Yesterday I felt inspired to clean the kitchen. As always, I had a PLAN and it was to start at the top and work my way down. Seems very reasonable and easy to know where I left off if (when) I needed to attend to my home-from-school-for-snow-day children. In order to clean the top of my fridge and get to the hidden mystery cupboard up there, I had to clear away cookbooks. Well, I might as well go through them and purge what I don't need (my friends who actually cook from real recipes are stifling giggles). Got a stool, started sorting cookbooks - a couple are purely for decoration so I set them in one pile; a couple I've never cracked open and their presence gives me guilt so they go in a pile of giveaway stuff. So far, so anal. Here is one called Love in a Lunch Box. I bought this when I worked at Barnes & Noble and the author came for a signing. Nope, no kids then - I'm not sure what I was thinking other than "Someday I will have children and they will have lunch boxes and I will surely want to put love in them." So this book has lived with me, quietly, for twelve years. Moved with me twice. I should look through it, now that I do have children with lunch boxes that I might need to put love in. Down I come from the stool, flipping through the pages. Writing cute notes, putting stickers on wrappers, cutting sandwiches into hearts and stars, blah blah blech. I've heard all these charming tricks and tried a couple, before I started throwing together lunches as the bus rounded the corner in front of our house - GO GO GO! Moving on - nutrition tips, "Make hummus fun!" Nah. I think the book was actually magnetically listing toward the donation pile on its own when I spied a recipe for Blueberry Orange Muffins. We have blueberries...And extra oranges that the kids think are pretty but won't eat because of the seeds and the white stuff and they're hard to peel and oh, we don't really like them. I must make these muffins. Right now! Stool in the middle of my pocket-sized kitchen, dazed & confused cookbooks strewn on the countertops, kids whining and wailing about playing with friends and having magic shows (more on that next), but as God is my witness, I will make muffins.
And they were good.
Today, I'll clean the litterbox.
