Marzipan pears- step one!

I'm not dead yet, encased in some cocoon of powdered sugar and rosewater.

Close, though.

The "pears" (in quotes because there's nothing pear-like about them except their shape) are done, except for the second and final dusting of sugar. I've promised myself to only eat two per day, but I'm addicted to rosewater and it's huuurrrrrrdddd to pry myself away from the baking sheet in the kitchen where they lurk, yummy and oh so delicious.

I'm going to put the final touches on tomorrow and- gasp! Post a photo. I think. It depends on if my cat has knocked my camera off of the kitchen counter one too many times, or not. I'm hoping not. I can't afford a new one.

Drumroll, pweeze

I have tentatively decided to work my way through Vefa Alexiadou's monumental Vefa's Kitchen, the epic Greek cookbook recently published by Phaidon Press.

I recently acquired this and have already made a few of the recipes.

How many times can I use the word recently in one blog post? ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!

Now, a few caveats. Number one, I don't cook every day, so this isn't going to be some hardcore Julie/Julia thingy where I'm up to my elbows in duck fat every night. Number two, I won't be up to my elbows in duck fat EVER because I'm a vegetarian. For this reason, I can't make every recipe in this book. However, I'm going to do my best to make all of the vegetarian recipes, and perhaps to modify some of the omnivorous ones to suit my tastes.

I've picked this book for numerous reasons. Besides the fact that it's a beautifully-produced volume and the recipes I've already made have turned out well, the Mediterranean diet is well-known as one of the world's healthiest. As a person who's recently lost over 90 pounds, this is, of course, important.

So, onward and upward!

Tomorrow: Marzipan Pear Petit-fours.

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!