It all started a couple of years ago with a particularly irritating dream about a squeaking door and with my husband swiftly elbowing me in the ribs. I woke up disoriented and looked at the alarm clock to discover it was 4 am. Despite waking up, the squeaking from my dream continued and Tim insisted that I look at our balcony. The scene playing out in front of me was too much to comprehend at that time of the night. A weird shadow was walking back and forth on our cement flower bed. Upon closer inspection, it appeared that the shadow was, in fact, a duck. The setting of the night, the dispersing darkness and my mental haze made her look unreal and very dramatic, like a duck avenger or a duck superhero or some messenger of sorts. In the end, we took a picture and went back to sleep. The duck came back the next night and the night after and I became obsessed with figuring out what she was trying to tell me. Should I play the lottery? Invest in stocks of foie gras? Make duck for dinner? What did the duck want? It turned out pretty quickly, that all she wanted was to lay some eggs in our flower pot, which she proceeded to do… and then she made herself completely at home. After some research, Tim got in touch with the Duck Lady, a Düsseldorf woman who donates her free time to rescue ducks, which nest in weird places. After a 30 minute telephone conversation she managed to thoroughly scare him. It turned out that baby ducks cannot fly and if they fall from our fourth-floor balcony, they will be falling towards a certain baby duck death and if that happens, then Tim will forever be a baby duck killer. The discussion resulted in Tim spending 60 Euros in the home improvement store and another 3 hours in own engineering efforts to create a foolproof netting system to be put around the flower pot. A closed facility, if you will, for the most delinquent and curious baby ducks. The duck momma was christened as Zelda, provided with some hay and wheat, and the three of us sat, watched and waited.
and a DVD of 
(thanks Gosi), a set of beautiful amuse-bouche spoons and a beautiful cookbook by Tessa Kiros called 
(thank you, Marion and Uli) and finally the coolest gift of all: a South African cuisine cooking class (thank you, the best of all husbands). This last gift was finally consumed last weekend and it reminded me just how much I love to cook. It has also motivated me to get off my derriere and start posting again. I have been neglecting Kitchen Crush for the past month, mostly because I was just so absorbed by my new job, and somewhat because I have caught a severe case of “the lazies”. I can’t explain it, but the fact that I started working and being productive in one area of my life, sent a treacherous signal to my brain which said “it’s okay to bum around for the rest of the time”. And so I bummed, and I bummed, and then I bummed some more, all the while feeling guilty about abandoning Kitchen Crush and my readers. A month has gone by and I think that the bumming period is over… it is high time to get back on track and to keep on doing what has made me so happy throughout February and March. So, I thought I would start the month by writing a bit about the cooking class that gave me that little kick I needed to get back on track.
