07.17.04 - 11:02 p.m.

Thankfully, I didn't have any dreams about falling into water over the past few nights. Instead, I dreamt about an electrical fire starting in our kitchen, caused when I tipped a pot of boiling water (I was making corn) into our gas stove. Is that even possible? I'm not sure I want to know if it is.

I did make corn last night, though I steamed it in the microwave. I'm not sure why anyone would go to the trouble of boiling a whole pot anymore, when it only takes four minutes in the micro and is just as tasty. The corn was accompanied by chicken marinated in lemon juice and dijon mustard and then broiled, and by roasted potatoes with fresh lemon, tomatoes, parsley, garlic, onion and thyme. The lesson for the night was that Dan is not a fan of thyme - that means leftover potatoes for me on Monday.

Today's culinary adventures started off with a little guacamole for breakfast. The avocados were just calling to me from the windowsill, and to be fair, it was almost 11:30 when I decided to chop them up. Then Dan was feeling grumpy-pants from his achy back muscles, so I made him a batch of tiny peanut butter cookies, with mini chocolate chips in them to highlight the tiny effect.

Then we went to the Cloisters, finally, after two years of asking. I amused myself by sniffing all the herbs in the Bonnefort Cloister (and eating some sage, much to Dan's surprise). But the medieval air conditioning (read: none) and the old-man condition of Dan's back forced us home. Note to self: next time bring picnic lunch.

At home, I went to work on a double batch of pizza dough, followed by chili-sesame-cumin crusted sea scallops with fried capers and a pea and carrot pearl couscous. And orange-almond biscotti. It is now 11 pm and I have been more or less cooking for 12 hours, give or take the time at the Cloisters. And tomorrow is Babbo, so there's really no eating at all until dinner. A Batali-induced fast.

After all that kitchen hoopla, how can I be thinking about what we're going to be eating tomorrow? I know it's our fabulous anniversary dinner and all, and that it's only a restaurant I've been planning to go to since I moved here, but it seems perverse that one small woman can meditate so much on the subject of food. Part of me is still thinking about the Calabrian cheese sitting in the drawer that I never got around to snacking on tonight. Sick, I tell you.