Well, it’s official: I’ve caught the grandmother of all colds, probably spread to me via the air conditioning system. The only question now is how long the BF will survive without catching it

On the plus side, my books arrived today–I immediately lent the Alastair Reynolds to the BF, who needed reading for a train journey, and kept the Daniel Fox in my grubby little paws. Also made some progress in a new story, after a couple abortive starts–1500 words so far, aiming for 2,500 so should be done soon.

In the cooking experiment series, we bought fresh Chinese noodles yesterday, and I cooked them with cha lua (alias Vietnamese sausage/ham). Yummy. I love this; usually, I stick it in a sandwich or cook rice to go with it, but frying noodles, scallions and putting soy sauce on top of everything was pretty nice.

The bacon-cubes-goat-cheese-olive cakes I made yesterday actually turned out pretty good, and I’ve had people ask me for the recipe, so here goes…

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800 words today. I’ve successfully locked my main character in a room with a knife-wielding maniac, always a good recipe for success (well, for the story. The character’s chances must be lower). Darn, it feels good to be tormenting someone again. I haven’t been doing any first-drafting since Worldcon: I’ve done edits and copy edits, but haven’t actually started to write another story since then.

Tomorrow, celebrating the novel sale with my work colleagues: to that end, I’m making ham and goat-cheese cake. So far, the cake

• looks worryingly yellow
• has ballooned to an impressive size

(at least I know why the second point: I went a bit overboard on the baking soda…).

I’d post the recipe, but first I need to taste it.
EDIT: Matthieu pointed out that I’d screwed up with the oven’s settings, too, and that the thing was burning faster than it was baking. Sigh. Me, and cooking: 3 different people.

VD4 food: spring rolls (or mixed salad rolls). Yummy food wrapped in rice paper.

Work is split more or less equally between chopping everything into small pieces and rolling the rice paper.

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So, since it’s a holiday and I had time, I figured: heck, why not try Vietnamese food?

I thought that chả giò, the Vietnamese fried spring rolls, would make a nice challenge. Boy, did I badly understimate.

The problem is that everything is suppposed to be chopped into very small pieces. This means:

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