The Ladylark has turned me into some kitchen-freak. I will be reading Nigella Lawson cookbooks... I am reading Nigella cookbooks.

As part of the Cooking Like a Grown Up project (maybe we should write a book?), Naomi had me making fresh breakfasts. Me being a "does it have caffeine in it?" kind of breakfast person. The most common thing I make is pastries (get them ready, put in oven, go for shower, come back down and burn mouth on hot jam filling) but this week I'm home all week so I made muffins this morning, enough to last the week. These have forest fruits and a teaspoon of orange essence as well as vanilla essence to give them a bit of zip.

The cooling rack goes onto the hob like that due to an unfortunate incident involving brownies, Moosifer Jones, Mischa (the neighbour's cat), and kitchen chaos. Admittedly, these muffins do not contain anything liable to get a cat into a "hungry? eat cake! hungrier! eat more cake!" feedback loop but I now automatically distrust cats and cooling baked goods. The hob is on the worksurface which is a good 6 inches higher than the table where the Great Brownie Hunger Incident took place.


I'm in the midst of a big rewrite of the Contractually Obligated Thing tonight, having pleaded with the editor for a few more days. Part of the rewrite involves shifting the tense in a couple of places, having read Rosina Lippi on tense changes and, when I reread the COT, seen that I could solve some of my unhappiness with it by tweaking the tenses. Also by seriously reworking the middle. I went to my usual lunchtime haunt today, sitting in the Boston Tea Party with a red pen. After 40 minutes, I'd only covered the first 4 pages of the 8 page story so I suspect tonight will be a late one...

Am I going mad, or is A Century of Elvis by Belle & Sebastian (hush, nos...I know they are evil indie Scots who have lured me in) about a cat? And I'm still mysteriously missing two Divine Comedy CDs (Casanova and Fin de Siécle) which I distinctly recall picking up from the desk in order to take back to the CD shelf downstairs...