Cooking the book

Right, so like, I'm totes going to do this this time. I figured out that what all you lovely readers want, out there in reader-land with your glasses and your flat shoes and your hair all tied back in buns like sexy librarians but without the sexy. You want a blogger (bloggette maybe? Or bloggess?) who's going to take a major cookbook and cook their way through it, one recipe at a time, telling you all about the trials and tribulations along the way. That's like, so radical. I remember when I first starting watching Sex and the City, that's just so the kind of thing that the ugly girl would have done. Oh, get me! What would SJP say!!
But then I totes had a look around on the intertubes thingy, and there's so many people already doing it! And they've picked such weird books too, like they've gone for books that make food that only poor people eat, or books that only cook things that aren't food. There's this one blog where the poor women spent four and a half-day using a hair-dryer on this paste of olives and anchovies that she'd made and then foamed using hydrogen gas that blew part of her kitchen up! At the end of it she keeled over dead with exhaustion and now her husband's continuing the blog in her memory, only he can't cook properly and doesn't know how to use a knife, so his spelling's getting worse and worse and he keeps chopping fingers off and he's worried he's going to lose his job as a concert pianist soon, and... wait! This is my blog, not his-hers! They can go and buy google ads to bring people to their pages just like all the rest of the poor-people.
So I needed something different, something that would stand my blog out in exactly the way I stand out in a nightclub, or SJP stands out in every scene she's in in SATC. So I figured I'd pick someone else's blog and cook everything they do, and then explain how they got it all wrong. Darryl says it's a meta-commentary and a sad reflection of the parroting parity of modern life, but I think he'd been eating the cleaner's brownies when he said that, and she makes them with things I don't think are ingredients. Bless her, she thinks she's Mexican too.
So I had a look around and I found this woman who says she's on television and cooks there, and she does all this "semi-homemade" cooking which is like where she buys the stuff from the supermarket (oh my god!! Who goes to a supermarket themselves?! That's what Rosalita, the cleaner is for, when the catering company have underdelivered!!) and then hides all the packaging. And I'm like, I can totally do this.
So, on her blog she makes this "semi-homemade" beans on toast, and this sounded like a good place to start. I got my coat, got my servant-beating stick, and headed to F&M.
"Make beans on toast!" I said imperiously to the girl behind the counter, who looked at me like she was going to answer back. I thought quickly, what would SJP do? So I smacked her with the servant-beating stick and repeated my demand.
It turns out that they don't do that on the shop-floor, so they took me into the manager's office and I told the security guard to jump to it and get it done. He's left to go and do that, and I'm taking this opportunity to write all this up for you. You lucky, lucky, unsexy librarian readers you!

The kiss of Boreas

It's so cold. I haven't felt a cold like this before, it strikes straight down from the top of my head, through my spine, and plunges on into my feet. My head feels strangely light, almost detached from the rest of me, and there's a kind of pain in my head, but I'm not sure that my head is really mine anymore. I might have borrowed it, I might have picked the wrong head up off the hatrack (the headrack?) when I left the house this morning. Could this be my wife's head? Is this why it doesn't seem to fit properly?

I'm starting to shiver, and I know that I mustn't. I'm wearing a shirt, and a jumper and a coat that's thicker than my youngest son, and he's pretty dim. Burned out lightbulbs seem to shine when placed next to him. But the shakes are becoming uncontrollable. no matter how hard I tense, my muscles vibrate like the modes of a superstring and I worry that my gravitational attraction will increase and draw in everyone around me, to point and to jeer as I fall to floor in numb, unconscious agony.

I can feel my head starting to melt now, and there's a strange light shining in my eyes, migraining my brain, and I can taste vanilla in my mouth but I'm sure it should be blood. I stumble, and my legs give out, the icy chill that penetrates me like an impaling icicle from my head to the floor wins over, and Boreas cheers somewhere behind the roar of blood in my ears.

"Are you ok, sir?" asks a titan standing over me, and even though he's in silhouette I know that this is the end. He reaches a hand down on the end of a very long arm, and lifts off my hat, and the frozen turkey and half-melted tub of ice-cream slide from my scalp to the floor. I make no effort to move, knowing that when he picks me up, the frozen sausages strapped around my waist will fall free as well. Security have me, and no doubt I'll do time in the cooler.