“I do my best thinking when I am peeling carrots, grating zucchini, or rolling out biscuit dough.”  So says Michael Lee West, author of Consuming Passions: a Food-Obsessed Life (who is, it turns out, a woman), as if in response to my earlier question of are we really capable of constructive thinking while cooking, or is that just something those crazy writers dream up?  But she is one of those crazy writers, and she admits to using cooking as an antidote to writer’s block.  So there.

I checked out this book because my latest favorite simple chocolate cake recipe apparently came from it (although I haven’t gotten that far yet) and I’ve succumbed to the danger of leaving library books lying around rather than shelving them promptly when I walk in the door – I can’t resist picking them up.  If it were safely on the shelve next to my eight other library books to read, everything would be okay and I might even be getting something done right now.  Instead I read a chapter, drank some tea, wanted to write down that quote, and got distracted looking up how my grocery store rates its fish.  They have a convenient color coded chart, and all seafood in the store has a color coded price tag, so you don’t have to remember whether or not you should be eating that farmed sturgeon caviar (the answer, apparently, is yes, although I doubt I ever will).  Spiffy, no?

Today will be another tomato sauce day – there’s a bowlful on the table, and with the exception of sliced on sandwiches, we’re not big raw tomato eaters in these parts.

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