Cello & Chard

I might have discovered, tonight, the bikram yoga technique of cello practice. With the temperature still over 80F at sunset, I decide to bake, in my kitchen that's been lapping up the sunshine all day long, a Swiss chard and goat's cheese quiche--an established favourite, and quite summery, you could say, were it not for the cranking up of the oven that its preparation requires.

The recipe also nicely accommodates a multi-tasking cello-practice (and my practice is always accommodated in my kitchen):

• blind bake the crust for 10 mins :: warm up with a few scales
• pause to saute chard for 2 mins (Take care before, during and after this stage to wash hands and keep bow safely out of way of olive oil; the amateur-bloggeur lost her first bow to some wayward sardine oil. Sunflower oil, as readers of Master and Margarita well know, is capable of even more diabolical damage.)
• bake assembled quiche for 35 mins :: a couple of times through the 4th movement (allegro) of the old Vivaldi Sonata No. 3 in A minor, with special attention to syncopated rhythms and transitions between phrases (I'm prone to just stop).
  
• Ping! Remove quiche from oven!

Tonight's post, it should be added, comes with a nod
of acknowledged inspiration to Dining with Dostoevsky.

This was a particularly pleasing practice session; I got through some tricky passages more smoothly than ever. It even elicited some kind words of approval from my long-suffering neighbour who arrived home to hear strains of Vivaldi (and smell of baking) wafting out my open front door. I partly attribute its success to the staggering temperature that my kitchen must have reached during this hour -- all the better for limber limbs and faster fingers, it seems.