Strategy!

It's almost midnight, I still can't breathe without my mouth open (no matter which meds I take), and all I want to do before I go to bed is get some of my article written. Deadline on said article: tomorrow. Or rather, the day that begins in four minutes. So what am I doing? Surfing the web, of course! (A habit I somehow managed to pick up in college, where else?)

I've been thinking about this personal mission/job requirement I have of becoming a foodie. It's not that I don't appreciate fine food - I do! I love making it, eating it, reading about it and, up until the day before deadline I even enjoy writing about it. It's just that I still feel as if I am a small child wandering through a parent's cocktail party and catching snippets of grown up conversation. I am reading Best Food Writing of 2006 right now, for example, which is having some calming effect on me, since I realize that the people published in that wonderful collection weren't born foodies either, well, not most of them anyways. But then tonight I came across a Forbes list of best food blogs (Ok, ok, I Google searched it), chose the least intimidating blog and began reading. Began to realize at once how much I did not know I did not know. Feeling slightly overwhelmed, I looked up absently from the laptop screen to digest (no pun intended), and came face to face with a row of my roomies vegetarian cookbooks. Vegetables. More intimidation. I chose one at random (Vegetarian: Over 300 healthy and wholesome recipes chosen from around the world, consultant editor Nicola Graimes), flipped through it, taking in a couple of random recipes and then quickly shut it. Talk about overwhelmed!

Now, admittedly, I am not a fan of vegetables. The cooked carrots of my childhood invoke my gag reflex (sorry Mom, it's not your cooking - it's the carrots, I swear) and the best part of my salad is usually the dressing. In fact, I can count on my fingers the number of vegetables I enjoy eating. However, I don't think that I have given veggies a fair chance. There's a very large group of people out there (one living right under my very roof) who live on the stuff, so what am I missing? (Interesting, slightly funny sidenote - if you take apart the word vegetarian, the suffix "-arian" means, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, "believer in, advocate of." Haha! An advocate of vegetables. A believer in vegetables... This is a bit ironic too, since the last vegetarian I met told me that she was a vegetarian not because she really liked animals, it's just that she really hated vegetables. Think about it. It's funny.)

So my first plan of action in becoming a foodie, then, is to conquer the vegetable. Or at least have a working respect for veggies. This large Vegetarian cookbook open on the couch next to me contains nine chapters: Breakfasts and Brunches, Soups and Appetizers, Light Meals, Main Courses, Special Occasions, Tarts, Pies and Pizzas, Salads, Side Dishes, and Deserts, Cakes and Baked Goods. At more than 300 recipes, with nine chapters, I figure that if I can work my way through a third of them, about 10 recipes per chapter, by the end of the book I will not only have a working knowledge of my least favorite section of the food pyramid, but I will also be able to cook something that my roommate can eat!

I know that this concept has been done for a blog - Julie and Julia comes to mind, but it's a good idea. It makes sense, and besides, this isn't really a gimick to get people to read my blog... it's more of a structural learning program - kind of a personal thing - and if my trial and error can entertain here and there, then we all benefit. I'll share the recipes I like and if you, wonderful reader, have any you'd like to suggest along the way, it would thrill me not only to get a posted response to my blog entry, but I'd be interested in trying those as well.

So for tonight, this is good night. Stay tuned for the first of my Vegetarian recipe attempts. Tomorrow night I'm headed home for a family dinner night - I think some sort of Mexican fajita lasagna is on the menu. Delightfully non-vegetarian. Yum. Can't wait!