Lately I've been bored and restless. Things at work have mostly calmed down from the auction (although I'm still recovering from the stress -- shown mostly by an increased irritability, joy for my coworkers), building community is still taking its time, and with summer coming up, my grad student friends will jettison themselves from South Bend as quickly as they can. So a thinned out social scene awaits me in the next few months, and singleness is, at the least, a further source of boredom. (There's no one to call and say, "Let's go for a walk!" who has to come and walk with me.)
So I did the only thing a girl with a penchant for most things culinary can do.
I bought five new cookbooks.
This is a very logical act. While working on "fitting in" and building a life here, over which I only have so much control, I don't have many new interesting things to do, and often very few people with whom to spend my daily life; and lacking the money to dine out on the exquisite food I enjoy eating, I have to fall back on making it myself. So cooking good food is an easy (or challenging!), enjoyable to way give my life a little flavor, relatively cheaply.
One of the most important aspects of cooking, for me, is not falling into a rut or getting bored. For the past three weeks just before grocery shopping day, I've been thinking, What do I want to eat?...and coming up blank. I flip through all my recipes and they're all so...blah. I'm not in the mood for any of them.
Time for something new. And something new showed up at Borders in the form of: Juices and Smoothies, Mediterranean, Mexian, Spanish, and Jewish cookbooks. I've done nothing for the past two days but read all the recipes and bookmark the ones I want to try.
I'm insanely excited to restock my cupboards and buy (a little at a time; I'm still on a poverty income) new accesories to expand my abilities to make such things as tortillas and flan. It's a little taste of something fresh, and a way to broaden my horizons while I lack the capacity to travel the world, or even the area restaurants.
Plus the pictures are pretty. My mouth watered all day paging through them.
1 comment:
Ooooo, so happy to oblige.
Actually they're all printed by Barnes & Noble and Borders -- and I picked them all up on sale.
The vegetarian cookbook is titled (sensibly enough) "Vegetarian," edited by Nicola Graimes, printed by Barnes & Noble Books.
My other never-failed-me-yet is "The Ultimate Soup Bible," consultant editor Anne Sheasby, printed by Barnes & Noble.
I'll keep you updated on the sucesses of the newbies!
And CONGRATS on Case Western!!! Cleveland is...kind of far from South Bend, but closer than Grove City. And it's a cool city...and it's on Lake Erie! (Cleveland is where Lake Erie, in the heyday of the industrial days before the Green Party started making the planet pretty again, and due to the pollutants and wastes and chemicals dumped into the lake, periodically caught on fire.)
And Jim Brickman is from Cleveland. And my morbidly obese, unpleasant, ankleless, dead great-aunt used to live in a run-down neighborhood in Cleveland. And I saw Eddie Izzard in Cleveland.
Yup. Cleveland. Anyway, many many congrats!!!
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