Sausage Gravy (For Mainegirl - hey girl, hey), and my Manic Not-Really-Monday

 My sausage gravy is different.  But hey, I am not Southern, so neither is my gravy.  

Saute 1/2 lb of diced bacon and bulk sausage (my preference is actually Jimmy Dean Maple Sausage) with about a 1/4 cup of white onion.  When bacon and sausage is cooked (do not drain the fat), and onions are translucent, drop in a few cloves of minced garlic and let the garlic get happy in the pan.  Deglaze pan with bourbon, add a tablespoon of real maple syrup.  Add flour to the fat and make a roux.  Add half and half and whisk until thickened.  Add a healthy dash of Old Bay, and some minced chives, minced parsley.  

As for my day today...  it was a long day.  My hand still feels like I have a knife in it and it's really difficult to type this out because I initially began spatchcocking the 4 turkeys for this Thursday's Family  and Residents Thanksgiving Luncheon, but decided that because my ovens at work are absolute trash, that I should debone them.  

I've done this many times over the decades, this isn't something new to me.  I remember working at a BBQ pit and making Tur-Duck-Hens...  lots and lots of them...  to the point that it would take me years to want to eat duck, because raw duck can sometimes have a specific smell that just is off-putting, especially when you're wrist deep in raw duck.  I have come to the conclusion that I am no longer that spry spring chicken that I once had been.  Literally feels like every finger has trigger finger.  I generally type 120 wpm, but right now I am typing like maybe 1/4 that speed and errors galore.  Two years ago, I decided that the last place I worked at would be my last restaurant.  I decided to jump back in to Senior Living.  While I am alone in my kitchen hours after I should have left to go home, I was trapped in my thoughts:

Everything was going through my mind.  Cuss words, wanting to just cry, there should be a law against the amount of chronic pain that I am in daily.  The amazing people that I worked with in the past, all of their smiling faces.  The not-so-amazing people that I worked with, the ones that extracted that inner Asshole-Chef that lies deep within the darkest region of my blackened soul.  All the great food I have cooked, all the not so great food that I have cooked.  The jerk Executive Chefs that I worked under, that somehow in some masochistic way, made me the Chef that I am today.  

In the end, while I was talking to one of our NOC shift caregivers, I realized that I miss the chaos of restaurants.  I miss the crew aspect - the constant banter and comradery .  I had to shoo her away from my island because it looked like turkey carnage and I didn't want the napkins to get contaminated.  So, she went away to the dining room to fold napkins.  I had music playing in my head, only because my bluetooth speaker died and my phone had 4% battery life left.  

I'm back to that point where I am tired of killing myself day in and day out for someone else.  Thoughts of the food truck came flooding back to me, the billion concepts.  There was a time when I HAD the money for the food truck, and then in a blink of an eye, it was gone.  So much had happened between that point and present day.  I am not getting younger.  I just want to fulfill one thing on my bucket list.  To do something that I can feel proud of.  To be able to take a weekend off, to be able to take a vacation without wondering how I actually can pull off a vacation.  I recently screamed at Timmy, he mentioned the food truck, and I snapped at him, "Don't ever f***ing mention food truck to me again, you'll get your sailboat before I get my dream."  I think I'm just tired.  The last time I had a proper vacation was 1996, Lake Tahoe with Scott and the kids.  

I'm sitting here staring at that sentence.  This is f***ing ridiculous.  My head is in a dark place right now and I feel like I am drowning.  All of this is relentless.  And it's too much for seemingly no reward.

I busted my ass to get to this point in my career.  Everything kept saying, go back to computer technology, you were good at that too.