Thursday 10 January 2008

Vitamins, incoming!

Step 903 on The Path To Conceding One's Undeniable Oldness: cancelling the dvd delivery subscription in favour of an organic veg box. It's like the moment I finally switched off Radio 1 for good, and decided to wake up to John Humphreys badgering politicans of a morning like the grown-ups do. (Apart from the bit where I just rent my dvds from somewhere else now.)

Anna Pickard's 'oh bloody hell, what am I supposed to do with THIS weird vegetable?' blog has been quite the godsend during the initiation period.

But now I've got one of these. Roughly the size of my own head. I like mashed swede as much as the next unusually-
fond-of-root-vegetables person, but there's a limit. Suggestions? Otherwise it's going to end up in my fennel risotto, and that's probably a bit too experimental...


Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. Teen romance which has spawned two equally successful sequels, there's a movie in the works, everyone and his dog has read it, etc. So far it appears to be Buffy, minus the jokes and the feminism. Because those weren't in any way integral to making Buffy brilliant. *sighs* Possibly I've been ruined for this sort of thing by Diana Wynne Jones' The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which has left me with a certain disdain for any character whose eye colour sometimes flashes to symbolic black, or whose hair is in improbably metallic. ('Bronze'? Really?) And waiting till page 120 for her to realise he's a vampire, when the blurb told us that? But perhaps the heroine will suddenly start hitting things or having witty, characterful friends or something.

Layouts and edits and advances, oh my! The UK page layout of Big Woo is shaping up very beautifully indeed (despite today's discussion of possible changes taking place on a malfunctioning speakerphone at their end, with much juggling of coffee and banana chunks across a windswept quadrangle at mine). US bound proofs should be done in a couple of weeks. And I met up with my writing group at the weekend, who were their usual gloriously inspiring and encouraging selves regarding Biscuits & Lies. Nothing puts me in positive writing mode so well as curry and fireside chat with that lot.

Prison Break S1 (still only on episode 11, but gosh, yay, etc), and lots of carrot scraping.

2 comments:

Jess said...

Very nice in stew. That's what I usually do with mine. (Or it's a nice excuse for haggis - it really is meant to be with swede which is scottish for turnip, or something). They used to to veggie haggis in Neil's yard wholefood place.

Many things are not the same after reading DWJ...

rocrastinator said...

It's quite good in the trad Lentil Soup too: you still need the carrot (tried it without, tastes of blah) but if you chuck some in as well as all the usual stuff it goes beautifully. Also made a lamb casserole which was heavenly (lamb neck, spuds, swede, herbs, stock, flour, yay).

No need for veggie haggis these days! But I recall feeding you some back in the Dale building (along with killer tiramisu with shards of plastic in it). Think it came from Palms, in a tin.

I'm not sure anything is the same after reading DWJ. I'm swearing off her for the time being: she makes me feel inadequate. :)