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Sometimes the simplest stories are the ones most difficult to tell.  I don’t know whether to blame it on my interesting newut morning regime, the continued adventures at LuthorCorp, the lurking desire to get out of the lumpy uncomfortable blue armchair and go play outside, or some other phenomenon bubbling below the surface of my consciousness, but I have never had such a clear idea of the story I want to tell, coupled with such a devil of a time actually telling it.  I have performed the usual PTMYB rituals of going to my reference works, visiting our space-age friend the search engine, trying to remove my gaze from my own navel and consider a wider context, and every night for a solid week, I have been left high and dry, all words eluding me, all thoughts just out of my grasp, except for one:  Hunza apricots are available for sale in New York City, and I am so happy that I could dance.

Alas, dear friends, this is all there is to tell of the tale, at least for today.  I have just spent two hours finding the words and writing the post, only to see it disappear.  Even as I thought I was saving every paragraph, everything but the first paragraph is gone.  At the risk of sounding churlish and mean, I just do not have it in me to rewrite the whole thing, at least not now.  I am trying to remain philosophical about this, but mainly I just want to set fire to my laptop.  Maybe I should just take this as a sign that there are better topics at hand than an apricot I have been chasing for ten years.

Let me jump in here and mention a couple of things.

1. The domain name redirect has not taken full effect yet, and until that does, final coding of the site cannot be completed.  All links may or may not work as they will once the redirect takes place.
2. The permanent URL will continue to be simply http://www.bakerina.com. The above URL is a temporary.
3. New RSS feeds, if necessary, will be provided once the domain redirect is completed.
4. The pages should all be functional, although not “perfect” while I wrestle with IE.  Here and there some browsers are showing a 1 or 2 pixel gap by the header.  I’m trying to figure out why closing it in Firefox, Opera, and Safari creates chaos in IE.

Finally, once the redirect is complete, I’d be happy to hear about any problems or glitches that turn up for you while you browse around.  It’s always hard to catch everything.

Dear friends,

You are not imagining things:  there *is* something different about this silly little page.  After much discussion, fretting, and mindmelding, I have decided to take the plunge, say goodbye to TypePad and hello to Expression Engine, and spruce the place up a bit.  Of course you know that I could not have done it on my own; all thanks and praise must go to Keith, the master of the house and keeper of the key at Scrine.  If you have ever been to visit Snow, ‘mouse, goliard, e or Bakerina Kitchens, you have seen Keith’s design genius in action.  If you are here via the bakerina.typepad.com link, and you are looking at a no-frills white page, you are in for a real treat once all the domain shifting takes place.

As a result of all this change, PTMYB may be unavailable intermittently over the next 48 hours, so if I seem to have disappeared, I promise that I have not.  Once the changeover takes place, and once Keith fine-tunes my template, I will be officially up and running, still at http://www.bakerina.com (if you have me linked via the bakerina.typepad.com URL, please do change it).

Thank you in advance for your patience, dear friends.  I’ll see you from the spiffy new digs.

It is that time again, dear friends.  It is the height of summer, the time of soaring mercury, tentlike humidity and pinballing pressure systems.  It is also the height of the season of food-based insanity, in which grown men and women compete for cash prizes by consuming dozens of hotdogs, half-dozens of hoagies or nine pounds of shoofly pie in a single sitting; the cameras roll as our elected officials preside over the pre-competition weigh-ins, and those of us who are aghast at this whole spectacle are advised to stop being so uptight and get a sense of humor already -- it's all in good fun, isn't it?

Thankfully, it is also the season of Blogathon, and I, for one, am ready for it.  (Actually, now that I have received word that Bunni, BlogMonkey and Eric will also be participating this year, I should rephrase:  it is also the season of Blogathon, and we, for four, are ready of it.)

For those new and newish friends of PTMYB who missed last year's highlarity, the rules are simple:  From 9 a.m. (EDT) on Saturday, July 29 until 9 a.m. on Sunday, July 30, I will be posting new content to PTMYB once every half-hour.  To get through this madcap enterprise, my fellow 'thonners and I will be relying on high-protein snackies, middle-of-night cold showers, the odd can or six of Red Bull, and, most importantly, pledges from our friends and loved ones as we soldier away, raising money for the charities of our choice.

Despite what the hamfisted rhetorical tactics I employed two paragraphs up might suggest, it was not the naked display of gluttony in competitive eating that inspired me to blog on behalf of Heifer International.  I was inspired by a much more (if you'll pardon the repetition) inspiring source, namely Cara, the peerless creative mind behind January One.  It was Cara who introduced me to Heifer via the charity raffle she organized to benefit them, through the auspices of Spin Out.  (If you are reading this at the end of -- or the middle of -- a bad day, do yourself a favor by clicking on that Spin Out link, scrolling to the bottom and reading up.  Take a look at Cara's original fundraising goal, and then take a look at how much money she actually raised.  It may not be the complete and utter cure for your bad day, but at the very least, it will restore your faith in what goodhearted human beings can do for each other.)   If you are not familiar with Heifer's work, the short, much-too-abbreviated version is that they work to end hunger, poverty, disease and environmental degradation around the world by providing livestock, as well as agricultural training, to families living in the world's poorest communities; these families in turn provide gifts of livestock to other families in their community, thus fostering a sense of community and economic empowerment.  This, as I said, is a much-too-brief summary, which does not do justice to the simply amazing work that Heifer does.  I encourage you to visit Heifer's website and read about their projects, their initiatives and their successes.  It is an amazing story they tell, made from a dozen small amazing stories.

So let's say you have been to Heifer's website, and you want to help.  You would also like to see what just what happens to the human brain at Hour 20 of nonstop writing.  (If last year is any indication, this human brain is only capable of crying "must...write...something!" or "I am so tired that I can see through space and time," but no, I will be more optimistic this year.)  So what do you do next?

1.  Return to Heifer's website, click on the "Give" link and scroll to the Online Gift Catalog option.  Here you will see a list of the livestock available to donate.  All of the animals (and trees!) on the list are on my gift registry...but we will not worry about the gift registry yet.

2.  Go to my member page at the Blogathon site.  (You will be asked to create an account.)  At the bottom are a pair of buttons, asking if you would like to donate an hourly amount or a lump sum.  For ease of the eventual donation to Heifer, I would recommend donating in a lump sum, but if you are a dab hand at arithmetic and you would prefer to donate by hour, far be it from me to dissuade you. 

3.  Follow the instructions on how to submit your pledge.  Accept my profound thanks for your pledge.    You will see a link on my page to my registry page at Heifer, with instructions on how to donate.  Please note that no donations are necessary at this time!  Your donations are contingent on my successful completion of the Blogathon posting schedule.  In the unlikely event that I should fail, I could not, in good conscience, accept your donations, and I definitely don't want to contact Heifer and say sorry, I'll have to take the sheep back...

4.  Come visit me on Saturday, July 29.  Feel free to cheer, throw things, point and laugh, etc.

5.  By 9 a.m. on Sunday, July 30, it should all be done and over with.  Feel free at that time to visit my Heifer registry page and make your donation.  Once again, please accept my profound thanks for your support.  (Yes, I can thank you even in my sleep, and by about 9:07 a.m., I probably will.)

Will there be a theme to this year's posts?  Absolutely.  (Those of you who have already seen it on my Blogathon member page, feel free to leave your witty comments here.

Thank you in advance for your support and fellowship, dear friends.

If that hoary old chestnut about the definition of insanity is true, then I am truly, incontrovertibly, just plain mad.  Every year the same set of circumstances exist; every year I behave in the exact same way; every year I am surprised at my behavior.  It surely sounds like insanity to me.  On the other hand, Lloyd and I are eating well, so it's a bearable insanity. 

Today was my first proper farmer's market crawl of the year.  I had not been to the market in a month, not since the day I showed up early, paid for a flat of strawberries and 13 pounds of rhubarb, and solicited my (visiting) (incredibly patient) mother's assistance in bringing them back to Astoria, with hardly a moment left for browsing.  Even though I had not been there for a month, even though I knew that the summer market season was about to kick into high gear, I still had modest visions for the day.  I would buy eggs, because we were out of eggs.  Because Julie had said something about the early arrival of sour cherries, I knew that I would buy a couple of quarts for pie.  Maybe some salad greens and herbs, because I've been craving something green ever since I started running again.  As far as I was concerned, that was it.  No meat, not even the expensive but truly wonderful guinea hens.  No merguez sausage.  No big bags of cooking greens, no matter how bright and color-saturated they looked, no matter how wonderful the squeak of snapping-fresh leaves rubbing against each other sounded.  No perfect little new red-skinned potatoes, still damp from the ground, the merest hint of black dirt still clinging to them.  No coriander with the fat roots still attached.  No, no, no, no, no.

You can probably guess what follows.

I will still argue that when compared to the shopping list of my own heart's desire, my actual market haul *was* quite restrained.  I did not get the guinea hen or the big bag o'collards or the potatoes, although I came close to buying those potatoes, along with a bunch of dill for good measure, after hearing some loudmouth yammer on about how only elite athletes and starving children could afford to eat such a carbohydrate load.  If you can look at those rosy pink beauties, if you can smell the sweet singular smell of the dill sitting next to them, fairly begging you to pick them up and take them home just as soon as you buy some butter to complete the job, if you can do all of this and the only thing that springs to mind is the glycemic index, then there is something seriously askew in the universe.  If you are a recently-diagnosed diabetic, and you miss your spuds, and you are engaging in a coping mechanism, then okay, I'll cut you a break.  Otherwise, please take your opinions to your nearest friendly neighborhood macrobiotic restaurant and leave me in peace to enjoy the sight.

Yes, I am digressing.  I bought the cherries, and at a fabulous price, too.  I also bought two little baskets of black raspberries, just because Lloyd loves them.  Wild arugula, the same kind I devoured with relish on our holiday in Scotland last year, for our salad green.  As I passed the stall where I buy my root vegetables, I saw that the summer beets were in, including my favorite Chioggias.  I'll only pick them up if I can find any marjoram left, I promised myself.  Of course there won't be any marjoram left; it's after 10, and even for a holiday weekend, there's a decent crowd here.  Whoops, here we are at the herb farm and they have a lot of marjoram.  Ah, well, there's nothing for it but to get some marjoram, and maybe a little bundle of French tarragon, and back to the beet stand for beets, which means that we're having spaghetti with beet sauce tonight, and oh, as long as we're here, why not pick up some scallions?  We use scallions all the time, and the local ones are such a rare treat, so much nicer than the ones that come to the Astoria greengrocers via the Hunts Point wholesale market -- oh, listen to that:  the green bits of the scallions squeak when you pick them up.  Heavens, but I love the market.  Say, are those strawberries?  We have tarragon!  We can make Claudia Fleming's strawberry shortcake where the macerated strawberries, as well as the whipped cream, are enhanced with a tarragon sugar syrup!  It's one of the best things you've ever made!  It can only be made in the summer!  Do you smell those berries?  Buy them!  Buy them!  Now, now, now!

It was only after I got everything home and began to unpack that I realized a few heretofore-unrealized truths.  I had fruit for pie, fruit for shortcake (which we would not have room to eat, because, really, the pie comes first) and fruit for some mysterious something-or-other.  I had to do something with all this fruit before it went bad.  It would start going bad by the end of the day.  I had plans to do some additional baking, muffins and protein bars and the like, for weekday breakfasts.  In addition, Lloyd and I have plans to go to the movies on Sunday morning, and Luthorcorp is expecting me to make at least a cameo appearance on Monday.  Simply put, I had goofed.

Fortunately, if there's one thing I like more than creating trouble for myself, it's creating a way out of that trouble.  Strawberry shortcake will just have to wait.  Both quarts have been sliced, sugared and left to do their thing.  A few of them went into tonight's dessert, nothing more than some of the juice from the strawberries, a little whipped cream and some crushed amaretti biscuits, all whipped together and layered, parfait-style, with some of the strawberries.  The rest of the strawberries will be available for our yogurt -- or for other parfaits.  The tarragon will have to be content with being added to roast chicken, or maybe bearnaise sauce if I'm feeling ambitious some night.  The blackberries will be turned into blackberry-lime curd, and the cherries will still be turned into pie, because while everything else is variable and flexible, cherry pie is not, at least not in this kitchen. 

And now, to quote Graham Chapman, for a complete change of mood.  Below are some pictures I've been carrying around on my camera, but only just managed to download tonight.  Can you tell where these pictures were taken?  (If I were a better hostess, I would offer door prizes, but alas, I have been caught off guard tonight, although Bog knows how I managed to do that with three big bowls of fruit in the house...)