Every once in a while, the book I’m writing decides to come very alive, walk into my life, and reverse our roles.\u00a0\u00a0 It happened with the first Paks books (especially in one instance, when Paks took over and handled a situation for me.\u00a0 I wish she’d done that more often!)<\/p>\n
Tonight it happened with cooking.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’m a pretty good cook, though not reliable (I have trouble making anything twice the same way, other than a fried egg.)\u00a0 But today, something about the weather (warm but not hot, and breezy), and the smell of the Madame Alfred Carriere rose mixed with the smell of bluebonnet, and the burgeoning garden\u00a0 with the pea vines at the top of the wires and waving above them, covered with white pea flowers…that and the new set of books, which have had gardens in them more than the Deed did….sent me over the edge.<\/p>\n
We have fresh peas.\u00a0 We eat them off the vine this early in the season.\u00a0\u00a0 Some have edible pods and some don’t, really (the peas are sweet and wonderful, though–just pop the seam and eat ’em like candies.) \u00a0\u00a0 We have overgrown radishes (originally to mark the carrot rows) and salad greens now at least a foot tall and green onions.\u00a0 I had a bag of baby carrots in the fridge (our carrots still have strings for roots–no carrots yet)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I had some lamb left over from Friday night’s roast along with its gravy.\u00a0 At the local store (small but good) I found a green pepper, a box of button mushrooms, and a can of sliced new potatoes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I already had a can of Ro-Tel diced tomatoes and green chilis with cilantro and lime juice.\u00a0\u00a0 The garden harvesting part felt very much Paksworld–peas to shell, a few big leaves of arugula, some parsley, those big radishes, a few green onions, (test the carrots…no, not yet; admire the emerging potato plants.)\u00a0\u00a0 Then came the slicing and dicing, the chopping, the sauteeing of mushrooms, the mixing of ingredients in a pot with a jar of brown gravy (I am so far from the world’s best gravy maker that I regularly use commercial gravy.)\u00a0\u00a0 True, nobody on Paksworld has the pots I have (but most would have an equivalent to the old cast-iron frying pan\/skillet<\/p>\n
Lined a deep oval casserole with pie pastry,\u00a0 poured the contents of the pot into it, topped it with more pie pastry, and shoved it in the oven until the crust was the perfect color.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And when it came out, and I broke the crust and looked…I thought, “This is a proper White Dragon Inn hot-pot, this is.”\u00a0\u00a0 Colorful, smelled great, and tasted even better.\u00a0\u00a0 (Yes, I’m bragging.\u00a0 Though of course at the Dragon they’d have had redroots in it instead of potatoes, unless there’s some southern root vegetable that’s pale instead.\u00a0 There could be.\u00a0\u00a0 But probably not, unless it’s a white radish…I used to use white radishes in soups.)<\/p>\n
It’s a good sign when the book starts intruding into my life…didn’t get many words out today (partly because necessary yard work was going on outside the window with mower and weeder\/edger) but the book’s nudging me to put those huge radishes in the mix, and use the arugula as well, means it’s beginning to flex its muscles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every once in a while, the book I’m writing decides to come very alive, walk into my life, and reverse our roles.\u00a0\u00a0 It happened with the first Paks books (especially in one instance, when Paks took over and handled a situation for me.\u00a0 I wish she’d done that more often!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[112],"class_list":["post-1531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1531"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1532,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531\/revisions\/1532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}