Sunday Summary

Life
Our old oven is on its way out, so we spent some time this week looking for a replacement. The variety of ovens available is bewilderingly large, and we found ourselves beguiled by the high-end space-age ovens. They can even be turned on while you're still at work by sending an email to the oven! As the price is sky-high we reluctantly abandoned these awesome machines; but there's still a lot to choose from. It will be after Christmas before we get an oven so I hope the old one keeps going - or we might be outside barbequing the turkey on Christmas Day :)

Emily Casey and her post about cooking a new reicipe (eggs benedict) inspired me to make something different, so I tried panna cotta. I first had this desert a couple of years ago while on holiday. It was gloriously creamy, with a subtle flavour of vanilla, served with raspberries.
My first effort was a disaster. Too much gelatin set the cream so solid it could have bounced off the floor! The second try gave a soft just-set cream, and the raspberry sauce was a tangy foil for the richness of the pannacotta. It really cheered me up :)

Writing
I'm half-way through Lesson 19 and feel excited by the way this lesson increases awareness of words. What a difference changing a single word can make to the meaning of a sentence or phrase. It's slow going but satisfying, and exciting.

Mystery in Morocco, my first and still seriously flawed novel, has been in my thoughts again. Yay! I spent a couple of hours working through and identifying what the problems were. Amazingly I've solved two serious plot problems. Even more amazingly, I achieved this by making only small changes to the plot! There are still some serious problems to work on but I feel encouraged by finding solutions which won't require major rewriting.