Having Peppy as a Taboo partner was an educational experience.

If I had been the one trying to get him to say Goldfish, I would have said something like, "It's a wet animal that you keep in a tank when it's alive and flush down the toilet when it's dead. It's kind of orange."

In other words, I would have painted him a picture and told him a story.

This evening, however, it was Peppy who had to get me to say Goldfish, and it went a little like this: "You have bronze, and then silver, and then . . . ? That's just the first part. The second part swims."

(Peps and I won the game, by the way.)

Until this evening, I had no idea that breaking compound words into their components was a reasonable strategy. It must be a Mars thing. I'd like to see Peppy and Rob as Taboo partners in the future (versus Jayca and myself as Team Venus), to test this theory.

Of course, the Taboo Play of the Day comes from Maan, who had to get Jayca to say the word Blow: "It's a job . . . A sexual job."

You may never really know someone until you get him to play a few rounds of Taboo with you.

Not that I'm a dating expert or anything--and not that what my friends and I had today was a date by any stretch of the imagination--but I'd totally recommend two or three couples getting to know each other over Taboo. Preferably with smoky barbecue-flavoured buffalo wings with honey mustard dip for nourishment.

+JMJ+

(In which I formerly lauch my campaign for world domination)

To be totally honest . . . I actually look more like Sarah Palin. Seriously. (One day I'll tease my hair into a beehive, and you'll see . . .)

That will be a good thing in about four years, when Obama does a Carter and Palin pulls a Reagan.

+JMJ+

(In which my writing career gets off on a rocky start)

This morning, my first day of freedom (or of shiftlessness: take your pick), I woke up from a vivid dream that just managed not to be a nightmare.

"Tita Grace was there," I told Patty, "and she was trying to stare me down."

"Mmph?" Patty asked through a mouthful of her quarterpounder with cheese.

"I haven't rung her yet--"

"What?" She had swallowed. "She wanted you to call her almost three weeks ago!"

"Well, what's a nice way to tell her that I just don't want to work with her--ever?"

"There's no nice way."

"Hmmmm. Maybe I could blog about it, and you could direct one of her kids to the post, and he'd tell her."

Patty gave me a withering stare over her quarterpounder. "What's so bad about working with her, anyway?"

"Well, other than the fact that I know next to nothing about real estate and bloody land banking . . . I just don't want to work with her. She didn't pay my student the agreed fee when he did that translation job for her--"

"Really?"

"She said that she'd pay 300 pesos for every page and that the document was six pages long. It was actually seven pages long. Then she dithered about meeting him, until I had to pay him, because he was set to leave for Korea and never come back. Then when I asked her to pay me back, she wouldn't give me the full amount."

"Oh."

"And that's not counting every other rotten thing Tita Grace has ever done to us."

My grandmother ambled into the room just then and caught the tail end of that sentence.

"Ah! Have you called Grace?"

"Not yet," I mumbled.

She looked appalled at a patent lack of good breeding. Apparently, a lady always returns her calls.

"Why not?"

Maybe because of the time she said she'd sell your car for you, said the deal fell through, never gave you a single centavo, and then was seen driving the same car for at least a year?

I didn't answer, though, so my grandmother just snapped, "It's money for you, you know."

Fuck the money.

I just pretended that I hadn't learned the fine art of talking with a mouth half full of french fries.

Anyway, it's clear that my future will not involve writing e-newsletters and press releases for a real estate company. That's the only thing clear about the future, however.

As for the present . . . I'm doing the profiles of the Indie band I told you about, an up-and-coming new artist I may have mentioned, and a lay missionary sprung on me at the last moment. After this project, I'm going to ask my editor for something steadier--or at least start writing for other publications.

+JMJ+

(In which I try to be positive despite there being something seriously wrong with my oven)

It turns out that I'm not a bad baker. I just have a bad oven.

It cooks the top half (sometimes not even half) of everything I slide inside it--cookies, bars, bread, everything--but leaves the bottom undone. So when I pull out the baking tray or baking pan, I have something that looks as if it came out of Taste of Home; but the second I try to pop it out of its container and cool it on a wire rack, it is unmasked as the spongy, primordial mess it is.

Tonight, I refused to let a mere oven get the better of me. So I improvised something it could never have expected, because my idea wasn't anything a sensible person would do. (Try to do battle with a crazy person and you'll just lose.) Having taken my cappuccino bars (yet uncut) out of the oven, I used two spatulas to flip over the whole sheet--yes, flip it over like a pancake--and then popped it right back into the heat so it could bake for another ten minutes.

In the end, I came out victorious . . . but it was admittedly a pyrrhic victory.

When I finally cut the bars out with a bread knife, I saw a geology project for Science class:

Notice how it looks like layer cake . . . or like a model of the earth's layers.

The bottom (formerly the top) was about two millimetres of golden brown goodness; the centre, about one centimetre of light, moist cake in a different colour; and the top (formerly the bottom) was a lightly caramelised crust.

If you can zoom in, you'll see that the notebook has the first draft of this very post!

Pavlover, if you're reading this, then you now know why our attempt to make pavalova ended the way it did . . .

Anyway, the bars tasted good enough--especially when washed down with a glass of cold milk (Yum!)--so it wasn't a total bust. I'm not very happy with the texture, though, as they felt more like white bread than the chewy bars they were supposed to be.

I wish I could tell you to come back for a story about muffins, but I certainly won't be able to make those any time soon.

(Hey . . . Now that I'm posting images of what I cook, am I officially a food blogger?)

+JMJ+

(In which the kitchen skirmishes reveal another layer of meaning)

Today I made my first grocery list. It's a step in the right direction.

I used to go to the supermarket with nothing but vague ideas and the hope that inspiration would serve where memory would fail. Then I realised, with the New Year coming up and all, that I should be more organised about my campaign to usurp power in the kitchen. So, for the first time in my life, I found myself planning three meals in advance.

When I got to the meat section, however, they had run out of one of the four reliable pillars of modern cuisine, the Boneless, Skinless Chicken Breast. (Don't ask me what the other three pillars are. I'm just trying to sound more knowledgable than I actually am. It fooled you, too, didn't it?) That ruled out my Chicken Parmigiano, as well as a whole lot of other recipes I could have experimented with. So . . . I bought a bag of potatoes in the vegetable aisle and decided to make Potato Parmigiano instead.

That was about three hours ago. In case you're wondering about the results, they tasted like a variation of mojos. If Chicken Parmigiano is topped with marinara sauce, then Potato Parmigiano should be served with ketchup. It's a lot of trouble to bread, brown and bake what are essentially fries; so I won't be whipping this recipe out of my arsenal for anything but special occasions. (Are you all scared yet???)

Earlier today, I grumbled to my mother that it wasn't right for my grandmother to go such lengths to have her cake and yet not eat it, the cake being her car. So Mom reminded me that Lala hasn't allowed Mom to drive the car from the very beginning. It makes no sense: Lala will ride in Mom's car, with Mom driving, but she'd rather take a taxi than have Mom chauffeur her in her own car.

"It's all about control," Mom said. "The last thing she can wave over my head are her car keys."

Realising they were now being waved over my head, too, I retorted: "She may keep me from the car, but she can't keep me from the stove."

It absolutely drives my grandmother crazy when I cook, partly because she doesn't do the cooking any longer. (It's similar to how she doesn't do any driving anymore.) She still controls the menu because she pays our cook, but she can't control us. If I want to buy my own ingredients, whip up my own dishes, and eat something other than what's on the menu, then she has no power. That's doubly true if I outdo myself and make everyone want to eat what I have made from scratch instead of what she has heated up in the microwave. (Petty, I know, but true.) If all those poor girls with eating disorders only knew about this method of rebelling with food, then they'd have more interesting adolescences.

Mine is not a family in which recipes are passed from generation to generation and the kitchen is the warm, happy backdrop of many a rite of passage. Yet you didn't really need me to tell you that, did you?