Fantasy baking

Back on the bus in the morning to stock up on fruit, Passover deprivation making fruit one of the only ways to have breakfast without gumming up either your arteries or your digestive system, and as I get on the only able bodied person in the section loudly labelled PLEASE GIVE UP YOUR SEAT TO SOMEONE LESS ABLE TO STAND THAN YOU clocks my crutches and silently, unsmilingly, vacates her seat. i always say thank you, but I've finally moved on from abject gratitude. Commuter behaviour is strictly one dimensional, except in the case of emergencies when all hell breaks loose. So, equally neutrally, I say thanks (though trying to "smile with my eyes" - like Tyra Banks does - unfortunately you need elaborately coiffed hair and quantities of make up, not to mention boobs like shelves, to pull it off - my attempt comes off as just plain creepy, judging by the expression of the freaked out commuter who places herself right next to the emergency button). I find myself seated next to a genial Indian woman wearing a beautiful and elaborate sari, who immediately launches into speech with me. She touches my knee, then her elbow, and talks about her son who had a double injury and was in plaster for months, then a surgical boot, then he had to have lots of physiotherapy, and she was very worried for him, but it came out all right in the end so I shouldn't worry for myself. At least, I'm guessing that this is what she said. I can't know for sure as not a word of it was in English. For all I know she was complaining about the rising price of onions. But I find it very engaging that she should launch in her own language and just expect - or hope? that I'll catch up with her, or maybe she has decided that I am a linguist (she would be right on that one, though unfortunately my academic prowess extends only as far as the Western European languages, which are of no help whatsoever once you step into any part of South Asia). Anyway. I nod and pat her back on her elbow and point to her knee and smile and generally get into the conversation. And it works. She smiles, I smile back, we nod with emphasis to signal the end of a conversation we have both enjoyed, and when I get off the bus, she yells something incomprehensible to the bus driver who, clearly experienced in the art of responding to passengers speaking languages he doesn't, reacts by letting down the disabled step at the exit, something no driver has ever done for me yet. It clearly pays to speak, well, whatever language she was speaking. On my way back from my fruit foraging exercise (well all right, it didn't involve hedgerows and took place largely in my local Waitrose), I am tempted to step into a small shop with the hyperbolic poster above its windows rebranding it as the Passover Superstore. I just want to see what is left that nobody wanted to buy. I imagine there would probably be quite a lot, but this is largely because my take on Passover goods is that they either taste awful, or they are overburdened with saturated fats and artificial gloop, or they are outrageously expensive, or they are all three. But I am wrong. The place looks as if it has been looted. Shelves are bare and sad, and virtually all that is left is a few scouring pads, milk and meat labelled cleaning brushes, and some nasty looking frozen turkey's feet. No, they are not the feet, they are another part of the poor turkey's body, but they do look gothically like the feet. I make a hasty exit, and on my hobble back home, begin to fantasise. I belong to the lucky (or damned?) group who keep Passover for 7 rather than 8 days which means that come tomorrow, I am back in the land of self raising flour. What to do with it? Only a week without it but it feels like a year to someone for whom baking plays so many roles in my daily life - stress beater, culinary skill, relaxing hobby, way to engage with the kids, pure fun. So many recipes circulate in my head I feel dizzy. By the time I am home I have decided that whatever it is, it will have to be a bulk bake. Watch this space.