Food Fantasies

I am pretending, for the moment, that I do not have a million papers to grade, a lecture to write (on a book I haven't read) and a dissertation to research. I am pretending, just for a moment, that I haven't been horribly neglectful of this blog and my small and much-loved handful of readers and that I don't have a half dozen half-drafted blog posts on other subjects waiting for completion. I indulge, momentarily, in this fantasy in order to share with you my latest web obsession: tastespotting.com. It's like a compendium of all the best posts about food, restaurants, and recipes on the web. It's gorgeous and delicious and addictive.

I do love recipe blogs and food porn. I spend a fair amount of time baking and cooking and planning to bake and cook. I have a long-nurtured love of reading menus, and can follow a link to a restaurant website right down the rabbit hole into a world where I'm choosing appetizers and googling ingredients and trying to develop recipes for the things that look like they would be just perfect if only I swapped out this ingredient (usually olives) for something else. Thus, tastespotting.com is like the best thing I've ever seen.

It's also possibly the worst thing that could happen to my career as a graduate student. At tastespotting. com, anyone who is registered can add pictures and links to the food-centered things they find inspiring. (The gorgeous picture of the espresso caramels (that's right, I said espresso caramels) up top, from Culinary in the Country was linked to there.) As a result, it's updated practically minute by minute. Ok, maybe not that often. Maybe more like hour by hour. In other words: there is new material all. the. time. It's fantastic. It's new things to read and links to follow and foods to crave every minute. Much, much better than grading these papers. Much, much better.

So in a year or two when I'm made absolutely no progress on my dissertation, and I'm in here moaning and bitching and asking "What happened?" I'd like you all to comment, one after another, "tastespotting.com." Because this cannot end well.