one would ever guess this was venison.”

Fabulous as in, I forgot to photograph it because we were so busy eating.

Fabulous as in, today I made a sandwich with some of the leftovers so I could take a picture, and my children fought over the sandwich.

Never again will I feel shy around venison. Never again. This stuff rocks.

Crock Pot Pulled Venison
Adapted from Jane of Thy Hand Hath Provided.

One reason I so like this recipe is that it uses any size cut of meat: big chunks, little chunks. They all get thrown in the pot together and shredded up at the end.

I only made a couple changes from Jane’s recipe: I added a chipotle pepper (I wish I would’ve added more), and I deglazed the pan with some broth and didn’t discard any fat (you know how I feel about fat, yum-yum).

5-6 pieces bacon
2 pounds (or a little more) of boneless venison pieces
½ cup chicken broth (or red wine) for deglazing the pan
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1 onion, chopped
4-5 cloves garlic, minced
1½ cups ketchup
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1-3 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, chopped
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cumin
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Chop the bacon and cook it in a pan with high sides (to avoid splattering grease all over the floors). Remove the bacon bits and set aside.

Rinse the pieces of venison to get rid of any residual blood. Blot dry. Working in batches, brown the pieces of meat in the bacon grease, making sure to get a good brown on both sides. When all the venison is browned, add the broth or wine to the empty, hot pan and stir vigorously, scraping the bottom to get up all the browned bits. Pour the liquid into the crock pot and add the bacon and venison. Add the remaining ingredients and stir.

Turn the crock pot to high and cook for one hour. Reduce to low heat and cook for another 6-7 hours, stirring every couple hours. Right before eating, vigorously shred the meat with two forks. I did this directly in the crock pot, but you can remove the meat and shred it on a cutting board if you prefer.

Serve the pulled venison on hearty buns.

This same time, years previous: maseca cornbread, my first play, margarita cake, lemony spinach and rice salad with dill and feta, hummus, and rhubarb sorbet.

Did you hear about the new study that explains how our brain cells shrink when we sleep? Once the cells are all shriveled, more fluid squeezes in around the brain raisins and washes all the toxins away. In other words, sleep is important because your brain needs a bath.

(Okay, so the study didn’t use those exact words…)

I believe this explains why we have the mushy, foggy feeling when we wake up from a deep sleep: our brains are filled with water and half drowned. It takes a little for the brain to drip dry and suit up for the day.

Ever since hearing about this study, I’ve felt virtuous about my typical morning wooze because maybe I can’t walk straight but hey, at least my brain is clean.

I’ve been kind of going running in the mornings. I say “kind of” because it’s more of a weak trot than a fluid run, I don’t go every day, and I’m not training for a marathon or increasing my distance or doing anything athletic-like. Mostly I try to stay vertical and not get mauled by dogs.

(Seriously, the dogs are getting to be a bit of an issue. Up the dirt road, there’s a new-ish family with three beautiful, young dogs and no fence. The dogs are friendly, I’m pretty sure, but they swarm, charge, and bark with alarming vigor. Yelling at them to go home is useless. I’ve taken to chucking pebbles at them, but I’m afraid that might anger them. This morning the pre-teen boy was outside when the dogs charged. He called them back. I tried to run by. They charged again. So I stopped, hands on hips, and cheerfully said, “I’ll wait till you’re holding them,” and then stood there while he tried to corral them. What’s the best course of action in this situation? Talk to the family? Carry pepper spray? Scream bloody murder when they swarm me at six in the morning? It’s putting a real damper on my  runs, which are already  hard enough without adding a herd of dogs to the mix.)

Anyway, to me running feels like I’m giving my entire body—the inside of it, that is—a bath. Every bit of my insides gets oxygenated.  The blood is pumping, the heart is pounding, the lungs are doing their inflate/deflate routine triple time and it’s good. Of course, I really have no idea what’s going on inside my body because I’m no biologist, but that’s what I imagine is happening. (I also told my husband that if I don’t come back some morning, it’s because I either had a heart attack or the dogs won, so come scoop me off the gravel, please.)

I have not read a novel, cover-to-cover, in what feels like months. I start books. I tediously pick my way through non-fiction. I read articles and blogs. I read children’s lit and young adult fiction to the kids (and husband). I read emails and junk mail and magazines.

I miss immersing myself in a good book. A really good book. A book I can’t put down. A book that makes me lose sleep. Sinking into a book is a healthy form of escapism, I think. Reading requires a focus that allows me to sink down, down, down into something. I spend so much of my day multitasking and being distracted—partly out of necessity and partly out of habit—that a prolonged focus is more than I want to give. Yet putting everything else aside and plunging into a story is cleansing and rejuvenating, kind of like a deep sleep or a good workout.

In a way, I’m scared of a good book. It will derail me, eat up my time, force me to give up an element of control, and make me live another experience that may feel uncomfortable. And I’m scared of a book not being good enough. The book I read has to be perfect. I don’t want to read something that’s badly written, disappointing, or inane.

So I don’t read books. I have become a spoiled, scaredypants, finicky, lazy reader. This embarrasses me. I don’t want to be this way and so … I’m going to change it. I am going to make myself read one book—a fun book—each month. (Dang, I didn’t know I was going to do that until I wrote it. Shoot. Does that mean I actually have to do this now?)

Help a girlfriend out, will you? Pretty please tell me your true love reads?

My requirements are as follows: pleasurable, interesting, fast-paced (more or less), well-written, no dying children, nothing scary that will give me nightmares, and nothing sad that will depress me. To give you a better idea of which ones have passed muster, here are a few of my faves (* = top picks) (out of sheer laziness, no authors and no links—sorry):

Angela’s Ashes
The Bean Trees
Life of Pi*
Water For Elephants*
To Kill a Mockingbird*
Tiger Mother
Tuesdays With Morie
Poisonwood Bible*
Does This Church Make Me Look Fat?
The Kitchen God’s Wife*
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
The Da Vinci Code
The Brothers K*
A Severe Mercy

And some young adult that I’m crazy about: Wonder*, Okay For Now*****, A Long Walk To Water, Old Yeller, and Where the Lilies Bloom. (Though this isn’t a genre that I generally prefer to read on my own time.)

Hit me up, people. I’m gonna crack me some spines.

This same time, years previous: happy weekending, the family reunion of 2012, “That’s the story of mom and us”, and warts and all.