As above, so below

Up here, I am poking at dead prose trimming extraneous words from my Exciting New Proposal.

Down there, I am decluttering that cupboard. Yes, still.

The two processes seem uncannily similar. Stuff I had thought valuable or useful or just here-to-stay (another variant on not going anywhere) is being excised, exiled, deleted from my book/house/life. In both iterations, the process is slow and difficult and on the edge of hurtful. I keep flinching from one, and finding nowhere to turn except the other.

However. Onward. I have swept the cupboard floor, so it ain't all wasted.

In other news, a number of ping-pong balls have been discovered. Despite our being in our middle years, we may have bounced about chasing balls like little kittens. Might've done. We're not saying. You can't prove nuffink. You didn't see a thing. Go 'way, we're tired now.

Inadequacy

Tonight, I am mostly making chicken pie. And demonstrating to my own satisfaction, once again, that I am physically unable to make pastry.

Leastways, I have to find a work-around. Which does not involve buying it pre-made, because I read once where nobody can call themselves a good cook until they are a good pastry-cook, so I'm too damn proud to give it up. Besides, y'know, I wouldn't. I don't. I buy ingredients, not foods.

But: I cannot rub fat into flour. I just can't. I know all about keeping it cold, and I have read instructions on technique, and I had a childhood of watching my mother do it effortlessly; but my mother is at the other end of the country, besides being ninety and retired-from-cooking, and I am here and incapable. There is all the pain thing, of course - it hurts my hands, and my forearms up to the elbow, and that's when my shoulders aren't bad - but I can work through pain. Hell, I can knead dough and whisk egg-whites if I have to. But I cannot rub fat into flour. It doesn't go. I work away, all fingertips and lightness, and I still have lumps of fat in flour, it never ever resembles bloody breadcrumbs. So I end up giving up and tipping it into the food processor and giving it a whizz. Which does the job just fine, and then I can take over and pull it together with a dash of water and make an okay pastry. But I always feel that I cheated, damn it; and I really don't know what I'm doing wrong.

Also, I want to bake pie and heat the residue of potatoes-and-cabbage at the same time, in the same oven; and the little casserole dish I need to make this happen is utterly inaccessible, on account of contents-of-cupboard heaped high between me and it. I can see it, but I cannot reach it. Grr.