Column: Something About Nothing

A Facebook friend posted that reading cooking blogs is like miniature torture sessions because she doesn’t have a kitchen right now. My friend is a mother with children and she likes to cook.

I understand reading cooking blogs. I love to read cooking blogs but it wouldn’t bother me a bit if my kitchen was out of order. It puzzles me as to the reason that I like to read cooking blogs and don’t like to cook.

My fascination with recipes doesn’t end with cooking blogs. I love cookbooks. Not only do I love cookbooks, I like to buy cookbooks. Church cookbooks are a favorite for me to buy. I have new Better Homes & Gardens cookbooks and the old ones. I pick up cookbooks at garage sales. I have been known to subscribe to Taste of Home, Simple & Delicious and pick up the cookbooks of these same magazines.

I also have stacks of the soft cover Pillsbury Cookbooks. I think I have bought every year of the Pillsbury Bakeoff cookbook.

You might think I am a cookbook hoarder. You might ask the question “Why would someone that doesn’t like to cook buy cookbooks?

I have pared down many of my cookbooks by selling them on eBay. I don’t fit the cookbook hoarder category. I don’t have any problem getting rid of cookbooks.

I honestly can’t answer the other question. I don’t know why I buy cookbooks. It could be the mouth-watering pictures. It could be that I have dreams of becoming another Paula Deen since I do have her pots and pans. Maybe I need a cookbook collector special kind of Dr. Phil type person to help me analyze my cookbook collectoritis.

Or perhaps I need a plan to try all of the recipes and then I could blog about it, except my past blogging endeavors haven’t been too successful because of time constraints. I also would have to live to be thousands of years old to try the recipes in all of my cookbooks.

I have another little secret. I do hoard recipes from magazines. I tear them out and put them in a special folder or more than one special folder. Once in a while I do try a recipe such as a fish recipe that uses various spices. I love that recipe because fish doesn’t taste fishy. Did I mention I don’t like fishy fish? My family asks me “Why eat fish if you don’t like it to taste like fish?

I do fit the “recipe that got torn from a magazine” hoarder category. I have a hard time throwing away those recipes. I start to sort through the folder to find recipes that I would never make. As I sift though each one I know that somewhere in the future there is the possibility that I could make that recipe. I tuck the recipe back into the folder and the stack of recipes keeps on growing.

I don’t care. I don’t care if I am a magazine recipe hoarder. Don’t send the hoarder people to me. I don’t want to change. I don’t want to cook. I want to keep dreaming about cooking and tasting the delicious recipes that others make for me. Don’t call Dr. Phil. I won’t talk to him. Don’t throw my magazine recipes in the garbage, I will dig them out.

Maybe I will write a blog about hoarding recipes but if I did that I might want to expand my hoarding back to cookbooks too. And then there are also all the recipes that you can print off of the internet. I could make it a full-time job finding delicious recipes to add to my dream recipe hoarding collection.

I hope my friend gets her kitchen back soon so she can try all those delicious recipes on the blog she found. Maybe she will invite me over.

Wells resident Julie Seedorf’s column appears every Monday. Send email to her at thecolumn@bevcomm.net.