I am exhausted.

Why? well It might have to do with the fact that we have kittens again. Izzy ( cat #5 and the 3rd generation youngest) gave birth Friday night at 11pm....then again at 12 pm....followed by 1.30 am and 3 am, by which time I couldn't get to sleep anyway; so I stayed awake and read till it was time to get up and get down to the allotment.

After a morning weeding and avoiding the annoying vendettas and politics going on there at the moment it was home to make ice cream, but as that took me till midnight to finish ; once again insomnia kicked in and I only got 2 hours sleep before it was time to go shopping, then back home to MORE ice cream making; followed by cooking dinner, which was a yummy Gammon steak covered in home made onion sauce.
After clearing up with the usual complaining , but getting on with it; from the boys, it was back to my mammoth task of reading all the way through the archives of David Lebovitz' blog. I am at present half way through 2007 and catching up fast, it is extraordinarily amusing; informative, envy-making and full of the most fantastic ice cream ( and other dessert) recipes.
This morning whilst prowling through it , I got to thinking about empty nest syndrome.....don't get the connection? well it goes like this:
as the boys have got older I have endeavoured to at least instill in them the basics of cooking, so they never have to get married just to get a decent meal; my delight in cooking and trying out new things has been re-awakened and the fact I can now make a decent sauce without panicking half a day over it ( I can knock one out at the last minute now with out having to refer to a recipe even), discovering the joy of being able to make a NON-lumpy custard base from scratch in seconds; led me to ponder why I am bothering to try and educate my children's palates at all? and then it occurred to me, that maybe subliminally it had nothing to do with educating them at all! maybe, just maybe I was starting to panic that at 14 and 16 they would soon be leaving the nest and what would they need to visit me for? So that delicious home made mint choc ice cream, was not so much a treat as a future-bribe/ insurance; something they would always remember, never be able to replicate and would always need to come home for; and bring their children with them to sample.

Could my mind really be that devious? am I turning into Marie Barrone ?  quite possibly. So with that in mind, I now realise why I feel the need to attempt Macarons next weekend; despite the fact I have never even tried to make a basic meringue-y type thing ever in the past!
After all, if they go horribly wrong that is to be expected anyway; and nothing is lost, and if they come out right; well then I have one more object of bribery in my culinary snare and I am again the cookery genius my youngest son declares me to be ( may he never be disillusioned, bless him and his washing up and chopping skills).
Well it just might work, you never know.