who only by moving can balance

Reading. Er. More of Plenty (Yotam Ottolenghi), which is probably going to go back to the library before I finish it, but of which I am getting the general idea.

More slow progress with mauve (Simon Garfield). I am increasingly convinced that some of why it's such slow going is the writing -- anecdotes are what might generously be described as strung together without any clear sense that time is linear, and indeed without making clear who the key figures are or why this apparently unrelated sentence is making up the last tenth of a paragraph; recountings of contemporaries' opinions are reported as fact and with no citation trail (there is a bibliography, but there are no useful references to it from the text); sometimes the whole thing is sufficiently disjointed that you'll get mutually contradictory statements about the same event within a page or two of each other without any acknowledgement that this is a thing. I am nearly done with it and I'm going to finish it but it is now definitely going back in the charity shop pile (whence, all those years ago, it came...)

Cooking. Spring pilau, from East! Omitted the mint because it's not big enough to harvest yet; added, on the second night, toasted flaked almonds; we reckon we probably want to bump the veg quantities up by about a third in order to get to our preferred rice-to-veg ratio, but definitely extremely pleased with this and Will Make Again.

Followed up, for the purposes of comparison, with another round of the winter pilau -- only with +60% of most of the veg. I think what with one thing and another (actually using tinned coconut milk as opposed to powder, e.g.) it wound up oilier than I'd ideally like, and I think I also failed to bump up the salt enough to account for the So Much Extra Veg, but I have now sprinkled some more over it & we will see how it does for dinner tomorrow. (And probably lunch on Tuesday...)

Not entirely unrelatedly, it turns out that the house rice pila[f|u] -- caramelised onions, cloves -- goes extremely well with bonus star anise and cinnamon leaf.

And I am experimenting with freezing a loaf of sourdough right before the final shaping/proof. Intent is to take it out of the freezer the afternoon we get home, leave it out on the side for a couple of hours, and then return it to the fridge for its final overnight ferment before baking it in the morning as usual. I'll report back.

Eating. STRAWBERRIES. More of them! They are so tasty.

Ongoing enthusiastic consumption of asparagus while it's still in season.

Exploring. We had a lovely adventure along the local Merryhills Way walk one evening this week (see Walking in Enfield), feat. the picturebook squirrel.

Making & mending. I Girded My Loins and applied Permatex to both one of Papa's walking sticks (the ferrule kept deciding it wanted to go on adventures) and my straight horn mute. I had long since lost all sense of where the corks used to be before multiple rounds of Terrible Adventure and I haven't actually checked that I've not made a mess of the tuning, but I can now honk (relatively) quietly again, and might even at some point start doing something a bit more adventurous than one (1) arpeggio, now that my head is not permanently Like That any more...

Growing. STRAWBERRIES. Transferred more (but not all) tomatoes into The Ground. Broad beans have Tiny Pods. Following An Adventure (tolerantly facilitated by A) I have distributed builders' sand in a few key locations around the plot that will hopefully make the water butts and the compost bin behave better.

Observing. Squirrel! Bat! A whole entire clutch of coot eggs! So Many Green And Growing Things.