Today started off with cooking a Thai-inspired butternut squash soup. It started off that way because Sara wanted to talk while she was cooking, and I had a butternut squash to chop myself. During the course of the call it became apparent that both Sara and Mike are really stressed about selling their house, partially because their prospective buyer wants everything certified and handed to them on a platter. For instance, they want the fireplace to be certified to work, since Sara and Mike have never used it. They offered to let the buyers come build a fire, but that isn’t sufficient, apparently.

They’re really feeling the stress.

After that I took a second shot at making the cake to go with the orange fig icing… and it turned into mochi. Seriously. It was a solid, but definitely gluey lump of rice flour with occasional hints of cake structure. Since I already had the icing on it, I dumped a slice into the microwave for a minute. Surprisingly, it became a rather delicious bread pudding that just soaked up the melted icing. I’m rather looking forward to eating it.

The afternoon was spent playing an online game with Tull and talking to my host. It is surprisingly good to have someone ‘new’ to talk to. (Not that I don’t love you all and enjoy talking to each of you, but I haven’t spoken to a “stranger” for an extended period of time in about a year. It’s nice.) If you don’t understand why, ask M&M. I’m sure she knows what I mean!