Welcome again to the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge, a year-long challenge set by the good folk at Long and Short Reviews that anyone can participate in. Check out the site to see who else is playing along.

This week’s topic:

A project or hobby of mine inspired by a book

Um…

Ummmm…

Ummmmmmmmmmm!

I honestly can’t think of anything that’d I’ve actually done, but after reading Love Lettering by Kate Clayborn I would love to learn calligraphy. It’d be such a handy skill and I might be able to produce legible book signatures at the end instead of my current scrawl.

Mind you, I’ve been inspired to go cook something after reading about it in a book. Which is hardly surprising given the number of cookbooks I read for pleasure. I love reading cookbooks. They give me all kinds of happies.

It’s currently winter here and our main heater is near my cookbook bookcase. My latest delight (aka procrastination trick) is to pick a cookbook to read while warming my bum, keeping a cuppa and a pencil nearby so I can slake my thirst and scribble notes on how I could tweak any given recipe to suit our likes and equipment at hand.

This is marvellous fun. It is, however, bloody terrible for my waistline. Especially the French cookbooks, of which I have many thanks to our stint living there. One of my favourites is a book entirely devoted to making fruit liqueurs. I love that baby. Which reminds me, it’s lemon season and lemon season means limoncello!

Me in Strasbourg. We visited in January and needed lots of beer and tarte flambee to warm up!

I even have excellent bottles for it. They’re Fischer beer bottles, a beer from the Alsace that we discovered in Strasbourg, and which come with these really cool ceramic swing top stoppers that make them perfect for preserving.

I fell in love with Fischer bottles on first sight (and taste – it’s a good beer). So much so that I hoarded them from every pub we went into, making Jim stuff them into his backpack so I could take them home. The poor man chinkety-chinked with every step and the waitstaff kept giving us weird looks because whenever they came to clear the table our bottles were nowhere to be seen.

Sorry, entirely off topic but pfft. Doesn’t matter! These topics are open for interpretation and I love to natter about cooking.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to buy vodka. Limoncello production awaits!

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