Sometimes I'm not very bright

We've been getting Designed Dinners for several years. These are the ones where you put together (or have other put together) gourmet meals, which you then keep in your freezer until you're ready to cook them. It's more expensive than just buying food at the grocery store, of course, but since there's only two of us, it's not too bad, and it gives us some variety in what we eat instead of being stuck in a rut of the same five or ten dishes in rotation. Also, I don't have to buy a whole jar of a new spice when I'm likely to only use it once.

For the month of December, they included a prime rib roast as an option and I thought that would make a nice Christmas dinner. (We would rather not do Christmas at all, but Jim's mother is kind of lonely and we do it for her at her place.) When it came time to go do the Designed Dinners thing, the Sunday before Christmas, we were snowed in and couldn't get anywhere. It didn't really matter because we were still snowed in on Christmas day, so even if we'd had the roast, we wouldn't have been able to have the dinner at my m-i-l's.

Saturday there was enough of a thaw that Jim was able to go pick up the dinners for the month, including the roast. I put it in the refrigerator to thaw out in time, which it did. Yesterday, I cooked it. It's so nice to have this really great cut of meat in a marinade of red wine and oil with herbs. Smelled great as it was cooking.

Everything went off without a major hitch, although it looks like I need a new meat thermometer. It said that the meat was "medium" when it was still pretty rare. We had to put the sliced meat into the microwave for a bit to cook it some more for Jim who likes his meat non-pink.

We got home about 6 o'clock and I was feeling really tired. I managed to stay awake until 8, just by force of will, but then decided to just go to bed. Slept like a log. Woke up with a migraine.

It was particularly bad this morning, not only with the pain in my head but barfing as well. I managed to take some of my mega-aspirin, which is all I have these days to deal with them, and went back to bed. As I was lying there, I was wondering what the trigger might have been. I'm still trying to work out what it is that I should avoid in order to prevent these things. I thought, "The only food type trigger I have is red wine and I never drink--- Oh. My. God. The roast."

Yeppers. I think that's it. Whether it was the smell of the wine when I first got it out of the packaging or the tannins in the wine that would have stayed on the meat, I don't know. But I'm pretty sure that it was the wine in the marinade for the roast that was the culprit this time. And likely was dozens of previous times over the years without it even occurring to me.

Damn! I know there are several other meals that are in the freezer right now that have a marinade that includes red wine. I can't just throw them out. I'll probably have one after this migraine is over just to confirm my suspicions, but I don't know what I'll do if my suspicions are confirmed.

On the up side, if it is what I think it is, this is something I can avoid relatively easily. It may mean that I will never be able to go to a place that has candles on the tables, just in case they use a red wine marinade. It may even be that I can't be in a room where red wine is being served. I don't know how sensitive I am. I'll have to do some experimenting, but my immediate gut reaction is to just avoid being within a mile of red wine just to be safe.

That said, Happy New Year! :-)