The Daily Special (Chinese Steamed Buns)

When you’ve canceled today’s planned motorcycle departure to Colorado, because your beagle is in surgery for a “large grapefruit sized” tumor on her little liver*, and you are so tired, but can’t sleep, and all you can do is knead your worry into bread dough, but it’s too hot to fire the oven for an hour or more, plus you have little bits of pork with chile paste leftover from last weekend’s birthday party, then what you do is add some sautéed mushrooms and onions, those remaining shreds of cabbage in the crisper drawer, a bit of garlic, ginger, soy, sriracha, and sesame, and make char siu bao**.

Plus, you have a few crappy archival photos from last time you made them. (No beagle in the hospital that time.) 

We’re not out of the woods yet, but the surgery went really well.***

The face I see when she's at my feet in the kitchen.

Another thing you can do is paint your bedroom pink. I did that yesterday.


*She didn’t tell me about it at all. I found it during a belly rub. 
** Use any simple, soft, white, yeasted bread dough recipe.  I'll often fly in the face of convention and add just a small fraction of whole wheat flour.  Let it rise a bit, portion it out, roll flat, fill, wrap them, then steam them for 15 minutes or so. Silly, puffy, good!  They’re also really inexpensive, which is handy, since I just completely emptied my wallet for this little veterinary adventure.  Beagle repairs, as it turns out, are significantly more expensive than Ducati repairs.
***If she makes it through these next critical 48-72 hours, the prognosis is very, very good.  “Littlest love,” I reminded her right before she was admitted. “Littlest only in stature!”
UPDATE - see "Dessert" here.