BIG LOVE!

Wow - I mean look at this.  All the way from the USofA from someone I've only ever talked to through blogs.  Thank you Petra!

It's a response to these cheeky posts and remembers this.  Petra has finished her 52 week marathon of recording everything she ate in 2008.   She says it's been fun - but not always - and setting off for a special restaurant meal only having to return because she's forgotten her camera must have been a pain!   But I've taken a somewhat masochistic joy in drooling over what has been an astonishingly varied and exciting diet.

Amongst her reasons for doing this was a recognition of a greater need for mindfulness - an awareness of what we eat that has vanished in our consumerist age - so detached from the land and the source of our food.  I think it has been a wholly worthwhile mission.  Here are a couple of examples why.  

But Petra's blog has also provided a distraction for her  from 'an insanely intense job that threatens to swallow me whole'.  And I've always been able to read her blog against that back-drop, and it's helped me to stay with the importance of what I'm doing and how right it feels. 

Meanwhile I'm stunned by the thoughtfulness and generosity of this little gift.  Slightly tinged by guilt - but only slightly!

And so this morning after breakfast we broke into the bacon flavoured chocolate bar. (I thought maybe we should sprinkle it over some fried eggs - but Jussi wasn't having it!)   The taste is very clever - the salt with the sweet works a treat - although embedding bits of chewy bacon in smooooth chocolate is a little too bizarre for me.

The other bar - dark chocolate with green cardamom, walnuts and dried plums - will sit until the temptation of it is too much.  A real treat.

Thank you Petra and Ritesh.