So I bought a new cookbook today...

Because of the way bus timetables, uni timetables, and work rosters are all set up, I seem to have a lot of time to spend wondering around Borders. There's one near uni, and there's one in the same shopping centre as my cinema. I usually have, like, twenty minutes between classes finishing and buses arriving each day. And obviously, in that time, I head straight for the cookbooks. I've now developed a huge list of books I want to buy...

1. Nigel Slater's Appetite (actually, all his books, I love his writing so much)
2. All the Magnolia Bakery cookbooks
3. All of Anthony Bourdain's ones
4. Bill Granger's Sydney Food
5. PIE (I don't remember who this one's by, but it's devoted soley to pie recipes, and it's thicker even than How to Eat... sounds like heaven)

Today, I indulged, and using a 20% off voucher I had, I bought Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, which I've had my eye on for aaages. I opened it up on the bus home, started reading the introduction, and couldn't put it down! It's soooo awesome, Anthony has a really engaging, passionate style - it's immensely readable. And that's before you get to the recipes! Ooh, the recipes!

It's all big, hearty, French, bistro-style food. And after having made lots of fantastic, big hearty stew-type recipes from How to Eat, I am sooo ready to be tucking into these meaty dishes. I'm inspired... I want to devote my weekends to making up huge pots of demi-glace, preparing duck confit, making fatty-as-all-hell rillettes to share with my family around a big wooden table. And despite the horrible four months that was my-life-as-a-cook-in-a-restaurant-kitchen, I'm almost inspired to get all angry and anal-retentive during cooking, shouting out shit like "Hold your knife properly, you useless screwhead!". (But I don't think my mum would like that).

But obviously I can't... dreams of turning my kitchen into an idyllic reconstruction of French peasantry are all on hold, whilst I continue to work my way through (the still much-loved) How to Eat. I barely have enough time to keep up with all the recipes in this book, let alone do new ones.

I don't know what it is, but I seem to be afflicted with the condition of obsessing over what I can't have. This must explain my fixation with other cookbooks...

...and why I keep buying food magazines, and collecting other recipes...

...why I get really obsessed with reading How to be a Domestic Goddess when I'm on a low-carb diet...

...why I constantly browse through shops whose clothes I can't afford, like Miss Sixty, Pierucci and so on...

...and why I always hang out with gay boys.