The Newest Obsession

I can usually blame any obsession I have on someone else. After all, it was their fault I got hooked on said obsessions in the first place. You’ve already read about my newest novel quest obsession (I’ll provide an update for that later.) “What about your obsession with strong drink?” you may think to ask and I will readily tell you 1) that is more of a hobby, and 2) my DBBF is to blame. I will however, say that it is a hobby in which I don’t frequently indulge anymore. Case in point, I have a bottle of Reisling chilling in the refrigerator, a bottle of Shiraz on the top shelf of the pantry and another bottle of Moscato Rosé on the middle shelf in the pantry. Not to mention the various assortments of liquor that is available for margaritas, rum punches, and martinis. The point is that all this has remained untouched. Two years ago, the three wines alone would have been gone within a week. The real point is that I’m a responsible mommy now who wants to be highly aware for her son in the event he wakes up in the middle of the night for any reason. I can’t do that plied with alcohol.

But the obsession that I am talking of now is with the Food Network. For years, my cousin has been telling me about Food Network and HGTV and how she watches faithfully, naming chefs like most people would sitcom characters. Up until I started watching, the only cooks I was familiar with were Paula Deen, Rachel Ray, and Julia Child. Yes, I’m telling my age with Julia Child. These cooks were only familiar because they’d made it to mainstream TV. And there was that chef that used to come on every week in a five-minute segment for local television in Virginia. I’d even heard the name Bobby Flay bandied about but I was never sure of his occupation.

This obsession is not as easy to assign blame to as any of the others, primarily because there were so many people talking about Food Network and HGTV. In addition to my cousin, I would come to work and everyone in the office would be talking about a show on one of these stations like it was The Office. “Did you see that cake?” Or “I really loved the way he laid that mosaic tile.” These phrases would be said in whispered and awed tones, and I’d sit there, wondering what in the world these people were talking about and even at times looking at them as if they were a little crazy. I mean, to get obsessed over as groundbreaking a show as Survivor was understandable, but Cake Boss? Really?

I was once relegated to watching mostly movies and select television series. I had this whole “thing” about watching too much reality TV. I figured that Survivor was the original reality show and that all the others were imitators. So, other than catching a few episodes of The Bachelor because it came on right after another of my favorite shows went off, I stayed away from reality TV.

But then a strange thing happened.

I started dating.

My significant other (and I know you’re still wondering about the whole “I’m engaged news) is a consummate channel flipper. I used to think I was such a TV junkie that I could watch a test pattern, but I came to discover that I’m rather discerning in my tastes. I don’t like crime dramas, and other than Grey’s Anatomy and now Private Practice, I try to stay away from the medical dramas. Of course the SO is a big lover of Criminal Minds, but in between, he’s always looking for something “good” to watch. It is in this spirit that I discovered the Food Network. One night, he turned it to the show Chopped. I did not know I could get so into a competitive cooking show! Now I record it, and on those days when I watch marathon sessions of it, I end up dreaming about the show; I kid you not, night before last, I kept dreaming about nopale, a cactus used in Mexican cooking, because it was one of the ingredients. The show really does not only provide some culinary knowledge, but some cultural and vocabulary knowledge as well. For you Family Guy fans, take for instance, the word Quohag: I recently found out it’s a type of clam; no wonder the bar is named the Drunken Clam. Those Family Guy people are really clever—sick, but clever.

At first, it was all about the ways in which these cooks could transform weird ingredients that were thrown at them. But after a while, it became more than the cooks or the recipes on there, because I found myself slowly but surely liking the judges. At first I didn’t want to like them because they sit there all stoic and judge people, and on the show, some of them can be downright mean. But then I figured out who the host, Ted Allen was (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy). And then, I developed a favorite: Aarón Sánchez, Latin cuisine authority. And it was all downhill from there. Next thing you knew I found myself liking the two most-frequent female judges, Alex Guarnascelli (I spelled her name right without needing the internet!) and Amanda Freitag, then Chris Santos. I’m still not a huge fan of two of the judges, but that will remain to be seen after I do my latest obsessive research. This latest obsession started because I decided to watch Aarón’s new show, Heat Seekers. Basic rundown of the show: two guys travel the country looking for the hottest foods in America. Rarely do both of them finish a meal. But the point of this is, I got to see a whole new side to Aarón: a lighter side and I got thinking, what if they all have this lovable lighter side? So now, besides watching Chopped and Heat Seekers, I have now signed up at FoodNetwork.com and saved a few recipes and read a couple bios of the judges, and will commit myself to watching at least one episode of their show to see what their personality really is.

Damn…another project!

But as for the need to watch Food Network, it must be some sort of rite of passage that goes along with being a homeowner. Or maybe parenthood. The home ownership theory would also explain why that same cousin also watches HGTV. But even though I am a proud new homeowner, I am also proud to say that my obsession has not yet taken me to HGTV, although I can see it coming because already I have been to Lowe’s one too many times this summer.

As to the other obsession of completing the series of books that my former dean belabored me with, I have made some progress. Again, this is probably going to be a SERIOUS project from here on out, so I decided to be somewhat systematic in my approach. First, I looked online to verify which books were indeed in a series (even though I didn’t exaggerate in the last blog about these when I said that almost EVERY SINGLE ONE was part of a series. Let me give you a rough idea of the volume of books my former dean has given me over the years. We found out in passing conversation that we enjoy the same specific genre of romance fiction: 18th century England. And I inadvertently mentioned that after she finished, she could pass them on to me. What I didn’t know at the time was that she reads roughly two novels per week. Of these novels, about 50% of them are period romances. Keep in mind also that when I’m working and teaching, I have NO time to do any leisurely reading and now I can rarely leisurely read at home. So I have garnered quite a collection of books to read.

Having systematically approached this project, I printed the booklists of the authors my former dean favored. This was about a 20-page generation, so I decided to consolidate those twenty pages into a Word document which now only encompasses three pages (I kept some of the some of the authors’ original pages). On those three pages alone, I have counted a total of 70+ books, and I have only read about five of them.

As I do this project, for the most part I am not reading every single book written by these authors unless it is specifically part of the series of books that I already have. There are exceptions to this. Two of the authors consistently lace characters throughout all their books. For this reason, their series will be one of the last tackled. I’ve decided to start with the smaller, easy to complete series first, and then move my way through the more complex, completing each in the series as I move forward.

A big help to my project has been Amazon.com; it is very convenient to be able to pick up books for as little as $3 and get them shipped to you free in two days. But an even better route that I have recently discovered is Google e-books. Yesterday, I’d finished the first book of one of my series and was eager to move onto the next. While I had purchased the book, it was still in the package from Amazon on my coffee table. So, just out of curiosity, I typed the title in the Google search bar and lo and behold! The entire text was there. How awesome is that! Now I don’t know how many books I’ll be able to access this way, but I am sure going to try that method before Amazon.