In Which I Forget an Important Purchase and Wind Up Cooking Ground Beef in My Mostly Deserted Dorm at Midnight

It is 12:42 am and I am still not quite ready to go to bed. In fact, I've just spent the last little while (while not on the internet) reading a novel and cooking meat in the basement. Which I must say, is an excellent way to end an excellent day, which this has been...

Although now I want to eat the meat. I wouldn't have been cooking it at such an odd hour if I hadn't been so forgetful. But then, finals week seems to be a good enough occasion for dementia. I went to the farmer's market with my friend Kaleigh and her mom, who ran into another friend and her mom, and I was there without my mom...which was a sad situation. But anyway, I put my big girl panties on and got over it.

I bought a half pound of salad greens and splurged on a pound of ground beef from the college farm. Then I put it in my backpack. Where it stayed until this morning when I suddenly snapped out of deep meditation on the faithfulness of Jesus in Hebrews chapter 2 to remember it. The frozen beef had thawed (luckily in a plastic bag) but it still felt refrigerated and had kept the greens cold while it was at it. Brittany and I don't call our room "The Lair" for nothing. It has been damp and chill in here for several weeks now and there was one night I could swear my blankets were sprouting mushrooms.

Having been warned of the dangers of refreezing raw beef, (I do have my food handlers license, after all, courtesy of the Berea College labor program) I made a mental note to cook the beef today, and then I put it in the fridge. Where it stayed until tonight, when I suddenly snapped out of my Facebook reveries and realized it was yet lying uncooked and bloody in the recesses of the icebox, where four whole dollars and a hunk of cow meat would go to waste if I didn't face my responsibilities.

The only problem is that my skillets are packed off in storage as of Wednesday and most of the suite mates have left, taking their generally free-for-responsible-public-use dish collections with them. A lone saucepan was left in the cabinet, which one of the remaining three suite mates claimed. It is only about six inches in diameter. And the community hot plate is packed away as well, which meant that I trundled down to a deserted basement at half-past midnight with the pilfered pot, a spoon, the copy of The Devil and Miss Prym that a graduating friend loaned me, and my bloody meat.

There was just room enough in that pot for the pound of meat, and with a good bit of stirring, I got it sizzling. Then I turned to the book, which I've been enjoying the past few nights. It is by Paul Coelho, a Brazilian author, but it has been translated into a lot of different languages. He also wrote The Alchemist, which I haven't read. The Devil and Miss Prym is a sort of philosophical thriller; short, a quick and engaging read, with deep questions. One of the main characters is on a mission to figure out whether people are naturally good, naturally evil, or both.

In the midst of reading I managed to not burn the meat or set off the infamous Kettering fire alarm and thereby incur the wrath of several dozen lingering dorm mates. It had a wonderful flavor; I could tell that must have been an exceptionally happy cow. It lived a good life.

I found, while I was cooking, a quote I especially liked in the book:

"Silence does not always mean consent-- usually all it meant was that the people were incapable of coming up with an immediate response."

-The Devil and Miss Prym

Often true for me, I thought. And often the case in classes this semester, which made me grateful for required online forum posts. And as I contemplated this I climbed the stairs and located a yogurt container for my meat in my small, boxed pantry. Then I contemplated the pros and cons of using the cucumber melon body wash to clean the dishes since the other dish soap was gone and someone had obviously set the body wash there for that purpose. It didn't strike me as being the most healthy thing to put on the dishes, but then, what is Ajax?

I taste tested the meat again--lean, juicy, and almost sweet. Oh, lasagna. And then I put it in the fridge. Where, one may predict with reasonable certainty, it will stay until I suddenly wake in the middle of the night in the new apartment tomorrow night to realize that I have left my pound of precious ground beef in the dorm fridge, never to be seen again.