Golly, sorry I haven’t written in so long, but I’ve just been doing so much exciting stuff!!

Or not. Actually, I’ve been holed up in my house–mostly–trying to write this guidebook. Which really means wandering around the house, stacking the newspapers, picking my calluses, washing the dishes…

It would be great if all my procrastinating could be channeled into cooking, but I don’t have much to work with right now. The cupboard is bare. Going to the grocery store requires leaving the house, and anything in that category is blatant procrastination and is therefore banned.

So I’m slowly eating my way through the pantry. Last week I made some lentil soup, based on a recipe in the Iraqi cookbook that I ordered a little while ago. The recipe calls for browning onions in oil with flour in a separate pan, then stirring all that into the soup–good idea, as it thickened the soup up nicely and added a more distinctive flavor.

That cookbook is excellent, but a little overwhelming in the same way that Yamuna Devi’s gigantic vegetarian Indian cookbook, Lord Krishna’s cuisine, is overwhelming: Everything is so delicious and exciting that it’s impossible to choose one recipe. To this day, I’ve only ever cooked things that Livia, who first bought the book, told me were good. But there’s no one to help me out with the Iraqi cookbook, so I just flip through it and read all the nifty excerpts from medieval texts and random bits of Akkadian etymology.

After I ate the lentils, I moved on to the chickpeas. Now there’s some painfully garlicky hummus in the fridge, with a slight crunch to it–I think those chickpeas were about four years old, and they’ll just never soften up again.

Fortunately, Tamara had dinner at her place on Sunday, so I had a square meal with vegetables and everything, and I even got some leftovers.

But right now, I think I might go out and buy an iced coffee. Because surely the coffee will make me work better and faster. And I’ve already consumed every other source of caffeine in the house.

Waaaait–I just thought of some bags of mate I have stashed in the top cupboard, next to the foofy herbal teas that no one drinks. Now I have no excuse to go out. Crap. Back to the guidebook…