Little by little I am getting my spark back. It started as a trickle, then a pop and fizz, and now I occasionally have moments when I actually feel like myself. I do not kid myself that these are real just yet - I'm still heavily medicated. And we take our pleasures where we find them, and I celebrate days when the muse strikes and I can feel some juice in the marrow of my bones.
One of the unexpected benefits of having my cranium all to myself again is that I have become quite a focussed cook. Somehow I seem to have reached critical mass with my knowledge, experience, materials to hand, and focus, and meal after meal is slotting into place. If last year I was tottering along with my stabilisers on and ocasionally falling off and scraping my knee, this year I am freewheeling downhill with the wind behind me and enough speed to make it up the coming slope. It feels lovely. A welcome surprise (and precious few of those have I seen this year).
I've been dipping my fingers into so many pies that I almost don't know where to start. I suppose I could list a whole load of links to the Wikki pages of the things I have made, and that would take time and probably be a little impersonal and dull, so instead... cue photo-montage!
Homegrown carrots and wet garlic
More of that lovely garlic
A close up of my gloriously knobbly homegrown sweeties
Homemade spaghetti - not bad for a first attempt if I do say so myself!
And my piece-de-resistance - my very own butter mountain
Almost a kilo of fresh butter made with my own fair hands. Utterly delicious smeared on my own warm scones with homemade apple and blackberry jam (neither of which hung around long enough to be photographed).
I'm salivating as I type this! Now why wasn't I born in a bucolic country farmhouse in about 1880?
