I hate coming up with titles for these things

It's fairly easy to gauge how depressed I'm feeling by monitoring how much Law and Order I allow myself to watch. In happy times, I'm very strict - one episode per day, a maximum of two days per week. Then as I get bluer, one episode turns into two, and two days per week into four. Before I know it, I'm taking in entire marathons, five and six episodes at a time, while lying in bed eating gourmet dark chocolate bars (often in lieu of dinner) and chain-drinking Diet Pepsi. It is not, as Martha Stewart would say, a good thing.

Then, as I sense that I am beginning to develop a televisual addiction, I invariably decide that I ought to try trading Detectives Green and Briscoe in for a good book. Or, in the case of this particular chain of events, four good books (okay, maybe not good...I'm not exactly reading classics) in ten days. By the time last night rolled around, I was just a little tiny bit sick of happy endings, and suspected that perhaps my addiction had just been transferred from one object to another. I am, after all, the girl whose mother was once called into a conference because my teacher was concerned that I needed to stop reading so much and start playing with the other children.

I was bored. I coudn't bear the thought of more chick lit, and I didn't have any fashion magazines to flick through. I have a strongly enforced no-internet-at-home rule, so that wasn't an option, and I had already devoted much of the workday to my novel (yes, I'm writing a novel...you can stop laughing now). So instead, I decided to indulge in one of my secret favorite activites - reading cookbooks.

Is that weird? For some reason I've always felt the need to be really clandestine about it. Like I'd be embarassed if someone walked in on me reading Mastering the Art of French Cooking as voraciously as if it were the latest issue of US Weekly. Okay, I'd be more embarassed to be caught reading US, unless it featured a really scintillating article on how exactly Britney Spears manages to be considerably heftier than me, yet can dance around in a bra and panties without anything shaking. I would pay at least three times its cover price and weather any public humiliation to know how that is possible. Anyway. Cookbooks.

So I was reading my copy of The French Chef Cookbook (which I would like to say is battered and stained from love and overuse, but is in fact as pristine as it was the day I bought it) and, in the back of my mind, thinking about that memoir Julie and Julia, in which the author spends a year preparing every single recipe in the aforementioned Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And then I thought, that's exactly what I need to do! Except with The French Chef Cookbook...because how many Julia Child cookbooks does one woman need in her collection? It would give me not only a mastery of classic French cooking techniques, but a general sense of accomplishment to boot!

Then it occurred to me that this really wasn't an especially good idea for a couple of reasons. To begin with, I would get fat. I know, I know, French women allegedly don't get fat, and I suppose that, given that as of 7:30 this morning I was a mere three pounds away from being medically underweight, it wouldn't kill me to gain a few. But the thought of all that butter and cream day in and day out sort of makes my stomach hurt.

Then there's the fact that while everything sounds really delicious and sexy when you say it in French, that isn't always the case. For example, don't ouefs en gelee sound like something you'd want to eat? No. It's eggs in aspic. As in, eggs encased in a cold layer of gelatin. I'll try anything twice - once for kicks, and a second time to make sure I wasn't wrong the first time - but that does not sound appealing to me in the least. And I wish I had the book here with me now, because that's just the tip of the iceberg. Julia Child seems to have been quite the aspic enthusiast, and I want no part of that. Nor do I want to bone an entire duck, kill a live lobster with a cleaver, or have anything to do with offal. And I think that it goes without saying that as accident prone as I am, I should avoid flambeeing at all costs. So while I may, in the future, attempt a cassoulet or a bouillabaisse, most of it is just not my tasse de the.

(Related: ever since Jess mentioned to me yesterday that she read Harry Potter in Spanish, I've been really wanting to read books in French. But the only book I currently own in French is L'Etranger, and suffice it to say that I don't want to read French badly enough to read Camus. Again.)

So anyway, this cooking as a hobby thing really worked its way into my brain, and I was thinking that a better way to do it would be to have a weekly Sunday afternoon dinner party. I was planning on having a housewarming supper anyway, but how fun would it be to turn it into a tradition? Just think about it: brisk autumn/winter afternoons spent in my gorgeous, cozy new apartment....delicious home-cooked meals...desserts from my ever-beloved Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook...football. I'm pretty psyched. Only thing is, October's pretty much booked solid for me, so I'm thinking the first Sunday in November. So mark your calendars, and I will keep the updates coming.

In the meantime, no more Law and Order. I mean it.