Hello friends,
Life is back to normal which means I'm back to the old grindstone. The hinges of my work laptop creaked open and I sifted through the emails, most of which were now out of date and therefore pointless but you have to read them anyway just in case someone has hidden a very important task somewhere sneaky.
After spending much of the past month in a vaguely horizontal position, I'd forgotten how rubbish it is to spend most of the day in a sitting position. On my work desk there is a little clock that tells me to get up and stretch every half an hour; I didn't realise how bleak this was until I came back to it. I can sit in a tight ball with a book until my feet are numb but put me at a desk and my lower back will be grumbling before the hour's up. However, I have a good job with nice people, and I'm still alive, so best not to dwell.
After being dragged back to reality and with the sun seemingly clocking-off for the rest of spring, I was in desparate need for some comfort food yesterday. We settled on not-ramen (noodle soup with ramen-y vibes but lots of shortcuts), but I was off my game. The mushrooms were under seasonsed, the soft-boiled eggs refused to be peeled and even the noodles - a new brand I had tried - weren't doing it for me. By the time I served it, I hadn't noticed that the broth had cooled, so it all ended up a bit tepid. The only saving grace was the bamboo shoots, a sad state of affairs, which I had cooked down in a broth-soy sauce mixture.
After my lukewarm soup, I then proceeded to sip a peppermint tea immediately out of the kettle and burned my tongue. Oh, cruel fate, thou are a bastard. There have been a bunch of these idiot moves over the past few days. There was the mad scramble to find the wrongly labelled parcel: I had put the wrong package in an InPost locker when trying to send multiple items to different addresses, and the customer helpline person was remotely firing open different doors while I was trying to rearrange the stickers and locations in the rain like some mad gameshow. A queue formed and there was deinfitely some judgement. Then there was the losinng of the single key to our flat, that was eventually found in the key drawer some hours later (we'd already looked there, honestly). Also leaving the bedroom door/laundry open so the dog snuck in and destroyed a pair of my pants - a good pair too. Boo.
Well, just give up, you might say. Put everything down, go to bed, rise again tomorrow. How I would love to do that my friends, but unfortunately I promised myself to do some baking this evening. I’ve got a load of fruit going spare that really needs using up, so it's got to be done. There has been a distinct lack of baking in my kitchen1 and that, coupled with the anti-rabbit's foot I seem to be carrying, does not bode well. Yet I must soldier on.
Roughly on the menu is a banana bread, maybe a rhubarb and apple crumble and a bircher or something, with the possibility of an orange cake. Perhaps I'll report back next week but if I don't, know that it's because there was another disaster and I'm sulking.
Yours in a complain-y sort of way,
Deb
My metaphorical kitchen, my husband is knee-deep in a sourdough love affair, which is fine by me because: bread.