Many delicious, uber-ripe green friends are now crowding my fridge. A mix of Shepherd and Hass, if you’re interested. I’m not even sure how I’m going to use them all up, since I have enough to make the phrase “I’m sick of guacamole” more than an hilarious fib. While I’m tempted just to strip off and take photos of myself in a bathtub full of them, smirking at the camera in a salacious display of squishy green wealth, I’m going to take a more practical approach and think about my options.

Day one: avocado on toast, with tomato slices. An oldie but a goodie, and with good reason.

Day two: avocado and salad rice paper rolls with carrot/ginger/miso dressing (adapted from Happyolks).

Now from here, I’m looking for inspiration. Help me foodgawker!

There is an arresting number of sweet avocado dishes out there. I’m not at a stage where I’m interested in avocado ice cream or avocado smoothies — I can see where people are coming from with avocado as a butter substitutes in cakes. I could totally get behind that if I hadn’t gone haywire on the chocolate cake front recently, leaving me with a strong sense of antipathy towards that whole food group for the time being. So let’s rule out avocado cakes, shall we?

Ohh, has anyone got some butcher’s paper and textas? I feel a brainstorm coming on!

• Avocado, tomato and lettuce rice paper rolls!
• Avocado, boiled egg and pesto tossed salad!
• Avocado, preserved lemon and chilli sushi rolls!
• Avocado and banana quesadillas!
• Avocado…on toast again!

I’ve run out of butcher’s paper. I’ll be honest: I don’t really feel like I want to get too inventive here. I love avocados and I don’t think the challenge here is to find ways of keeping them interesting. The challenge here is to eat them all before they go funky. I think a ginormous bowl of guacamole and friends over for burritos is going to be the best option. It combines my love of guacamole with my friends! What more could I want? (Spicy beans, that’s what.)

No, it's kinda good, you can still see them...

Stewed quinces! Yay!

I know it's a bit blurry, but I think they can still see the cloves and stuff...

Peel, core and slice quinces; mix a spoonful of sugar and pour about two cups of water over. Add whatever spices plough your paddock: I used cinnamon, allspice, cloves, ginger and nutmeg (in descending order of quantity). Boil until the quinces become lush and soft and start to fall apart. You might need more sugar, you might need a dash of lemon: taste it and see. We’re not formal here.

I admit it's getting a little hard to tell now.

Cameras don’t like steam.

Quinces: you'll have to take my word for it.

This blurry tale is the last of this year’s quinces. Quinces are done, figs are done. I declare autumn: iCal that shit.

Under the croft.

After a long, stubborn while, it clicked: running was awesome, bounding away like a bike someone’s ghostied down a hill. And then pain in my leg that, mid-run, had me blubbing by the creek and pretending I wasn’t. That right there was a stress fracture in the femural neck of my right leg. I’ve got Addison’s Disease and after about two years of massively overtreating with cortisone, my bones were like brittle meringue. Hence: stress fracture. (Science: sometimes it’s mean.)

Over the croft.

After the hip-pin operation last year, no walking for six weeks. After twelve weeks, my ankle swelled up and I was confined to barracks once again. My last run was in the last week of July last year.

Fittin'

It’s taken my ankle ages: I mend slow and there’s still some clickety-stiff in there. I’ll wait a bit more, but I tried on my new runners last week and hot dog, I can’t wait. They’re so light and comfortable…I’m infatuated with them. It’s so close I can taste it.

Light and sprightly.

Things I learned from all this:

• If it hurts, see your doctor. Don’t keep waddling about like a fat gouty swan for a month.
• If you try and run when your body isn’t ready, it’s gonna smack you down and rightly so.
• If you go for a run too early, it’s not going to be the springy, bounding high you remember. It’s going to be waddly and sore, it’ll set you back and make you cry. Don’t bother and just go for another walk.

In a couple of weeks’ time, if you see something red and hunched heaving along in pretty shoes, that might be me. Don’t make eye contact.

Don't be fooled: that is a razor-sharp nose.

And then last night one of the neighbours had some friends over for dinner: their departure, after this dog’s bedtime, outraged her so that she barked every thirty minutes or so all night. Not a long spree of barking, just an offended “brouf, brff, brff”, so that M and I were regularly updated on her annoyance level.

So: slightly sleep-deprived and in the company of an indignant hound, today I’ve been doing small things. Sometimes food bloggers go all out and make seven-layer meringue tarts with whipped beet filling, presented as a dinky little image of a recipe card and pictures that would make you weep with the futility of your own pathetic attempts. Not me. I made a salad.

Aforementioned salad.

I bought some pretty chillies and then tooled around with the macro setting:

The hotter the chilli, the closer to God.

I put all my weekend things on the couch and took a photo of them:

My life is so awesome.

And then I chilled. I hate being tired: it makes me cranky and sad. Yesterday (while very tired) I tried to figure out why, but didn’t really get anywhere. I did nudge up against the frightening thought that maybe the world is a crueller, colder place than I think, and I exert a lot of energy to keep up the facade so when I’m tired it crumbles CRUMBLES and I see the horror of the world for all it truly is. Totally bogus: my life rocks. But cut my sleep into a smattering of 20-minute chunks and suddenly it’s tears in the supermarket because I don’t know what flaxseeds are, not really. In light of this shift towards the “incredibly poor” end of the judgment spectrum, I’m slowly learning that tired days are days for cutting myself some slack: instead of trying to function normally, or even normal-ish, I give up and sit down. No shame there. You want shame? I got yer shame RIGHT HERE (by which I mean elsewhere).

There’s ratatouille in the oven, slowly baking in anticipation of hungry workers needing nourishment all week. (Me and M, that is, we’re the workers around here, not that bourgeois brown hound you see above.) Not pictured; mug of tea and five crackers with peanut butter and apple slices. There’s knitting and a Helen Garner book and a sooky brown dog. Look upon my couch, ye mighty, and despair.

Then I started seeing other dresses on Ravelry. Oh, man, there’s some sexy stuff out there. I have a serious knitty-boner for this black dress by Gudrun Johnson. (Here’s the Rav link, if you want to lose hours.) Ravelry seems to be groaning with knitters who have made this dress and are deliriously happy with the results. Ludicrously happy. And rightly so: they’re beautiful.

Then I found Sparkle! (Rav link and sorry about the exclamation mark, it’s part of the pattern name), a resurrected Vogue Knitting pattern. I can’t explain my crush on this dress but I LOVE IT. It resembles nothing I own and I can’t imagine picking it off the rack in a shop without anything but a derisive sneer. But it completely arrests me and I want to make it. I think I would probably make it plain. At first.

So the next thing I know I’ve spent an hour comparing reviews, doing maths to calculate yardage, weighing up prices and filling online shopping baskets only to abandon them in online aisles for the online staff to put back on the online shelves (I’m not proud). I haven’t bought yarn in a really long time: a few years ago I took a bit of a look at my stash and thought “yeah, that’s enough to be getting along with”. So I forgot how seductive and slippery online shopping is. One minute you have a clear goal and a budget: the next, you’re dancing on the shredded pieces of your shopping list and singing your credit card number to the tune of “High on the Hill Lived a Lonely Goat Herd”. I got to the checkout and had a “HOW much?” moment, and walked away.

I sat in the yarn cupboard for a while. It started as a “Yeah, this yarn’s okay for now. Maybe when I’ve worked through it I can buy some more yarn…” visit, a sort of gloomy reminder of all my current yarny commitments. Grump grump grump, no new yarn for me. Then I got into the cupboard and it was like meeting old friends. And remembering all the other things I want to knit. YEAH!

I can knit EVERYthing! AHAHAHAHHA! Coffee Tunic! Sexy Vesty! Kilt Hose! Hats! More skirts! Oooh dear. It’s been a while, but I know the Startitis boogie when I feel my heels shuffling. If I didn’t move quick, I’d come to my senses surrounded by half-finished terrible ideas and that would just be annoying. So I grabbed the nearest yarny chum and needles, and cast on the sexy Coffee Tunic in black. That took the edge off. Digging out a couple of socks that are soooo close to being done it’s silly helped, too.

I don’t need to order dress yarn. I don’t need to knit another dress. I am excited about my socks and the Black Coffee tunic. But butter my butt and call me a biscuit if I’m itching to make more dresses.

1. Referring to food as naughty, sinful, etc. This isn’t the Dark Ages: I think we can stop tying values of good and evil to the freaking bread basket. These value judgements are not useful. Fer Christ’s sake — no, scratch that: for the sake of compassion, decency and, oh, hey, let’s go crazy, maturity, let’s chuck the whole “naughty” thing, okay? It’s twee, stupid, and gets me into a big angry foam. What’s that? Why? Well, I’ll tell you.

1. Guilt and eating. We can do with less of that. Unless you’ve been living at the bottom of a compost heap for the past thirty-odd years, you might have heard that there’s a few people out there with food hangups. Even if you dodge full-blown anorexia, orthorexia or bulimia, it’s possible to be pretty disordered about food, following unhealthy patterns of bingeing, self-loathing, self-reproach and jumbled thinking that leaves you frizzy with anxiety about the avocado on your sandwich. “I nearly ate a Milky Bar earlier today, but instead I went to my dubstep-treadmill class, so I’m a better person.” Food shouldn’t be about how valuable you are as a person, unless you’re Lucrezia Borgia. It’s hard enough to chill out in the middle of a crazy-busy working day without somebody looking pointedly at your goddamn morning tea and hinting that you’re a bad, less-than-worthy person because you happen to want a Tim-Freaking-Tam.
2. Identifying something as a sin means another agent is in the position of forgiving. If your eating is a sin, it’s because some external agent has identified it as such. So some external force also has to forgive you. No. No way, José. It is not up to another external agent to tell me whether my eating is right or wrong, morally acceptable or morally condemnable. I don’t require another person to accept what I’m eating. I eat it because I want to eat it and this shouldn’t be an issue. Driving your car to work is, arguably, a greater moral concern than eating a carton of caramels every day, but nobody calls that sinful, indulgent or naughty.
3. Branding particular foods gives people the social sanction to negatively judge you. If you see someone eating a wedge of cake, suddenly you’ve got the right to assume that action is an illuminating example of their weakness and overall poorer social worth as a person because cake is naughty or wicked. Stop that, it isn’t nice. What a rotten way to talk about people.
4. Equating pleasure with sin is weird. Unless you’re a seventeenth-century European Puritan, you’ve probably figured out that pleasure and living ethically are not mutually exclusive. Love playing soccer? Reading a good book? Jet-skiing? Playing with your kids? Why are those pleasures not wicked, sinful, indulgent? And if the foods that are wicked and sinful are so good — and let’s face it, you’re unlikely to ever see a recipe for a Truly Sinful Dressing-Free Cabbage Slaw, are you? — what are the morally acceptable foods? Is it bran? Vitamin supplements altogether removed from food sources?

This is a feminist issue — not exclusively, but significantly. Look at it this way: what kinds of foods are usually marketed and labelled as naughty and sinful? Chocolate, ice cream, cakes, desserts. Less frequently: cheese platters, mashed potatoes, filet mignon, risotto. None of those are particularly scanty on the calorie side of things, but it’s the girly treats that are branded sinful, wicked, etc.

C’mon, food bloggers: referring to something tasty as wicked is just stupid, cheap and immature. You can do better.

2. The expression “you won’t even miss the meat” (usually with an astonished exclamation mark). Here’s a news flash, broadcast on all channels: some people can struggle through life without the meat. Sometimes they even go without meat for, oh, days at a time. Some true freakazoids go years – YEARS – without meat. Somehow they still manage to cobble together a meaningful existence. Sometimes they even seem happy with their food, even take pleasure in cooking and eating. How do you think they manage? I’ll tell you: meat, frankly, is not obligatory. Even most dedicated meat-lover types don’t eat meat with every meal. You don’t see Cocoa Pops with “tasty enough to make up for lack of meat” on the side of the box, do you? Cheese boards don’t come with whispered apologies for the absence of sausages, do they? Fruit salad doesn’t need a “WARNING DOES NOT CONTAIN MEATS” byline on the menu, does it? What about apple pie? Guacamole? Crackers? It’s not just vegetarian foods that cop this kind of talk: you also see “you won’t believe it’s healthy!” on anything not-horrifically bad for you, which suggests that healthy food is never anything but some sort of drear obligation, endless chewing on flavourless chaff. For crying out loud, people, can we lighten up on this sheer amazement that something could not contain pork chops and still somehow manage to be enjoyable?

I have other quibbles, such as the ubiquitousness of bacon and sriracha in every single food-related discussion anywhere on the Internet and the swarm of Oreo-stuffed baked treats that seems to be sweeping across the blog-o-world (seriously: how busy are you that you can’t take the time to eat your cupcake and then your Oreo?) — but honestly, those are quibbles about other people’s preferences and they don’t really impact me, except my slightly increased risk of eye-roll strain. But the other two are seriously bothering me. If you’re writing about food, think about the language you’re using: think about the messages you’re sending and the judgements you’re making. Yeesh.

Good things about summer:

1. Cherries. Just bought a kilo from the farmers’ markets for a stupidly low price. I almost feel like asking the sellers if they know how much cherries are worth, but all the stalls are selling for the same stupidly cheap rate, so clearly the market is just in my favour right now. I don’t want anything more from life than to keep eating cherries. Except…
2. Boysenberries. A friend came over last night and brought a bowl of boysenberries. I am blissed out on boysenberries. Boysenberry swirl was my favourite flavour of anything when I was a kid: ice cream, yoghurt, cake, packet-mix-self-saucing-pudding. They’re even better in person: lush and juicy and oooh hang on a sec I’ll be right back.
3. Late sunsets. Can you say “drinks on the back deck every night”?

That’s all. It’s a short list and it’s mostly food things. I’m clinging to these because summer also means hot hot weather and that’s pretty sucky. Love cold weather; less love for the hot. My house stands up nicely to the heat — there’s fans, an air-conditioner, and dark shades you can pull low over the front windows so not too much light/hot gets in. Surrounded by trees, too, so we get tons of shade (and tons of comments from Negative Nancys about roots getting into the toilet pipes; honestly, whatever happened to decorum?) (where was I?) (oh yes) and tons of plums. But I can’t stay in my house eating plums all summer. Bitch’s gotta work.

So this summer, so far, it’s been cool and damp and I love it. Normally by this time of year I’m bitching about how it’s too hot to sleep: this year, slumber city. Normally I’m living on lettuce and yoghurt and whining about how it’s too hot to cook: today, I’m an all-singing, all-dancing, cherry-powered cooking machine! Bread! Yoghurt! Tabbouleh and couscous! Dolmades! Maybe later dolmades: it’s almost three o’clock and I don’t feel like blanching the vines leaves right now. On the other hand, yeeeeaaah dolamdes!

Hellz, it’s cool enough that I’m thinking of getting out the jumper I cast on at the end of spring and working on it. Then I remembered that these cool weather oases are fleeting, and turned back to the summer dress. I’m on track to finish it by, oh, 2014. It’s a good project, though.

I’m not used to big, chewy, sugar-and-butter-laden, chocolate-chippified snacks. I’m typing at the speed of sound while doing a bidding war on eBay for something I don’t want while Skypeing with my Nan and singing along to Depeche Mode. I’ve never felt so ALIVE!

Oh, now I’m sad. Another cookie, please.

My doubts first began to burp when the pattern insisted that one size would fit all sizes from XS-L. Since I’m working with a limited amount of yarn, this concerned me: it suggested that the pattern was made to stretch enough to fit the L, and then the springiness of the ribs and cable would snug it back to fit the XS as well. So I started making plans: maybe I could start over and do fewer pattern repeats, make it snugger overall…all of which was brought up short, sudden and sharp at the end of the 12cm of 2×2 rib (which, mysteriously, took me for-fucking-ever).

Okay, here’s the thing: you cast on 220 sts, work in 2×2 rib for 12cm. Then in the last round, you increase to 224 sts, so that you’ve got a multiple of 16 ready for the cable pattern. Logic: impeccable. Except. Big fat problem: there is no way you can incorporate those 4 sts evenly into the work without fucking up the ribbing. And if you like your ribbing to flow seamlessly into your cable pattern — and most right-minded, charismatic, lovable champions do — you don’t want to fuck up your ribbing. So…why not just cast on 224 sts to begin with? You got me stumped, and I feel stoopid for not reading the pattern ahead and figuring that bit out already. Still, worth noting for next time.

So, realising there was no way I could smoothly incorporate those 4 sts, and no way I could accept the ribbing-cable-pattern-flow thing being interrupted unnnecessarily, I decided to frog. Plus, it would give me a chance to reevaluate the rest of the pattern, see where I could economise and make the whole thing smaller. You have 7 cable pattern repeats on both the front and back: I like the number 7, and I particularly like odd numbers in pattern repeats. So I thought I could trim down to 5 repeats front and back, but that would drop my stitch count so much as to make me suspicious. I could drop down to 6 repeats front and back, which is a less extreme reduction, but also cancels the pleasing odd number of repeats thing. Feeling a glow of maturity in reaching this compromise (with whom?), I read the pattern again, and decided I would adjust the end/start of round marker so that the waist shaping would always fall between cable repeats: my glow of maturity built to an inferno of grownuppityness!

While I was grabbing the ball winder to begin frogging Green Sprite, on a whim, I also grabbed the yarn scales — and made a crushing discovery. Yup. Not enough yarn, by a long, long margin.

Green Sprite dances away from me like Le Fée Verte, the little minx.

Coffee Tunic is definitely staying in my to-knit queue, however: despite my little dummy-spit about the ribbing-to-cable transition, it’s a bitchin pattern and have commenced rummaging in the stash to see what else I can make it from. But where does that leave Green Sprite? A hazy, teasing flicker in my imagination, that’s where. A tantalising succubus of a design, haunting my soul and also needles.

I love food. So I love reading about food, food blogs, forums, etc. etc. Awesome places to yammer about yeast, waffle over waffles and shoot the shit about shakshouka. But, in keeping with Sturgeon’s Law, 99% of food blogs are crap are not to my taste. People, it’s not enough just to shove a photo of a slice of cheesecake up there and assume that it will distract us all from bad layout, dud writing and uninteresting posts. Allow me to guide you through some basic principles.

I’ve got some rules about what I’ll read. (I didn’t sit down and plan these out or anything, these are just observed patterns of behaviour.) First rule is that you’ve got to be interesting. Time is short. Like my legs. Your skills with a baked ham may be beyond reproach, but if your writing is blabbery and unfocused, you’ll just sound like a nine year old who needs to pee LIKE RIGHT NOW, and you’ve lost me. No recipe is so awesome it’s worth trawling shit sentences.

Rule two! I am uninterested in your cupcakes. You can have photos of dear wee decorated cupcakes that moisten the panties of the masses: I can promise you they will not move my cold, dead heart. It will be as a marble heart carved on the tomb of your ancestors.

Third rule: if at any point your recipe suggests I have to open a packet of cake mix, brownie mix, powdered French Onion Soup mix, or any other prefabricated box of crap, my cursor is already hovering over the back button. Proceed with extreme caution, and know that the presence of two prepackaged ingredients is likely to result in a muttered curse and clearing Chrome’s history .There are exceptions, obviously: peanut butter, sriracha, mayonnaise, jam, Cointreau – I could go on). If you post a recipe that involves pre-grated cheese, you should be prepared for the repercussions. That chill on the back of your neck and those nightmares you’ve been having: yo. You deserved it. (If you post a recipe that involves cheese from a can, then you can expect carbuncles, bunions and plagues of dildos raining on your next garden party. That’s not me, that’s just divine justice, but I wholeheartedly support it.)

Rule the fourth! A sandwich is not a recipe. C’mon, put some effort in.

All of this boils down to one thing, and it holds true across the internet. Don’t waste people’s time. Never forget for a second that your brave little blog post is launched into the heaving, extra-spicy combination laksa of info, stories, pictures and games that is the internet, and your reader could be reading something waaaaay more interesting and informative at the click of a mouse. Give folks a reason to stick around and read your blog instead of, say, foodgawker, Wild Yeast or Rabbit’s Reviews. You’re asking someone to give their precious time and eye juices to you: to make it anything less than 100% worth their while is downright rude. And stupid.