cooking cooking, nothing by halves

Today has been like some kind of self-sufficiency nut/cooking fiend orgy. I spent the early hours being Mistress Tomato. It was hot work so i ended up topless as I sweated over taming those insubordinate tomatoes to the tune of my stakes. I tried to be stern but it's hard when they insist on looking so cute in their array of shapes and colours, round orange, mini deep red, and yellow pear shaped, not the mention the stripy ones. Then I gathered up the windfall apples and picked a big bag of soft ripe figs.

I was a bit unimaginative with the apples and stewed them to put on my muesli in the mornings. But the figs, i made into jam, which is a spiced(gingery) and delicious. Then, even though it's sweltering today and i really should have gone and sat under a tree with Michael Ingatieff (well, his book actually), I decided today would be a good day to bake sweet treats. I cooked a container of the blackberries from out the back into a semolina cake and grated up a couple of the innumerable zucchinis that were starting to fill the vegie drawer into a moist banana cake. I'm looking forward to taking that one for lunch actually, for when Michael and I really do get down to business.

Reading whole books with which i fundamentally disagree is a new thing for me. I used to try to keep it to journal articles and sometimes i still get confused reading Mr Michael's 'The Lesser Evil' where be basically posits that it's ok for a democracy to temporarily suspend civil and maybe human rights (it's a blurry line) in order to protect the majority from the perils of terrorism. I get confused because Mr Michael doesn't even reference the position that I'm trying to build. He identifies two positions- the civil libertarian, the one who won't tolerate extreme policing/torture/etc because it betrays the very spirit of democracy the govt. purports to protect, then there's the majority, for whom temporary suspension of normal liberties is palatable in the face of genuine and urgent threats to 'our way of life.' This juxtaposition of the ethical stickler versus the realist fails entirely to engage with the possibility that there might be alternative ideological theories and/or ethical codes that object to government tyranny, let alone that most people are not in any kind of position to gauge what genuine 'threat' actually exists.

boring Michael, no wonder I chose to swelter in my kitchen today.