Currently to share my cooking and baking ‘adventures’. I’m not sure who benefits from these posts but it gives my a brain break from all the other writing that I do that is my actual paid day job as a paediatrician.

And here is some tomato and garlic rice I made earlier…

Ingredients

• 250 g basmatic rice
• 1 red onion, halved and very thinly sliced into half onions
• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 small packket (about 30g) of flat leaf parsley, finely chopped
• 50 g butter
• 4 heaped tablespoons tomato puree
• 1 heaped teaspoon garlic granules
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander
• finely grated zest and juice of 1 fat unwaxed lime
• 400ml cold water
• Maldon sea salt flakes and freshly ground black pepper

Instructions

• Put all the ingredients into a saucepan with a lid, season with a generous amount of salt and pepper and stir together well.
• If using a gas hob, place over a low heat, or if using an electric/induction hob place over a medium-low heat. Cover the pan with the lid and cook for about 30 minutes, or until the rice on the top is tender and cooked through and all the water has been fully absorbed.

Reference: Simply, Sabrina Ghayour, page 38.

In the past blogging was a way to share my thoughts with the world and stave off the loneliness I felt as a single woman. Later, about a decade ago I had surgery and during the recovery period, I found my self blogging furiously to keep my brain occupied when my body was healing. In the time when my father was sick and dying, it was a strangely a soothing activity to do after the distressing hospital visits and conversations, a distraction from the tragedy that was unfolding all around me. After my father died, I did lose my mind and it did help me piece it back together. Ultimately though, deep down it was the practice for the book I’ve been saying I would write for decades. I might also reflect on the fact that maybe it has been a distraction from the book that I need to write.

November is soon upon us and I will be taking part in NaNoWriMo, so I will once again try and write a novel of 50,00O words in one month. Amazingly, I wrote the first draft of a novel Lone Wolf last year. The first time, in all the years that I have taken part in this venture that I have finished this. I still not had a chance to look at it again, it was just ‘practice’ a memoir of sorts, looking back at my journey from junior doctor to consultant. At the time, it seemed the easiest thing to write, that would flow. I had started off writing an adaptation to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. I read the play, bought and watched the two TV adapatations and even bought three books based on the play. I started my draft and I did manage to write a whole plot but it felt quite shaky did not really hang together and I felt that I really did not want to write it at that time. So I did not. This year, I’m perhaps doing a similiar thing memoir wise – Physician Heal Thy Self exploring my teenage years and beyond and how they have shaped current situation. Is it lazy writing? Is it just therapy dressed up in the pretense of book writing? I don’t know! I do know I won’t be publishing it anywhere! I think I like the challenge of dedicating myself to writing in a focussed and driven way. I do have two weeks of annual leave in the early part of November, so I do hope I will be able to dedicate time to this. My preparation so far has been search of articles on how to write a memoir, might as well do this properly. I’ve set up a document on Scrivener to start putting together my research and ideas. However, with all this activity, I wonder what I am distracting myself from now?