We have the best bottle shop near us. Great service; helpful staff who Know What They Are On About; affordable, drinkable drinkies. I only just discovered however that they have a website, Doc's Liquor, and they deliver for free! But that's not all, they also have some great looking food and cocktail recipes.
Even one for

Shake well with cracked ice. Strain into cocktail glass.

I invented a soup last night and it was so darn tasty I thought I'd share the recipe. I call it White Soup for reasons which will soon become apparent.

Ingredients:
sploosh of olive oil
1 onion, chopped
1 leek, chopped
1 parsnip, peeled and chopped
2 potatoes, peeled and chopped (do we see a pattern here?)
1 1/2 cups cauliflower florets (about 1/4 of a head should do it)
enough veggie stock (well, I dunno - water to just cover vegies then throw a cube in!)
salt and pepper to taste (to taste nice to you - actually if you want to be a real smarty pants you can use white pepper, otherwise you'll just have to accept the little black fly specks in your pristine soup)

Method:
Gently fry onion and leek in oil until softened. Throw everything else in and bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer until all the vegetables are mushy - about 25 minutes. Blend or beat the crap out of the soup with a potato masher. Some grated parmesan on top might be nice if you're into that kind of thing. Have lots of buttered toast for dunking.
Serves 2-3 people, depending on how hungry and who wants seconds.

A list of things that frustrate:

There will never be a point where there is no more housework to do.

Our cat has just two neurons and only one of them is firing.

Everyone promised it would be a fairytale wedding, but I saw no poisoned apples, spindles, step-relatives, dwarves, porridge, thorns, beanstalks or sausages on noses.

The word bling.

So the reason that little kids eat Clag is because it tastes exactly like rice cereal. Blecch.

Brief but interesting interview with Madeleine L'Engle. She talks about God (is a shit), The Da Vinci Code (is fun), Harry Potter (nothing underneath) and the movie adaptation of her classic children's book A Wrinkle in Time:

Newsweek: So you've seen the movie?
Madeleine L'Engle: I've glimpsed it.
And did it meet expectations?
Oh, yes. I expected it to be bad, and it is.

Indeed it is.

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Just lost a few thousand words on a story with a deadline at the end of the month. Sure, I wasn't too happy with how it was going, but at least I had words written down to work with. Lesson learnt. Back to the blank page.

Geeze, I like Phillip Pullman. Here in an old essay in the Guardian he writes about the horrible state of literacy education in the UK (and elsewhere too, I'm sure). Not that the kids aren't literate - but that they hate reading and have any real creativity in their writing stifled or drummed out of them. This is apparently from a series of essays. A choice comment from Anne Fine further along in the article is:
"There is no intrinsic reason why a fast first stab at a piece of writing shouldn't be the best it could be," Fine says. "And this is not maths. 'Showing your working' is not a virtue in English."

I saw an interview on the ABC the other day with philosopher John Armstrong and went in search of his book The Secret Power of Beauty which in turn led me to previously unknown bookstore Booktopia. $6.50 postage up to 20 books anywhere in Australia. Oh. Dear. But no Wishlist function :-(

Yes, I am now an Ebay seller. Please, buy my stuff! Bid! Bid! Bid!

(I just think Chorleywood is a neat word.)
The Guardian has an edited extract from Felicity Lawrence's book Not on the Label. It's a fascinating read, this section on bread, in much the same way as Ruth Ozecki's My Year of Meat was good for cattle farmers.
Now I want to know what ingredients are really in the bread pre-mix I'm currently using to bake a loaf of wholemeal. Or do I? (via Bookslut)