Chemistry Set

Suffering a renewed passion in cooking lately, due to a whole list of enablers:

• My father sent me a NuWave for Christmas. I know that no one in the Food Network cooks with this thing, but it makes me far less scared of large cuts or whole parts of meat
• Julie & Julia--the movie, the book, the phenomenon. As a thank you gift for cat-sitting I am receiving Julia's two-volume cookbook--and while I'm not so ambitious as Julie Powell to squeeze all of the recipes into one year, I'm daring enough to make them a regular appearance
• The meat department at Andronico's. The one in the Inner Sunset has RABBIT, for Pete's sake. Time to go wild...
• Food Network--while I can't watch it all day like I used to, I can watch with acute interest when they cook some strange and wonderful blends, and then get the recipes on-line.

With all of these things in my chemistry set and a desire to eat healthier, is it any wonder that I should look forward to this year?