I bought this cookbook the other day called “Quick and Easy Thai,” by Nancie McDermott (which is probably the least-Thai-sounding name I can think of actually) and since then I have been cooking Thai food like a fiend. Our house was smelling strongly of garlic every day – until a couple days ago, when Kate moved a few things around on one of the counters and made the horrifying discovery that we were, as she put it, “living in squalor.” And now our house smells like a demonstration of cleaning products.

This is because there were tiny mouse turds everywhere. This is the problem with having black counters, apparently. You don’t notice turds until it’s too late. They were in little piles behind the bowl of garlic and ginger, under the butter plate, behind the bag of apples. Suddenly I was flashing right back to last fall, in Colorado, when my mouse problem got out of control. Hantavirus is not nearly as big of a concern here in Minnesota, but we added some more mouse traps anyway (I think we’ve caught eight mice now), doused everything in bleach, etc.

Sorry about that. We were discussing Thai food. Stop thinking about mouse turds and get your head back into the world of crispy garlic and brilliantly colored little peppers and crunchy green rings of spring onions.

So the book is great, and I recommend it for the simplicity of its recipes and ingredient lists, although there are doubtless better and more complex, rich, and authentic cookbooks out there, written by people other than Nancie McDermott. Still, she does a good job, and everything I have made (often with Niko’s help; he is definitely way better at cooking rice than I) has been delicious. (Garlic ginger rice soup with tiny shrimps; fried rice with fake chicken; tiny skinny rice noodles with sugar peas and napa cabbage; garlic pepper fake chicken with water chestnuts.)

If you’d like to make lots of yummy Thai food, I recommend stocking up on oil, pepper, and everything I dutifully copied and pasted into this lovely image. Maybe add some coconut milk and peanuts to your pantry too. (At the bottom there is cilantro, soy sauce, and sugar.) Then go to town. Really, if you just mix all of these things together in different ratios and saute them in a pan and eat them with rice and/or noodles, it’s going to be awesome. Go heavy on the garlic (and then don’t burn it), sprinkle fresh raw cilantro and green onion on top of everything, and add all kinds of thinly sliced vegetables. Any vegetable. It’s going to taste great. You know, most likely.

Besides cooking and trapping mice – those are definitely two separate things, I do not cook the mice after I trap them, I promise – I have also been taking Cody on walks,

And going on hikes with ICO (the group I’m the volunteer leader of) –

And, obviously, going to work and hanging out with great people and watching definitely too much online television and going to dance class and drinking coffee and waking up slightly later than I really planned and all of that great stuff.

Many of you requested on Facebook that I write about certain topics. I have been neglecting those requests. Coming soon, I promise!