OK, I think I am going to get fired because I have turned into a real slacker about updating my site.  It's the electronics, I tell you!  If I could do it with a paring knife there would be no trouble, but I'm a lost cause with computer programmes.

February breezed past without incident.  I was mostly developing the cold-weather section of the new cookbook.  It is amazing how tricky it is to come up with perfectly balanced and interesting menus.  Often things sound ideal in the head, but when they hit the plate you wonder what on earth you were thinking.  Chocolate mousse does NOT work after corned beef and all the fixings, in case you'd always wondered about that.  It is a fun exercise, though, and now I am proudly staring at a print-out of 13 quatrains of recipes.  Another 13 to come once it warms up a bit and I move into the warm weather material.

I am moving house this month. (What's life if you don't move every 12 months?! Yes, that was sarcasm.) The Toronto trial period is over and I need more wiggle room, so I'm on the lookout.  Meanwhile, I'm going to run off to the wilderness for a few weeks to write and run through another full round of recipe tests. A break from the city will be just what the doctor ordered, and when I come back, I trust spring will be here to greet me in full colour.

Hope all is well wherever you are. I promise to put up a picture as soon as I can get my camera to stop doing everything in a blur...(The picture on the picks page was, mercifully, taken by my friend Ian Varty, in case you wondered why suddenly it looks so much better than usual.)