The "birthday cake" I cooked for her was rather special, but I knew she would find it delicious. Normally, whenever I shell prawns (which is quite often, because I'm fond of several prawn dishes), Sophia waits for the heads and shells. Today, after preparing half a kilo of prawns, I put the heads and shells in a mixer. Then I added an egg and fried the mixture in olive oil. I had the impression that Sophia was pleasantly amazed to find herself being offered such a delicacy.Happily, she's in perfect physical form. In fact, the only problem with Sophia is that, through living alone with me at Gamone, she seems to have become somewhat antisocial... like me. So, on hot days, when I take her down to the Bourne for a dip, she often growls at unfamiliar dogs that approach her. She leads an extremely regular existence, of a clockwork kind, even to the extent of rolling around on her back, once a day, in exactly the same patch of weeds alongside the house. At another spot, near the main door of the house, there's a corner of bare earth that I've been trying to cover with grass for years. But Sophia has made it clearly known to me that she prefers to lie down there from time to time in a soft heap of thick warm dust. So, I've given up trying to grow grass there. Sophia has won. Funnily, the regularity of Sophia's daily existence (which starts early in the morning when she wanders upstairs to wait alongside my bed until I wake me up) seems to rub off onto me, and exert a kind of reassuring, stabilizing force in my own life.
Happy birthday, Sophia!
ReplyDeleteThere was an unexpected but nice aftermath to Sophia's birthday "cake" composed of prawn heads and shells. Later in the day, when I rinsed the food mixer and then used it to churn up prawns and green herbs for my favorite Thai dish, the plastic lid and container of my archaic kitchen robot became firmly jammed together. When I started trying to separate them with a screwdriver, they broke into fragments. So, I'll have to purchase a new machine. I'm wondering whether a canine divinity has punished me for not giving Sophia the prawns, rather than simply the heads and shells.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, Sophia's gustative habits are often peculiar. This morning, I cut up a few old apples and threw them onto the lawn, because they seemed to be getting soft and yellow. At first sight, Sophia didn't appear to be particularly interested... although it's a fact that she often gets stuck into pieces of apple. A moment ago, I noticed that the pieces of apple, lying in the sun, were being visited by wasps, so I promptly trampled them with my boot. Sophia was watching the scene, because one of her pastimes consists of trying to snatch moving wasps with her jaws. She sniffed the warm squashed apple with three embedded dead wasps. Then, before I could intervene, Sophia devoured it all. I'm hoping that dead wasps are merely a variety of meat for my dog, washed down with warm apple sauce, and that her powerful digestive system can deal with the venom.