Last weekend, we had a situation. Mistakes were made.¹ See, we had decided to share a quarter of a cow with a couple of other parties,² which was, of course, occupying our packed downstairs freezer. At some point, I tried to fit some stuff in there, rearranged a bit, and (thought I) closed the door. At a later time, the door turned out to be open. Luckily, only a little of the meat³ had thawed beyond recovery. While we couldn’t refreeze the rest, we could salvage it — all we had to do was cook it all. So for the next five days or so, we had steak every night, along with delicious fruit cobbler⁴, while we also cooked and then froze a 10 lb brisket, a 6 lb roast, and an appalling number of meatballs.

As we stand today, the meatballs have been cooked and frozen, half the brisket was turned into corned beef yesterday, the other half was prepared and frozen to this recipe, and half of the roast went to failed carnitas while the other half went to a successful braise (which was just the carnitas recipe without the burning-to-a-cinder step). All in all, a reasonable recovery from a dumb mistake. More or less.

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¹ By me. E appreciates me being clear about this.
² For those keeping score at home, this works out to 1/12th of a cow in our freezer. It was about 40 lbs all told, which cost us somewhere around $130. A good deal, even if a lot of it was ground chuck.
³ Just some of that ground chuck, which frankly we won’t miss that much, certainly not as much as we would have missed the New York steaks.
⁴ From the frozen not-at-all-inexpensive fresh organic fruit E had painstakingly gathered, she would like me to mention.