Cooking and reading about cooking and writing about cooking is not the sum total of my life these days.

It’s a gigantic part of it, of course (although after reading through my favorite food blogs I find my inner voice saying, Shut up about your excitement over learning to boil water already, would you?). But it’s not everything.

I have been writing. Not quite at the NaNo pace, but at the current moment that pace would be pretty hard to keep up. I was stuck for quite a long while on one particular plot point—no matter what I did or how I cajoled, my main character wouldn’t do what I told her to. I got nowhere with my rewrite for, dare I say it, weeks until last week I did an “interview” with my main character, me typing questions, “hearing” her responses. It was spectacular fun and reminded me of that strange way in which writing is an intersection of channeling and psychosis. Whatever. That interview (which lasted three hours) really sparked me to get going again.

Yesterday, in fact, during my Sunday morning writing session (during the weekends pretty much the only time I go and write is Sunday morning—Darin hangs with the kids, plays a little World of Warcraft, I go and caffeinate up and write) I had a spectacularly productive writing session, writing a scene that didn’t even occur during the first draft. I’m still hung up on the same plot point I was before, so I skipped ahead to write something else and found myself eleven pages into it. It felt really, really good to do that writing.

I don’t know why writing has that effect. I know that books and books have been written on the subject, but it’s still the closest thing I have to a mystical or spiritual experience. I see, hear, smell, feel something in my mind, and I write it down on paper to share the occasion with someone else.

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I am also attempting to get back into the swing of things at the gym. I’ve made it at least three days a week since the beginning of the year. My attendance gets iffy when Simon gets a head cold (and boy, he seems to have one at least once a month), because I can’t bring him to the Kids Corner when he has a runny nose. (Hey, I wouldn’t want anyone else bringing their kid in if they had a runny nose; fair is fair.)

When Darin came home I said, “I have to stop cooking on Mondays. Or at least cooking anything complicated. Or anything new. I have the kids all day. I’m a wreck by dinner time.”

“What happened?”

“I made a chicken pot pie. And it’s all going wrong! Look at it!”

He looked in the oven. “It looks fine.”

“But it’s not browning! It says it’s supposed to be golden brown! Something probably went wrong with the dough.”

“Okay, you’re having free-floating anxiety. Just calm down.”

“I forgot the mushrooms! Chicken pot pie is all about the mushrooms and I forgot them.”

“It’ll be okay.”

Later, after eating:

Darin: “You know, with mushrooms this would have been perfect, but this was pretty good. In fact, this is the best thing you’ve made recently.”

Diane began to hit her head against the table. “You can’t say that to someone with free-floating anxiety!”

“Because now you’re wondering what was wrong with all the other meals you’ve made? Everything is fine, hon.”

“I’m only making pasta on Mondays.”

“If that’s what you want to do, that would be fine. But this was great.”

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I used the chicken pot pie recipe from The Best Recipe. And I have to tell you: I am a die-hard follow-the-recipe-exactly kind of girl, and something always goes wrong with these recipes. This time it was the pastry topping. Add the flour and salt to the food processor, it said. Okay.

Add the butter, cover them in flour, pulse so many times, and it should look like such-and-so.

Huh. Mine still looks kinda just like flour.

Add the shortening. Pulse in. You should get something that looks like yellow cornmeal.

Hmmm. Mine kinda looks like flour with a few lumps here and there. Food processor works okay, I’m pretty sure of that.

Add 3 tablespoons of water to the dough. Add one more tablespoon if and only if the dough isn’t hanging together.

Is adding 2 to 3 more tablespoons okay? Because that’s what it’s taking me to get mine to hang tough.

In the end it turned out okay—tasty, but the kids wouldn’t eat it (of course). Darin was quite pleased. The pastry topping was tasty. But man…The Best Recipe never runs smoothly for me.

Errrr, I accidentally bought some self-rising flour instead of standard, run of the mill flour.

1. What in the heck is “self-rising flour”?
2. Does anyone have any recipes that call for self-rising flour, so I can see if I can rid of this stuff?

Update: Aha. Well, with more judicious Googling than I had been doing, I found the following: “1 cup of self-rising flour contains 1 teaspoon of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. It can be used instead of all-purpose flour in a recipe by reducing the salt and baking powder according to these proportions.”

So to use self-rising flour in recipes asking for flour, baking powder, and salt will require math. Well, okay.

Earlier this week I had open the Complete Cooking Light Cookbook and Simon said, “I wanna make that.” He was pointing to the blueberry pound cake on the cover.

“Sure!” I said. “We’ll make it on the weekend, for breakfast.”

This morning Sophia shook me awake and said, “It’s time to make the cake, Mom.” (I can see what the rest of my life is going to be like. Mistake #1: teaching her what “the weekend” is.)

So we mixed and shook and folded and baked, and after baking we had this:

My intrepid assistant attempts to steal the cake

The cake, unfrosted

The cake, frosted

The inside of said cake

This is, in fact, the first time I have ever made a cake from scratch. Darin made his own birthday cake from scratch, and my contribution to that effort was to clean up, both work area and plate. I have made cakes from boxes. I have never made a cake from scratch before. I didn’t even know you could while growing up.

Blueberry Pound Cake

From: The Complete Cooking Light Cookbook

2 cups granulated sugar
1/3 cup butter or stick margarine, softened
1/2 cup (4 ounces) 1/3-less-fat cream cheese, softened
3 large eggs
1 large egg white
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 cups all-purpose flour, divided
2 cups fresh or frozen blueberries
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
8 oz. lemon low-fat yogurt (1 carton)
Cooking spray
1/2 cup sifted powdered sugar
4 teaspoons lemon juice

1. Preheat oven to 350F.

2. Beat granulated sugar, butter, and cream cheese at medium speed of a mixer until well-blended (about 5 minutes). Add eggs and egg white, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in vanilla.

3. Light spoon flour into dry measuring cups and level with a knife. Combine 2 tablespoons flour and blueberries in a small bowl; toss to coat. Combine remaining flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add flour mixture to sugar mixture alternately with yogurt, beginning and ending with flour mixture. Fold in blueberry mixture.

4. Pour batter into a 10-inch tube pan (angel food cake pan) coated with cooking spray. Sharply tap pan once on counter to remove air bubbles. Bake at 350F for 1 hour and 15 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean.

5. Cook cake in pan 10 minutes on a wire rack; remove cake from sides of pan. Cool 15 additional minutes on wire rack; remove cake from bottom of pan. Combine powdered sugar and lemon juice in a small bowl; drizzle over warm cake. Cut into slices using a serrated knife. Yield: 16 servings.

Calories 288 (22% from fat); Fat 6.9g (sat 3.9g, mono 2g, poly 0.4g); Protein 5 g; Carb 52.2g; Fiber 1 g; Chol 56mg; Iron 1.2mg; Sodium 212mg; Calc 45mg

Everyone pronounced themselves quite happy with the cake and all pieces were eaten. (Well, all the pieces that were served, of course. And 16 slices? Hahahahaha. I don’t think so.)

Problems I had with this cake: As you can tell, the crust of the cake is quite a bit darker and harder than the crust of the cake in the book. Overcooked? Too near the heating element? Bundt pan instead of angel food pan? It was still tasty. I just wanna know why mine wasn’t golden brown.

I also made a)too much icing with b)the wrong type of sugar. I used the extrafine granulated instead of powdered, which made the icing grainy instead of smooth.

Eric Alterman speaks for me:

What is one to say about today?To the horror of its well-wishers across the world, the United States—once the “last, best hope of mankind”—is re-inaugurating the worst president in its history; one who has exploited an attack, the success of which its own incompetence helped enable, in order to execute an extremist agenda that is killing thousands, costing trillions and leaving all of us far more insecure than when it began. Before November 2, we could argue it was all a mistake; the guy ran as a “compassionate conservative,” misrepresented his record, Nader screwed everything up, and we actually voted for Gore anyway. It took the Republicans on the Supreme Court—two of whom were appointed by the guy’s dad—to stick the country with this regime filled with ideological fanatics and corrupt incompetents. Now, what are we to say? Fifty-nine million members of our nation do not mind that we were deliberately misled into a war that has drained our blood and treasure to create nothing but hatred and chaos; and that the very people who were at fault have been rewarded and promoted, encouraged to look for new targets to spread their hubristic malevolence. It defies all logic and truthfully, my ability to explain or even fully understand it. One thing is for certain: Based on an virtually unanimous unwillingness to consider its past mistakes and learn from them, things are going to get far, far worse before they get better. Thousands more will die. (Twenty six yesterday.) Trillions more will be squandered. Millions more will grow to hate and revile the name of the United States of America and prepare to attack us in ways for which our government is resolutely unwilling to prepare. Avoidable catastrophe awaits this nation and its victims during the next four years as we will undoubtedly reap what we have sown.

One thing’s for certain, none of this would have been possible without the enthusiastic cooperation—if not cheerleading—of the nation’s mainstream media. Thomas Friedman, considered a liberal opponent of the Bush administration who nevertheless advocated for its mendacious arguments vis-a-vis Iraq and then explicitly excused its willingness to lie because, after all, Hussein was a vicious dictator, cannot help but recognize the damage the administration has done to the nation’s good name the world over. Still, he once again chooses to empower its worst instincts vis-a-vis yet another abominable adventure in Iran by finding what? A single Oxford student in Paris. And pronouncing on the basis of this intrepid bit of investigative reporting that Iran is a “Red state” by extension, would welcome an American invasion of the type outlined by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker. Four years from now we will be assessing the fallout from that catastrophe undoubtedly in dead Americans, Iranians and additional hatred—and terrorists—bred the world over. God Bless America. We are going to need all the help we can get.