"Would you ever eat one of those cakes?"

"Oh heavens no..."

One of my favorite shows is The Simpsons, long may it reign on Sunday nights, and one of my very favorite episodes involved Bart sitting with Mrs. Skinner after he's done a chore for her and is waiting to be paid. I think she pays him in ribbon candy. Anyway, she's showing him an album of photos of cakes that she's cut out of magazines and cookbooks. He asks her if she ever ate any of those cakes and she replies, "Oh heavens no..."

This is a long way of saying that I loooooove reading recipes in magazines, cookbooks, newspapers, and online but I never make any of them. I love pictures too, especially when the cooks show the ingredients and steps they take, not merely the finished product. I love watching cooking shows on television, especially PBS which has loads of old Julia Child-Jacques Pepin episodes. I love travel shows that involve cooking like Anthony Bourdain and Man Vs. Food. I love Gordon Ramsay's shows like Kitchen Nightmares (the British version is best) and Hell's Kitchen and I love reading restaurant reviews, even for places in cities and countries I will never visit. Ever. In my life.

But I rarely make anything more sophisticated than pasta with vegetables. I don't eat meat or cream sauces or dessert. And most nights of the week, I have a salad because I get home from class very late and don't want anything heavy before bed.

So why on earth am I a voyeur when it comes to food? I don't know. But here is a link to one of my very favorite recipe blogs, Smitten Kitchen. I actually did use a recipe from this site, a muffin recipe, I believe, and they came out great. Love the pictures, too.

The lure of leftovers

If you don't know me, you will probably think I sound strange and if you do know me, well, you'll probably think I'm a lot stranger than you already do.

I hate having food in the house.

Weird, huh?

I also hate furniture.Okay, see, I have this fear of settling down, of staying in one place too long, of not being able to pack up and leave at a moment's notice. Buying furniture - and painting the walls and putting up pictures and decorations and generally making an apartment more comfortable and personal - means you're stuck. You can't put all of your important belongings in the car and drive off.

I know, I know. I've been in this same apartment, same town, for ten years (10, oh my god) and it doesn't look like I'm about to leave any minute.

But I could. I can. I can leave what's here and start new somewhere else. I can put my husband and my ballet slippers and my laptop in the back of the car and just go. Well, maybe Mo doesn't go all the way in the back.

Freedom.

What exactly does this have to do with food and my distaste for having it in the house? You're probably asking yourself. And then quickly following that with, "man, Leigh is seriously deranged."

How could I just leave - or go away for the weekend or shake up my world - if there is food here? It means I can't do what I want when I want or the way I want. Food in the house, like furniture, requires me to make plans and decide where I'll be for a while. Most of the time, I do like plans and I do enjoy a routine but I like the feeling that I don't have to if I choose not to. In other words, I want to choose to be routine, not feel forced to have one.

Is that so strange?

Random Thoughts on a Friday

4 Things I Won't Ever Be

1. A car aficionado - As much as LA is a car culture, I just can't wrap my mind around spending the equivalent to a year's worth of college education on a car. I can't make the words "I drive an Avalanche" sound right coming out of my mouth.

2. A vegan - I like soy products, I really do, but I also like wearing cashmere. Is that so wrong?

3. A Tom Cruise fan - His bland likability may appeal to a wide swath of the movie-going public but he's too...bland and too...likable for my taste. He has no edge, unless you count jumping up and down on Oprah's couch edgy, and virtually no potential for criminal activity and I truly dig that in my Tinseltown idols.

4. A romance writer - Not in the sense of "a writer of romantic fiction," no, but perhaps in the "a writer who thinks it's romantic to be a writer" vein. For while I believe spending one's life in the pursuit of the perfect turn of phrase, the plot twist that no one saw coming, and the story that makes every reader cry at its end is both noble and worthy of great sacrifice, I simply haven't mastered the ability tot make a romance the centerpiece of my MC's world.

I tried it once and it turned out gay - literally. I wrote a novel about a girl whose life is turned upside down when she falls in love with another girl. Not that there's anything wrong with that...but it's certainly not a conventional love story.

Not that there's anything wrong with that either.