Lemon bars ahoy!

Another heatwave starting today, everyone a bit tired what with one thing and a dozen others. Handsome Son visiting today, first time in weeks, yay. 

I made it to the library before it gets too hot, and my videos start accruing fines, and to the post office to send my Cross pencil back for repair, fingers crossed on that.

So all of the above means everyone needs a treat.

Lemon bars happened. This recipe made a lot, and they're so rich, what with butter and sugar and eggs, that you only need small pieces. At a time. You can keep coming back.

I don't make them often because it's making the shortbread base, baking that, making the lemon stuff, adding that and baking again.

The entire kitchen is sticky, which is why few pictures, not wishing to gum up the phone with lemon filling and sticky fingerprints. If my food stylist had shown up, it would be different,  but she's pretty unreliable.

Here's where I was pressing the dough, it's stiff,  into the dish. All tools failed until I tried a gloved hand. You see the glove there. That worked fine.

Then sprinkled confectioners sugar using the handy sprinkler thing I improvised a while back and bragged about in here

So there's the Cliff notes version.

I'll carry some of them next door, where they will vanish before I'm home again. And maybe a couple of other destinations, too.

Reading Charles Todd, Inspector Rutledge mysteries at the moment. Light enough for heatwave reading. This one's about the mysteries in an east Anglia coastal area, secrets and the murder of an apparently beloved priest. Not universally beloved, it seems.

Rutledge is a police inspector home from ww1, where he served in the trenches and has what they then called shellshock, now PTSD. 

The writers, it's a team, had a terrific idea. They have Rutledge haunted by the voice of a soldier, Hamish Macleod, he sent to his death, acting as a wise alter ego in his brain, taking part in the investigations, working like an extension of a soliloquy. 

It's a great idea for keeping the action moving when a lot of it is about thinking. This is the second I've read and Hamish is a continuing character, though an imaginary one. 

I love expertise and good writing technique, and there's plenty here, when they can restrain themselves from purple passages, overdone chunks of adjective-ridden description. 

If you've ever read Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm, a great send up of the Mary Webb type of tragic rural muddy narratives, descended from Hardy and his benighted Wessex, you'll know purple passages. 

She even puts asterisks to make sure they register! The Todd team are a little bit naive on this point, nonetheless a rattlin good read, and I recommend both the Bess Crawford and now the Inspector Rutledge series.

Well, I have to get on and see what Hamish has to say.