Not enough hours in the day...

Although Heidi's cooking blog does live on my right hand wall of fame, I thought I'd actually write a bit more about it today, as I was procrastinating. Shocking!, I know, but it happens. (Not often, of course, for all you clients out there reading this, but occasionally. And it never happens, of course, when I'm working on your project, but it does occasionally happen.)

There are two basic ways I procrastinate - either very productively on something entirely unrelated to what I need to get done right now today this minute, or dreaming and fantasizing and researching feverishly about something (or things) I'd much rather be doing than what I need to get done right now today this minute.

And quite often, the latter involves food, and cooking. I love to cook. I dream about cooking. I yearn to cook. I have a prodigious collection of cookbooks, from many of which I have yet to make one, single, solitary recipe. Not one. I have an old-fangled (for all you loyal readers out there, you'll get it... for you newbies, search the blog and it'll all come together nicely, I promise) egg-box crammed with recipes from newspapers (I love you, Mark Bittman, Nigella Lawson, Amanda Hesser...), magazines, cans and other oddball sources, like the little card that's about 2 inches square from the restaurant BLT on east 57th St. in New York with a recipe for Yorkshire Pudding. It's in that box, I'm sure of it. Come to think of it - I've actually made that recipe, and it's quite yummy.

So periodically, when I really, and I mean REALLY, should be doing something else, I find myself sneaking over to 101cookbooks.com and reading up on what she's been cooking up lately - her premise is that she is going to go through her prodigious collection of cookbooks and actually cook from them. What a concept.

I did make a pretty darn good garbage pasta carbonara the other night - given that I had no peas, I made it with spinach. And I have never actually made a real carbonara, but this one had soft sauteed onions, scrambled eggs, ricotta cheese, whole wheat pasta, wilted spinach - all topped with crumbled bacon I made ahead of time in the oven. It really was tasty. But it didn't come out of a single cookbook. Oh well.