Book du jour

loaded with homely memories

Despite a lot of thinking and faffing about, there's not much progress, lately, on the german/english cookbook with the verbs fallen out. The desk is littered with printouts of pages of recipes and scans of photos - like the Schwarzweiss Gebaeck and the Prinzregententorte above - and my notebook is full of sketches and notes on how they might go together ... "might" being the operative word.

This project needs some action on the actual putting-together. At the moment it's all too complicated, even though I've tried to take it back to basics. Perhaps some of the unnecessary complications will drop out during the trial run. I'm after simple, clear, and elegant - the right size, with nothing unnecessary, conveying the idea ... but leaving something to think about. And I'm not at all sure this cookbook-thing is going to make the cut, as things stand - much as I want it to. Maybe I'm too involved with the personal-history aspects, and need to step outside that particular box?

Plan A: use the 5 pages of photos and 4 pages of recipes (2p english, 2p german) currently on the desk to follow the current plan and make a maquette (these pages are horribly printed due to problems with ink flow etc etc etc) - don't do the laborious cutting out of words, tempting as it is to spend lots of time on this; see what the structure looks like, and what needs simplifying or revising or abandoning.

Plan B: make an english-only version with just one sheet of photos and one of recipes - how can they be put together in the most straightforward way - will this convey "losing the ability to cook because you can't follow the sequence of actions in the recipe"?

I'm in some panic about this as there are now only 30 days till the assessment, by which time the show has to be up (ie, what to show has to be decided!) and the entire work and reflective writing ready to present. Time-management skills would definitely be useful at this point.