My week - Reading cookbooks before bed

We just bought this happy bunch from Sophie, whose zinnias bloomed this week.

Two cookbooks arrived in the mail for me this week and I've been reading them before bed :) I bought Sophie Dahl's Very Fond of Food (the title and this pancake post made me do it) and My Darling Lemon Thyme from the Western Australian food blog of the same name.

I was so excited to discover the This Is Radio series, which profiles game-changing independent and public radio producers like The Kitchen Sisters and Joe Richman in short videos.

On the topic of radio, I may be one of the few people who didn't love Serial. This post captures why listening to the series made me uncomfortable (I stopped at episode 4).

I spend a lot of time on Instagram so Tony showed me Amalia Ulman's tongue-in-cheek feed this week. The artist totally masters every kind of Instagram photo and user, from the baby pics (guilty) to the too-perfect food photo complete with hilarious caption.

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's Q&A website is live! Thank goodness for Google translate. I want to ask a question around the simple meals that feature so prominently in all of his stories. A restaurant in Portland has even created a Murakami inspired degustation.

And now for the long weekend. We're going to make chocolate fondant and honey gelato for a lunch at a friend's farmhouse on Sunday, try out the new Vietnamese cafe in town and I'm going to watch Studio Ghibli's Porco Rosso - a cartoon about a flying pig!