Things I have learned today

When in doubt, you should totally do everything in the kitchen wrong-handedly and backwards. This will lead to a wonderful sensation of burning yourself, without any of that disappointment after where you find that you haven't really.

Also, the filling of bundt pans, when pouring a stiff batter from a large bowl: the trick would be to think before starting about how neat it would be if there were some kind of cap - an egg-cup, a shot-glass, anything - over the tube in the middle, to stop that damn batter from dribbling down through the hole and thus onto (as it happens) the burner of the stove.

We call this living and learning, I suspect. I await my next lesson with all the eagerness of a cat on a hot afternoon. That cat over there, f'rexample. Wave to the nice people, Barry... [You are please to imagine Barry waving enthusiastically, and not at all puddling on the duvet with his nose in his tail and his back to the internet entirely, no, not at all...]

Just sayin'

I made a pumpkin gingerbread cathedral:

Sometimes other people are smarter than I am

So a significant portion of my pumpkin gingerbread cathedral may be headed up to the city tomorrow; so I said, "I'd better write out a list of the ingredients, so that Cliff can check off what he's allergic to."

So m'wife said, "Sweetie. The recipe's in that book, right?"

"Um, right...?"

So she took a photo, with her phone. Of the ingredients list. Which would never, never have occurred to me.

This is I think the second-coolest use of a camera phone I have come across in real life. The coolest coolest was when we were in San Diego at the zoo in the rain, and we were on one side of a road and there was an animal in a pen on the other side, and none of us stood a chance of reaching the sign to tell us what it was; and Mark took a photo on his phone from across the road and then magnified it until we could too read the sign. Which again I would never ever have thought of, because. See subject line.