who only by moving can balance

Reading. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke: reread, for the first time in... a while, status ongoing. I am enjoying the mix of things I had entirely forgotten and things I half-remember and being totally unable to tease out what's actually foreshadowing from what's memory, real or invented.

I am currently less than a month behind on Dreamwidth.

I have also been dipping in and out of various cookbooks & Joy Larkcom's Grow your own vegetables, but nothing thorough enough to make it into the spreadsheet!

Writing. An e-mail to my MP? Quite possibly the most writing I have done this week is an extremely resentful e-mail to my MP.

Oh! and I actually submitted my second indexed cookbook to EYB. Now I get to wait impatiently while it's proofread, and then I can ask for book #3...

Playing. Finished a jigsaw! ... which is missing a piece. We bought it second-hand; did it arrive this way? Or did I manage to knock it off the table and then feed it to the robot vacuum without noticing...?

Regardless: absolute nonsense. It was a bit of a slog to start with but turned into Lots Of Fun, so I suppose I'm keeping this one as well.

Cooking. ... so I am doing the thing where I am making Lots Of New Recipes and it is honestly quite tiring and I should probably attempt to do slightly fewer New Things? But this week featured:

• sweetheart cabbage okonomiyaki from East; not this recipe but same basic idea. I actually gave up on attempting to cook this last week because I was so convinced I was going to dislike it (or at least the sauces she advises to go with), but... actually it was a very tasty and very quick cabbage fritter and it is Getting Added To The Rotation. (I have a Sous Chef tab open with okonomi sauce...)
• an Ottolenghi rice pudding with roasted rhubarb and tarragon: I think I prefer our usual, but I have also been sneaking bits of the roasted rhubarb out of the fridge entirely by themselves, which I had not anticipated...
• one-tin Korean style aubergines with spring onions and sesame rice: entirely adequate as a way to eat a pile of vegetables (and, to be fair to it, better on day two, and genuinely very straightforward), but not particularly memorable.
• Ottolenghi olive oil courgettes with eggs and potatoes: I am unsure how much of my absolute delight with this was simply that I've not eaten enough fried potatoes recently, but it was very pleasant. Might well reappear should I actually manage to grow three different kinds of courgette this year.

Eating. Two rounds Solero Exotic Fruit, because it was sunny and pleasant and A wished company in eating Take Away Ice Cream, and I was more into the concept of these than into the concept of Cornettos (of which I was very fond in childhood, but which I'm afraid will turn out to Not Be What I Want any more, and I would on the whole prefer to err on the side of preserving the memory). Two rounds of pizza (one at the allotment). Wagamama, because I had a flap about not getting to eat it in The Usual Fortnightly Dinner Slot (replaced by a Social Pizza, not at the allotment).

Ottolenghi dark chocolate, pistachio, and raspberry brittle: annoyingly I think I significantly prefer the salted caramel & hazelnut brittle.

The last piece of Ottolenghi cake -- "cooked fruit tart" i.e. pear frangipane -- with a slightly ridiculous quantity of Chantilly cream (because I was whipping cream anyway for the rice pudding...)

Exploring. Whipsnade Zoo! Lots of fantastic sleepy animals and a new-to-me goose.

Barking Park, with new duck food dispenser.

Making & mending. ... honestly it was mostly A? but there is Tiny Progress toward fixing the book chair (which will if absolutely nothing else be extremely helpful for cookbook indexing...)

Growing. SO MANY THINGS. To my surprise several things I'd given up on (having sown them direct) are sprouting, and are not promptly being obliterated by gastropods. I've moved garlic chives and shallots from modules into the allium bed, and sown the rest of my leek seeds (which might actually do something, which I'm very excited about). Buoyed by this unexpected success, I have direct-sown a whole lot more peas.

The jostaberry is now in full flower; the cherry is still thinking about it but not quite there yet.

Infrastructure-wise, reorganising the footprint of the fruit cage to make it easier to actually close went surprisingly well. Both oak saplings from the bed I want to grow tomatoes in this year have been Removed, one entirely by me (and unlikely to survive) and one mostly by Adam (about which I am more hopeful). Do I wish to donate them to The New Site for Admin: the LRP? Yes of course I do. And the capillary matting I am using in the greenhouse seems fingers crossed to be more-or-less doing the job I want it to.

Basils continue happily. I might have two germinated aubergine after all? Ditto pineapple physalis? I have also sown the rest of the calabrese seeds in my possession (highly unlikely to germinate, but at least no longer taking up space in my seed box); the pak choi I'm hoping to generate seed from this year are sorta progressing (though I have discovered just how badly they don't like being transplanted, so am sowing the remainder in newspaper pots).

... lots and LOTS of plants. And also some Freecycle railway sleepers, though I need to arrange to go back to the house they exist at with a pry bar and a saw, to cut the longer ones up enough they'll actually fit in the car...

Observing. COOTS. BABY COOTS. SO MANY BABY COOTS.

Zoo animals! Birds Of Barking Park! The allotment foxes are getting much more comfortable with me!

And, also at the allotment, my first peacock butterfly of the year :)