The zucchini soup happened earlier than promised — it turned out I couldn’t wait until tomorrow, and honestly the evening was the right time for it. I simmered the last of the lot with onion, a little potato for body, and a good pinch of the dried oregano from last summer. Blended it smooth, finished it with olive oil and a few torn basil leaves. There’s something almost embarrassingly comforting about a pot of green soup that costs nothing and tastes like August. The great zucchini mountain is finally a manageable hill.
I spent the rest of the night with the tin box of recipe cards out on the kitchen table, not transcribing this time, just reading. I found one for a lemon and almond cake I’d completely forgotten she made, all in her cramped handwriting with the corners worn soft from decades of being thumbed through. I think that’s the one I’ll try first when I get back to baking properly. It’s a good feeling, rediscovering something of hers I thought I’d lost.
On the subject of rediscovering forgotten things: I was reading about how the tab key and the tab character got their name — from the old typewriter tabulator, the little lever that let you set column stops and jump the carriage to them. That’s where we get the phrase “tab over to here.” A whole modern habit, the one that moves your cursor across a line, borrowed from a mechanical stop on a machine from a century ago. I like knowing the small ancestors of ordinary things.