BEHOLD
I am again travel enabled.
My renewed passport was received today after a miracle 5 weeks and 4 days despite being warned it would take 7 to 9 weeks. I have dodged the bullet of my passport renewal trapped due to the pending government shutdown.
Now it is on to the next steps of getting a new Ghana visa and a visa for a visit to China next year.
As I joked to a friend, I can't believe I am not already on a plane out of the country.
I am fully in the cooking battle lust these days. That is leading me to trying all kinds of different things. On Friday, I had some leftover Great Northern Beans and was inspired to make some Middle East flavor inspired patties. The idea was to have something crisp like falafel. Sadly, I didn't get the binding right and ended up with the patties melting. Then when I turned up the heat to hopefully crisp them, they burnt. So I ended up with bean pudding with crispy burnt bits. Wife was game and ate them all though. She is reluctant to complain about my failures as I might stop cooking all the meals and her having to cook. And that would be A DISASTER! (for her).
On to more cheerful cooking, my slow grilling of a boneless leg of lamb. I haven't done this in ages and I wanted to try it with my new passion, the yogurt based marinade.
The Marinade - I decided to go with the SE Asian flavor version with Fish Sauce, Miso, Curry Paste, Spicy Crab Paste, and Soy Sauce.
Then I use good Bulgarian Style Yogurt
That's right Bulgarian, not Greek. It is much looser and tangier, better for marinading.
You slightly saute the SE Asian flavorings. Let them cool and add the yogurt
And PLEASE Stop asking me for the amounts of things. I don't measure. I'm a Grandparent. It's traditional. Grandparents don't measure. We just add things by eye or feel. Because we know how much is enough. What? You want to know how much is ENOUGH? Easy, if it didn't turn out good, it wasn't enough or was too much.
Now we prepare our lamb - One boneless leg piece
You put a number of cuts along the width. This allows the whole to spread out. This will greatly reduce the cooking time and will allow the marinade to penetrate deeper into the meat.
Our meat in marinade ready to rest overnight in the fridge.
I used the same indirect grilling technique I used with the chicken a few weeks ago.
My accompaniment was a cabbage slaw with a dressing of mayonnaise, yogurt and a lot of fresh tarragon.
The finished product
In truth, it was a tad overcooked. The cutting technique really reduces the time it needs. But the flavor was crazy good.
So let's say that J is right. Let's say we suddenly are getting all kinds of leads, are closing them, and holding on to the clients we close. We would go pretty darn quick from having our small staff of 8 being underutilized to their being used to the max. We could double the clients and revenue we're doing now with our existing resources and we'd be more than breakeven, but if we continue growing beyond that it will require a bunch of additional resources such as:
And that's just the business stuff for starters. Then we get into the social impact stuff to aid our women in truly transforming their lives.
All this implies money...a lot of money. But there is a big difference between where we were a couple of years ago and now. Then we were just a wild idea, a very interesting idea for sure, but just an idea. Now we are building a track record. Feedback that I'm getting from people who have worked in the social impact investing space tell me that there aren't that many projects out there that have even achieved as much as we have. So maybe it is time to go for broke and search for serious money?
That's what I am thinking. And that's what I am working on. Let the Ecstasy / Terror roller coaster roll on!
When I left Ghana a month ago, I wrote how I felt we'd made a breakthrough. I still feel that way. But the ebb and flow of business in any small start-up sometimes has you doubting. I was talking to my fractional CFO today that I alternate between being ecstatic and terrified as we navigate trying to get over the hump (in terms of getting to breakeven and being able to cover all our expenses without donations). I joked there is the couple of minutes between the high (we're going to break through big) and the low (we're going to crash and burn) where you are in perfect balance. I just need to keep my consciousness in that gap!
But that's not why I'm writing this post. It is more a realization that IF we do get to the goal of breaking even, it is HIGHLY UNLIKELY we are going to stop there. Let me explain with a bit of background.
I've mentioned frequently how this process has been unreal, unlike any business endeavor I've ever experienced. Throughout, volunteers and unlikely donors have shown up exactly when they were needed. This hasn't happened just once or a couple of times. It happens all the time and is continuing. Right after I got back from Ghana another volunteer showed up. This gentleman, let's call him J, was met (as so many have) through a virtual networking group I belong to called Lunchclub. It was a strange call because he was totally focused on Theodora and wanted lots of detail information about how we did things. Turns out he has been using VA's for decades and has a very refined system for using, training, managing, and getting business for them. He proposes to help us.
This seems a bit too good to be true. I have numerous members of my Ghana group interview him. I check his references. We all agree we have nothing to lose by giving this a try. Fast forward a month later, everything he has told us he was going to teach and show us, has come to pass. We are now starting to work on the key piece...for us the missing link...building a sophisticated lead generation system (not dependent of de-I). I've been watching all the training and I'm thinking, "I think this is the real deal."
Now here is where the terror starts to creep back in. But what if this guy is right. What if we suddenly start generating a LOT of new business. Are we prepared to grow rapidly? The answer would be a big NO. We'd need a ton of thing put in place. So now I find myself having to balance my thinking between how we manage through our tight cash flow and what do I do if we suddenly have so much business that we must expand rapidly.
I will continue this discourse in my next post.
Maybe it we are hard wired from millennia of living a life where you had to plan for the days of scarcity when things were either cold or dry. But despite the fact that I live in a privileged world where I can get food no matter the climatic season, I find that in the late summer and early fall I am processing food like crazy, getting it in the freezer to prepare for the winter ahead. In my own mind, I am not doing this because of the cycle of harvest. But, I suspect that is just me rationalizing it to myself.
The Hunt
Of course, one of the most primal of activities associated with this activity is the hunt. You go out. You find the prey. You kill it. You bring it home. You smoke, dry, or cure it in someway so you have nourishment to carry you through.
These days, of course, the hunt is a bit different. Your fearless primal hunter, de-I, gears himself up, prepares himself mentally. "Be one with the prey. Think like the prey. Act like the prey." And he heads out to the area where experience has told him there is the best possibility of a successful hunt, the best hunting grounds. It is an area spoken of with reverence in the lore. It is.
COSTCO
It does not disappoint. In no time at all, our fearless hunter has bagged 30 pounds of packaged protein using is trusty Visa Card. Coming home I break it down into individual portions, wrap and put into Ziplock bags, carefully organized in then in the freezer. Ah! The feeling of being back with nature.
However, there is actually some food preparing being done.
Pulled Pork
One 10 pound piece of pork shoulder, brined for 24 hours
I have waxed rhapsodically about my Yoder smoker
Which in harmony with our theme of 'back to our primal roots' takes the intense concentration and craftsmanship as turning on an electric light.
But who is to complain when 13 hours later you have this!
Grilled Chicken
I like to have food that is already cooked in the freezer and decided to split and grill a chicken using the brick weight mechanism for enhancing the cooking time.
Marinade
I have been playing around with yogurt based marinades and have very pleased with the results. It seems to tenderize the meat more and get more flavor imparted. I use a wide variety of flavor combos. I did a Middle Eastern/North African inspired flavor for this one. But my favorite so far has been using Southeast Asian flavors.
I actually had to do some really cooking effort! Chicken needs a good long cooking time so I rigged up a way to get more indirect heat to the bird.
It turned out very good. (of course I forgot to take a picture. This is de-I. I have a reputation to maintain).
Make Use of Everything
The smoked pork shoulder has a big layer of fat and skin on the top of it. Normally, after smoking, I throw this away. But, I reasoned, I never do that with chicken. I make cracklings out of them. So I decided to do the same. Came out great.
I like to take a bit of them, crisp them in a frying pan before adding eggs and green chile.
Deterioration is the constant companion of the aging. In almost all aspects of your life, you see that you are not what you were. This is normal. It is the trajectory of life.
If you are at all self-aware, you have been watching this happen to others. You compare yourself. How far am I along the path? When will the eventual 'key event' take place?
The 'key event' is some kind of injury or illness that causes you to be sidelined from your normal activities for a long enough period of time that you overall state (particularly your physical state) deteriorates significantly. If you are able to overcome the injury or illness, you find, despite work, you are unable to get yourself back to where you were physically. This accelerates the trend of deterioration leading eventually to death. This can take longer or shorter depending on the overall health and physical condition of the person.
It was in April when I feared the 'key event' had occurred. I talked about it in this post. I didn't mention it during the posts in Spain. But it was there. Although I had overcome the pain, my leg strength had diminished substantially. And I had lost a lot of conditioning. Was this it? Was this the 'key event'?
When I got back to New Mexico in July, I made a concerted effort to get back to hiking. I was so way out of shape and my leg was not what it was. I found a new routine that allowed me to get out despite my schedule with calls so early in the day. I found that the extreme heat was not bothering me that much so I could go later in the day when it was more likely for me to have time. Slowly but surely I added a little more distance.
Now I am much further along than I would have hoped. I have no illusions that I am going to be back to something of 5-years ago. But I am definitely a lot stronger. I really feel like I dodged the 'key event' bullet.
This time.
