$200? Or $2,000?

While I was in Bordeaux earlier this year, for a month, I was working on a cookbook. I really wanted it to work. I was shopping around for publishers. I wanted to call it "The Saturday Cookbook", owing to my penchant for going shopping Saturday mornings and cooking all afternoon while watching cooking shows on PBS.

So I bought some cookbooks in Bordeaux and translated some of the more intriguing recipes on to my laptop. I made a couple of them (the Magret de canard au miel was the best meal I have ever made, bar none) and I had a prototype, with maybe a hundred recipes, all designed and laid out in Adobe InDesign, all on my laptop.

Yes, you guessed correctly.

I came back to Montreal and one day was jamming on my guitar to some blues being pumped out from my laptop. The sound was stuttering, for some reason. So I went and did the mature thing: I gave it a thump.

It stopped working. The fellow who replaced the hard drive said he'd done all he could do to get back the data; even frozen the damn thing in the freezer to see if it might shake something loose.

No go.

So I brought it in, finally, to Vital Data to see if Vitaly can bring back my month's worth of cookbook.

But he wasn't encouraging. "The estimate is free but it will cost you a minimum of $200 and a maximum of $2,000 . . ."

I told him to just get me the recipe for the Magret de canard au miel.

All the rest is just gravy.