I just realised that by Tuesday I'll have had a perfectly balanced week. In just seven days I'll have seen one of my daughters fitted for her Top Secret wedding gown, I'll have laid my Mum's ashes to rest, and I'll have read a bedtime story to our youngest grandson. A corker of a week, you might say. And as if all that isn't enough I've also started work on two new projects and taken several curtain calls as Domestic Diva. This usually happens when I get a new cookbook.

I recently bought Silvena Rowe's FEASTS, Food for Sharing from Central and Eastern Europe and so far I've made the Veal and Paprika Stew and the Rabbit with Plums - a delicate undertaking, this last, because Mr F is rabbit king in this house, famed for his honey mustard dipping sauce. I sort of pretended I wasn't cooking rabbit until the deed was done and I could slide the plate onto the table. And Mr F conceded that it was pretty damned delicious. So now we have two bunny dishes in our repertoire. There may be a deeply buried element of revenge in this. Of all the pets my children had - cerebrally challenged dogs, Houdini hamsters, dispirited fish - their rabbits were the ones I dreaded most. They may have had cute floppy ears but that hissing and ground thumping was a dead giveway.

But to return to FEASTS, today, a Bulgarian zucchini and feta pie assembled like a coiled up serpent, and coming very soon, smoked salmon potato cakes with garlic cream. First though, I have to pack for 10 days of babysitting.
I guess that'll be my fully-spongeable, EeZee stretch wardrobe in machine-washable shades of soggy rusk and dried sniffle.