“Honey do you mind vaccuming today?” I asked Mr NQN last Saturday.

“Errr okaaay….later” he said  looking at me with a measure of suspicion. I’m sure he wondered how a perfectly lovely weekend day had suddenly turned hideous.

About  twenty minutes later, I heard some expletives from the lounge room. “&*(&(&(!!” he yelled and then repeated it for good measure. “I’ve put out my neck!” he said woundedly.

“How? You were just sitting there on the couch playing on your phone!” I asked.

“I dunno, I just did” he said. And with that he limped off to the bedroom to sleep off the rest of the day.

Now, I’m not accusing him of faking it, I think that he had really hurt himself but I couldn’t help noting the coincidence in timing. Our plans to do the grocery shopping were aborted and I spent the rest of the day cleaning. And I was bored.

I decided that the weather was perfect for a spot of baking. If you remember last Saturday in Sydney, it was a summer day that was little cooler than usual so the oven heat wouldn’t be too much of an intrusion. Alas, as it was grocery shopping day, our fridge and pantry supplies were running low and I could only make one item that sat on my “to cook” list. One that I found on Jenny’s blog Practically Perfect.

It fit the brief exactly. I didn’t have any bread so I needed to make some for lunch. I had flour, salt, beer, cheese and green onions and it was a cinch as it didn’t require any kneading or proving at all. Just a stir of everything in a bowl and a stint in the oven and then we had our perfect bread for your Australian male specimen.

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I was always hopeless at Maths at school. I looked at it like some sort of strange wizardry and my teachers used to be frustrated at how I just could not wrap my head around things as simple as calculus and I kept wondering why they would try to make me do something that seems as natural as a fish riding a bicycle. I maintain that to this day I’ve never had to use calculus in life-not that I know of course because I only have a fleeting familiarity with it. My maths anguish was combined with the fact that my sister breezed through 4 unit maths whilst I floundered in 2 unit and well you can see how when someone tries to talk maths with me I cringe. I much preferred English as a subject.

I grudgingly have to admit that ratios do play a large part in my life. Ratios and fractions are crucial for cooking and baking and if you get the ratio wrong, well you can change a dish completely and for the worse. Mr NQN is not fond of baked bready things-he finds them too stodgy and dry but I knew that when he tried this bread with what appeared to be a fabulous ratio of bread to filling then he might be won over.

Povitica is a swirly Croatian or Slovenian bread dough much like a sweet brioche that is rolled out until paper thin, slathered with a sweet spread like ground walnuts or poppyseeds and then rolled up and then baked. The resulting bread has a lovely marbled effect inside and resembles swirls or the layers of a tree trunk. And as soon as I saw it on the Daring Bakers website I knew I wanted to make one and not just screeching in before the deadline. Povitica are not easy to find here in Australia and our hostess Jenni told us of first trying these at a American Farmer’s Market where they were $25 each!

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There was Mr NQN his eyes wide glued to the television. He was riveted, watching a stark naked man running across the ice.

“Honey come have a look! Bear is running across the ice naked!!!”

“And I would want to see this, why?” I asked raising an eyebrow from the comfort of the other room.

I’m convinced most men have a secret man crush on Bear Grylls or at least want to be him. For me, I’m still wondering why his name is Bear and why he keeps doing the things that he does and whether at night he sits in a 5 star hotel getting pampered or simply pulls up stumps on the side of a road and unfurls his sleeping bag. I have also learned never to interrupt Mr NQN while he is watching him. Not that I could pull his attention away. “Shhh…Bear” is all he will say to quiet my questions, his eyes not moving from the screen.

Mr NQN was having his brother over and they were going to do manly sporty things while I was away. I knew that they would both be starving and helpless (where has the caveman that seeks food out gone?) so I needed to buy some food to feed them lest they raid the ingredients that I had bought to test out recipes with. So I made them brioche to eat. But as life is often  about marketing something properly I told him that instead of it being a sour cream custard brioche (code for “fancy”) my down to earth husband would be content with “some bread with some custard on it.” I dared to buy them some brie and some Afghan bread and knew that they would be fine and fed.

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