Okay, so here's the deal.

I recently watched the movie "Julie and Julia", to which I had three visceral reactions:

1. I think Stanley Tucci is adorable.

2. A craving for chocolate buttercream frosting.

3. A desire to replicate the experiment on my own, which would be a lovely idea except that I don't eat meat.

So- what to do? Over bean tacos, post-movie, it was actually my husband that had the idea: do it with a series of veg*n cookbooks, one at a time. So, this baby was born. My new task is to pick a book: I have what seems like eight thousand of them, so this might be a bit of a process.

The goal, of course, is to cook one recipe per day from my selected volume. There will be a 19-day break in December, when I'm on vacation in Germany, but otherwise I'm going to attempt to do this without breaks. This means I'm going to have to stop being lazy about food photography and actually remember where my good camera is so I don't put whoever winds up reading this through iPhone-photo hell.

But I digress. Back to the food. As I gaze up at my cookbooks (many of them are stored up above our kitchen cabinetry, so I really am looking up), my first instinct is to begin with Crescent Dragonwagon's monumental Passionate Vegetarian. I've cooked up a good deal of her recipes and loved them all. Then again, the book truly is voluminous, and it might literally take three years to work through it all. Hrmm.

For now, I'll go to bed undecided, chewing on a chocolate cupcake that I adapted from Julia Child's Reine de Saba cake recipe. YUM!