A looooong weekend

So I survived nannying - and so did the children. For a long weekend at the beginning of Spring I don't think any of us appreciated the pouring rain, the gale force winds or the hail but god has mercy - and these days it's called Nintendo.

By the time I got home on Monday afternoon it was all I could do to roll cadaverously off the sofa (freshly built) to eat the delicious meal LB had cooked for me, a mouth-watering Thai beef salad no less. It marked the end of an interesting couple of days, culinarily speaking. The long weekend was all about toasted sandwiches, burritos and packet cake mixes... an insulting low after Friday's personal triumph in the kitchen.

Cake aside, yes I really did bake one, I was mindlessly flicking through Bill Granger's Sydney Food cook book when I struck upon a ricotta and tomato tart and, perhaps deluded after all the Masterchef that LB has been making me watch lately, decided that making puff pastry from scratch couldn't be that hard...

And it wasn't.

Granted it was messy and absolutely it was more cal than low but honestly, there was puff to my pastry AND, more importantlyslashsurprisingly, it was delicious. My eyes were like saucers at the shock and even now I catch myself saying quietly to no-one in particular, "I made puff pastry. From scratch. And it was delicious." Or rather... "And it was delicious??" with that slightly raised intonation that suggests shock and utter disbelief. So to make packet mix brownies 12 hours later was a rather depressing come down as you might imagine, irrespective of their compelling edibility (ed: is that even a word?). My new theory is, if you're going to O.D. on calories, you have to at least earn the right to do so by making the bloody thing yourself. This theory obviously applies to everything except Snickers bars.

Not much else happened over the weekend and yesterday I was at the gallery before heading to the bar. A long day by anyone's definition but I didn't really mind. LB told me I should get a 9 to 5 job and I told him it wasn't the 9 to 5 I objected to so much as the Monday to Friday. Give me crap wages and long shifts any day as long as I can have the mornings to myself to sit on the sofa and write.

Coming home from the bar around 12.30, I was walking down the street when I spotted a fox, tearing through the rubbish bags in search of food. I stopped and tried to take a photo of him and as I did he stopped at looked at me, as if to say, rather indignantly, do you mind? But my crap camera failed to catch him in the darkness and so all I ended up with was this:

Best not give up any one of my day jobs just yet...