In Which I Write the Ideal Cookbook with the Help of Bogus Algebra

So I was drinking red wine at a book launch the other day and talking with three published book authors. They all knew each other and I didn't know anyone, so I resorted to my time-honored technique of holding a drink and smiling vaguely like I knew something the rest of the room didn't. The goal is to seem worldly and mysterious, although I probably just seem stoned and stand-offish.

It didn't help that I had a headache so terrible that everytime I swallowed (and I swallowed often, since the free appetizers included spring rolls and deviled eggs) I heard the horsemen of the apocalypse riding around somewhere in my ear canal. I was attempting to mitigate my misery by drinking wine, but either the medicinal properties of booze have declined since I was in college, or my medical needs have matured.

At any rate, there I was, surrounded by accomplished people in an 'intimate' bookstore that smelled vaguely of menthol and contained an entire section dedicated to furniture. I shifted between eyeing my wine and the bookstore's sex titles, which were garishly and freely displayed on an eye-level shelf, as if the owners wanted to indicate that this was not, in fact, your grandma's bookstore (where "marital aid" titles are suitably stashed in the back between the clearance bin and the section on DIY drywall, where you can spend hours without worrying about encountering a wayward browser)

After the conversation was over, I casually mentioned to my friend that I'd taken the day off work (believe me, I could barely string together a sentence, and when I spoke I sounded like an Olympic-level contender in the nose guitar event) and that I'd spent the entire day eating.

"But I thought you were sick," she said, in genuine surprise.

Ever since I was young, whenever left alone for any extended period of time, I ate. It became such an ingrained hobby that now I don't even think about eating - by and large, if I'm alone, I'm probably eating. There was a time, before I discovered the social pressures that press down on every other woman since birth, that my chronic eating was a legitimate problem. I used to measure out servings of ice cream by packing the stuff into a metal water glass using a fork, like a farmer tamping down compost.

Now that I'm constantly on a diet (particularly of late, thanks to some relatives with a narrower perception of beauty than my current frame) I find myself trying to reconcile two warring sides of my psyche, much like Arjun at Kurukshetra.

This has led me to a lot of experimentation with food. I've found soup is the ideal constantly-eating-while-dieting food, and in the right hands, it doesn't even feel like a time filler. But there are also other options, like apples with cheese (sometimes, in an attempt to save on fat, I forgo the apples) or saltines with cream cheese and jalapenos, or salsa (all by itself.) Recently I've also discovered I like popcorn.

You may have gathered by now that I'm terrible at dieting. It's true.

I recently bought a box of potato gnocchi at a specialty grocery store. After eating half of it I went online to find out if gnocchi are healthy. It turns out they are! There are entire pages dedicated to making gnocchi at home, although most of these recipes involve an oven.

Which brings me to my central point, after much dithering. Cookbooks. Even in the over-saturated book publishing market in the US, there is a niche that needs to be filled. Where are the cookbooks for people like me?

Sure, there are shelves full of books for parents who want to work two jobs and still feed their children delicious home-cooked meals that will ensure their offspring grow up to be President, or at least not an axe-murderer or a contestant on reality TV. But what about people like me, whose main goal in eating is to stave off boredom and occasionally scurvy?

When adding up all the ingredients required by all the recipes in my ideal cookbook, the number can't be greater than four times my current age. The distance I have to travel in order to procure these ingredients should be short enough that it takes at most ten minutes, via rolling office chair. The number of implements required should be a prime number such that n is greater than 0 and less than 10.

And now we get to the really tricky math:
-Each of the ingredients should pertain to at least three recipes (For example: if one of the ingredients is 'testicles of a squid' the author of the cookbook should be aware that testicles come in pairs, and there had better be enough balls-based recipes that I'm going to use up that supply, because otherwise the unused testicle will sit in my vegetable crisper until it turns black and dissolves into slush and completely dashes any hope I ever had of reselling the fridge)
-None of the implements, on their own, should require 'prep time' (In college, I once misguidedly bought a Thai cookbook. The entire first chapter was devoted to 'seasoning your wok' - a two-day process that required a lot of vegetable oil and free time. In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have bought a cookbook from the 'marital aid' section of the bookstore)
-The travel time required in order to obtain the ingredients combined with the prep time for each recipe should really not be longer than 20 minutes, assuming that I'm traveling via office chair to get the ingredients
-Every recipe should cost, at most, 10 cents per serving. Counting labor. (If the person cooking for me is the Pope, Amartya Sen or Benjamin Button as played by Brad Pitt in the latter two hours of that interminable film, I might raise this by a few cents. Provided the proceeds go to charity)

Really, the ideal cookbook for me would be at most a page long. It would go something like this: Buy a bottle of wine, a block of cheese, some bread and an apple. Go on a picnic! (By 'picnic' I mean 'eat in the living room' since we're restricted by the whole office chair transport situation) For bonus points, pretend you're one of those mice from that awesome Redwall series by Brian Jacques!

Although, come to think of it, those mice were always eating things like parsley and chestnut pastie and dandelion wine, so never mind. (I mean, the mice were monks. What else were they gonna do but hang around and cook? In fact, it occurs to me that I could solve a lot of these problems of mine by rooming with a monk. They'd wake up early, be tidy, cook nice meals, discuss weighty subjects and there'd be no confusion over the whole 'open bed' policy that some male roommates seem to think is practically a clause in the lease. It's not. What are we, King Arthur's knights in the days of droit de seigneur?)