Two weeks to my birthday.

My major accomplishments for the day, and possibly the week, were applying to a few jobs and getting to 40,000 words on my current WIP. I'm not happy with the words, but they're there to be unhappy about, which is an improvement over being unhappy about them not being there.

Also, last night I made one of the best dinners I've cooked in a long while. Someone moved out and left behind a lot of comestable goods in the recycling area - canned tomatoes, coffee, soup mixes. One of the soup mixes was black bean and pasta, and the recipe called for a half cup of sausage, some stock, nothing too fancy. So what I did is I cooked the beans alone, and while they were going, sauted an onion and some garlic in duck fat before I added diced broccoli raab stems. When they were done, I added the beans along with the pasta, the vegetable and spice packets, the canned tomatoes the recipe called for, the homemade chicken stock leftover from when I deboned a chicken a few weeks ago and had to do something with the remains of the carcass which took the place of the canned beef stock the recipe wanted, the broccoli raab leaves, and diced lamb sausage.

When I sat down to eat it, I realized I'd inadvertently recreated an Italian dish people have already been cooking for centuries, and that I need to make it again when summer tomatoes are ripe and overflowing.