If you read my journal, you do, and if you don’t read it, suffice to say I have spent this month going, on average, 36 hours without calamity. The food blogging, especially in light of stupid crap like food poisoning, fell by the wayside.

I’m going to post, over the next few days, a pile of blogs about my Non-Easter gathering last weekend, pear tarts, plans for cooking Western American food from the 1880s for a roleplaying group, two Restaurant Week reviews, and a really big post planned on my new Wüsthof babies, thing one and thing two.

For now, though, I want to quote a book at you. A local bookstore, McIntyre& Moore, is moving to a new location soon, and so they are selling their stock at half price just to keep from having to move it. I was walking by with some time on my hands last week, so I went in and checked it out. Picked up a cookbook I’d never heard of but that was more about stocking your pantry for last minute cooking. I skimmed it, expecting to put it down, but the introduction had this:

“Most cooks are not born, but made, or rather self-made through intelligent study of cookbooks and much practice and experiment. The other attribute necessary to good cooking, in my view, is healthy greed.

Healthy, or creative, greed differs from gluttony in being a sociable, generously disposed vice, if indeed an instinct which generates so much harmless pleasure can be called a vice at all. Non-greedy people can become skilled cooks at a mechanical level, reproducing dishes reliably and well, but creative greed is what lures one on into trying to do better and different, into such culinary adventures such as boning ducks, pickling pork, stuffing sausage skins, crunching off on frosty mornings in search of wild fungi, lacerating fingers to fill a basket of wild blackberries, sitting up till all hours monitoring the raised pie whose juices simply will not run clear. Little adventures like these can end in tears or embarrassment (try bringing a whole garlic sausage in your handluggage the on your next flight home from abroad), but they keep cooking real and challenging in the teeth of so much that is designed to make it as easy, and as boring, as ordering the weeks groceries by computer.”

Jocasta Innes, in the Introduction to Food Magic, 1987