Rainy Sunday

The mosquitoes are like kamikazees that dive bomb you the minute you set food outside. I had to pick some cilantro and parsley today. Swat! Pluck! Swat!

Both the cilantro and the dill reseeded themselves from last year in spite of the weird January where everything thought, "hey, Spring!" and jumped up only to find "Yech, Winter!" The basil is unhappy with all the wet weather. What can I say?

Another South Beach Diet Salad, today, shrimp this time. Yum! Those ounces are just melting away. Tomorrow I will bake bread. The food processor recipe which any fool can succeed at.

Lazy Sundays are nice. Read the paper. We watched the ladies tennis and ladies golf matches and I did a bit of editing on Festival Madness.

I miss Ms. Snark and Kipper Yap and all the gin. Speaking of which, I've noticed my character is pounding down the drinks with frightening regularly. Of course she has some problems that are vexing her. Yes indeed.

The house drink around here of late is something called the Bardstown Sling, a combo of bourbon, Triple Sec, lime juice and a soupcon of cranberry juice. Quite tasty, actually, and packs a whallop.

Another Sopranos in a couple hours. I confess to a feeling of dread, because how can things end well? Can there be redemption? Don't think so. There's been a lot of buzz about the final episodes. Someone mentioned that just like in life, the characters try to change, succeed for a while, and then backslide. The actors are brilliant. I love the opening music and finally downloaded it.

Still reading Proust and Three Trapped Tigers, but I finished the Afghan book, The Damascened Blade, which actually had a pretty good ending with a nice surprise. Surprises are good. There was a wonderful sentence in the NY Times Book Review about an author's transparency in setting up a story which I will dig out and quote. That was the gripe I had with the Cloverly book. I won't be writing my Afghanistan thriller, in spite of the cool plot, unless I find a very knowledgeable co-author. Thrillers R not us. Still plugging away at The War Lord's Son and liking it when the son is on stage, so to speak.

All over Germany in the summer, restaurants and kondittori's are serving up a lucious red dessert called "Rote Grutze," or red groats. Usually it has the full fruit in it, but it can be geleed. Contains raspberries, strawberries and red currants. Delicious. Red currants here are hard to find and expensive, so I have been experimenting on what we now call "Americanische Rote Grutze." In addition to raspberries and strawberries, I've used cranberries and today some rhubarb to delicious effect. The sweet young thing at the checkout counter didn't know rhubarb from nothin', but the old guy bagging groceries sure did. He assumed I was going to make a strawberry/rhubarb pie which I would have done were we not in diet mode.

I've going into the kitchen to serve it up. In a nice crystal bowl with dollops of (light) cream.

Grapeshot, who is slurping it down instead of sucking it up.