Busy day for better and worse

 I'd decided to make sausages rolls, my mom's way, small, rolled and sealed with pinching, no egg wash. Not the doorsteps with a handle on of the Budget Baker. But he gave me the idea, so there's that. 

Also the apricots were soaked and all plump for the cake.

So I embarked on a marathon of baking. I made my yogurt based pastry, always just crisp enough but not all flakes everywhere. I used this for pasties a while back and liked it a lot.

It's years since I made sausage rolls, decades even. Handsome Son will probably have a stroll down memory lane when he tries them.

The sausage is the very spicy plant-based stuff, no need to do anything to it other than shape it and roll it up. Served here with great tender Florida pole beans (!) and pickled red onions.  A dozen rolls, from one roll of the sausage stuff.  Really good too.

Meanwhile I was making the batter for the apricot snacking cake. It uses two sticks of butter but it made 32 pieces of cake, so, when amortized, fine. It's also not very sweet, which I like.

Notice the clean curtains from upstairs while you're strolling round the kitchen.

 

Apricots halved, ready to stud the cake batter. 

This was originally Melissa Clark's Figgy Demerera Snacking Cake. I've used various fruit including plums in the past, but ripe figs aren't a thing here, and I didn't have Demerera so I sprinkled regular white, and I didn't have brandy so I did without.

But it's really good and supplies enough for a battalion or a couple of neighboring kids plus Handsome Son, Gary and me.

In the middle of this I got an alert to tell me the special online lecture on Ndop cloth was not at 1pm, as I'd thought, but at noon.

So I ended up pushing tablet buttons to get screenshots while rolling pastry and sausage and wielding bench scrapers, and generally trying to do several incompatible things at once. 

In the middle of lunch, sausage rolls hot on my plate, while the cake was in the oven, and I'd finally sat down to watch the presentation as planned, a neighbor stopped in.

Gary's in the hospital, sudden pulmonary thing, yesterday morning. They're keeping him three days, he's seemingly doing okay, but everyone is worried.  Neighbor and I may visit tomorrow if he's up for it. Definitely uneasy. 

So I missed a bit of the Ndop program but I think I got the gist for you, and blogged about it in a special post.

Also in the local news 

The scallions are growing!

And I found in reading the current Sacks, that Humphry Davy, the chemist, inventor of the miner's lamp, was also a poet. In his time, early nineteenth century, academic disciplines weren't so separated.

Here's what stunned me 

He had great respect for the elegance and inventiveness of Davy's use of language. And he too was a chemist as well as a poet.

Also a later improved version of the miner's lamp was invented by an ancestor of Oliver Sacks. The stuff you learn from books.

Anyway I did get to sit and stitch, after all this activity today.

I've been dreaming about this book, all kinds of new ideas for stitching the next page,  as well as anxiety about how to construct it! Brain never rests, despite the daily chair yoga.

About which I'm happy to say my hip is much happier, which seems to confirm my thought that's it's the cartilage, not the joint, complaining. Stretching is working. Neck, too, is doing better. All's good. 

Happy day everyone, don't do all the things at once like me. A person gets tired.