I've been suffering from a combination of blog block and over busyness lately. It's not that I don't have tons that I want to tell you, because I do, it's just that the words aren't coming quite as easily as they might and when they do I have five or twelve or a hundred things I need to do first. Little things like feed the baby or meet a client deadline.


Tonight I went to bed at 10:15 and finally gave up falling asleep around 11:45. So I've come downstairs to fart around a while and see if I can't exhaust myself into some shut eye. I've placed an order at Sephora (some matte stick treatment thing, along with four gratis samples and checked the going rates for reference books on Ebay (good sales to homeschoolers, it appears) and got caught up on blogs (note to Sue: Math doesn't lie? Really? Fibs to me all the time. You must know a better class of math than I!)


The best way to drift off, though, is with a cookbook in arms. As soon as I'm done here I'm going to look up some ketchup recipes. Mushroom ketchup, anyone? What about peach or plum? That tomato ketchup is our primary reference for spiced and heavily cooked-down purees is kind of an accident of culinary history. In fact, if I understand things correctly, tomato wasn't even the most popular among ketchups until well into the last century.


Ketchup making came to mind because I'm pretty sure I have a couple years' worth of jams, marmalades and jellies now (although there's not a force on this earth that will stop me from making the scented geranium jelly I've been looking forward to), not to mention sauces (although cherry sauce is another virtual certainty for this year) and chutneys. Pickles I always need more of but I kept thinking that something was missing and so I pounced on ketchups as the answer. Without looking more into it, I'm thinking that mushroom ketchup would be a good first, experimental bet. I bet it would be great on a steak, or maybe as part of an omelet.


Damn! Now I'm hungry. Part of the risk of writing about food at this hour of the morning, I guess.