I’m in a list-making mood, dear friends. This is good for three reasons: 1. It’s T-9 today, and I have a lot of packing and shipping and printing and lecturing and wailing and boogieing over the next 9 days. I always fancy myself as the kind of person who doesn’t need a list to pack; no, I have an innate sense of what I really need, so innate it’s like a biorhythm. Then I get to my destination and discover that I’ve forgotten something like socks, or my head. 2. Since I’m so busy working on these lists, I need not feel guilty about not tackling the sink full of dishes. Of course, I will still feel guilty about it, because hey, that’s my idiom, but I don’t have to feel guilty about it, which makes all the difference. Thank you for not asking me how. 3. Since I’m already in a listing frame of mind—whoops, almost tipped over that time (rimshot)—I can share with you another list, a list of some particularly fine and noteworthy posts that have crossed my path. Do check them out, as they make for good reading.
We can (and most of us do) get cake on our birthdays, but leave it to Vicki (a/k/a Calgal) at Just in from CowTown to give us cake on her birthday. Take a gander at that recipe for that buttery, tangy chocolate chip tea cake, which you had better believe I’d be mixing up now had I not just baked two pound cakes from an 18th century recipe. Oh, hell, who am I kidding? I’ll probably bake this one, too. While you’re there, help keep Vicki’s birthiversary celebration going; with any luck, we can stretch it out to a week!
I can’t believe I almost missed this one, from Dragon Bear Cave. Back in February, when it looked as if I might have to give up my job in exchange for accepting the Egg Board fellowship, I sent an e-mail to a good friend who is also my baking/foodwriting mentor. She wrote back to me with a piece of advice about risk-taking that I just love: sometimes, she said to me, you just have to step off the cliff and trust that you will be the Road Runner, rather than Wile E. Coyote. Anne took this idea and ran with it, and the result just lit me up with pleasure, lit me up like a Christmas tree.
All of our shopping trips should end this well: One day
One of my favorite writers, the late Laurie Colwin, once said that cooking was like love: you don’t have to be particularly beautiful, or smart, or attractive, or skilled, but you do have to be interested in it. Colwin’s heroines were interested in love, and thus love found them. Taken to extremes, this kind of thinking can lead you into Norman Vincent Peale or Napoleon Hill territory, but on a small scale, I wonder if we do put out feelers to draw certain emotions or bits of knowledge to us. I never set out to study eggs; it was the purest bit of luck that enabled me to study them, but now that I am studying them, I find myself the recipient of all sorts of egg lore: recipes, trivia, questions. Sometimes I look for it; sometimes people send it to me; and sometimes I find myself casually perusing blogs like the plumbutt chronicles, where I find things like this. I’m still laughing at it.
I’m also laughing at this, but I feel mean for doing so. The inimitable Pauly D at Words for My Enjoyment has a cautionary tale to tell us about s’mores—and really, how often do you get to use a sentence like that in conversation? Seriously, Pauly, I’m laughing with you, not at you, or would be if you were actually laughing. Uhh...are you actually laughing?