Anywhere but here

Iceland, take me away.

I’ve been a ball of anxiety and haven’t been sleeping! I put the exclamation point there to make that announcement sound less doleful because who wants to read about how tense and tired someone else is? We’re all tense and tired. I’m just a little extra tense and tired right now. First thing in the morning I burst into tears because I knocked over a full cup of coffee and had to make more, poor me, and when I went upstairs to do so found that Owen had left his laundry in the middle of the kitchen. Owen is very lucky that he’d already departed for band practice.

Seriously, though, death, grief, burial, college applications, Disneyland, and, yesterday, public speaking. The first 14 days of January were rough. The other night at dinner I startled myself and everyone else at the table by saying that when Mark retires I want the two of us to move to India for a year. Really? I want this? Mark in India? Mark with all those cows? The next day I wrote Isabel a mystifying email saying that if she’d like to go to Iceland with me over the summer, we should discuss. 

Iceland? WTF. She has yet to respond. 

The eulogy I gave at my grandmother’s funeral yesterday went fine. I read a couple of anecdotes from the archives of the blog and I think it worked. Here’s what was really cool about this experience though: while looking through the archives, I found so many stories about my grandmother that I’d completely forgotten, days we spent together, verbatim dialogue, really sweet stuff. I never intended the Tipsy Baker as a family scrapbook, but among other things, that’s what it's turned out to be. I uncovered a trove of memories that would have been lost forever had I not been packing them away like a typing chipmunk, year after year. Not just memories of my grandmother, but of my mother, father, kids, Mark, our life, all of it. Maybe you’re wondering how I didn’t realize this before now. I’m wondering that too. I just didn’t. Now I do.

So that’s happy. 

Cooking.

-This is a very good, healthy, easy, green soup.

-The Ottolenghi macadamia-caramel cheesecake is baking as I write. Full report after tomorrow night, but it smells divine.

-The Ottolenghi marinated rack of lamb with cilantro and honey was intended as an expensive weekday dinner earlier this week, but on the night I was planning to serve it both my kids had theater obligations down at the high school and for various boring reasons I couldn’t postpone the lamb so I cooked it, didn’t bother with salad or vegetables, and Mark and I ate it standing at the counter. Then he went to see the theater production and I stayed home and finished the eulogy. It was a sorry and unceremonious way to serve a luxurious and delicious meat, but hey, the kids have lives of their own now and I have to deal. The recipe is nice because rather than pouring away the marinade you boil it for 15 minutes and use it as a sauce, an extremely punchy, flavorful sauce. This was another great recipe suggestion from the comments. Thank you commenters. I’m almost done with all your Ottolenghi suggestions and then. . . what? 

Interesting, don’t you think, that Plenty More didn’t turn up in the Piglet lineup? Maybe they decided that Ottolenghi's books have gotten enough Piglet play in past years. I couldn’t disagree. Perhaps I’ll explore some of the Piglet titles over the next few weeks.