Recently I received a chain e-mail (chain mail?) requesting me to send along a recipe, preferably something tried and true that I could write down from memory, and also include a list of 10 or 20 addresses of people as recipients of a bounty of food ideas. I meant to. I know it's not that hard. Recipes are easy to come by. It's the addresses that are difficult, so much clerical work. So time has slipped by and I owe an apology to the friend who invited me to participate.

I hate chain letters, always have. So, in its time, did the Post Office - all that extra carrying for the poor, aching, over-burdened mailman . Now, I consider such proliferating requests to be a form of emotional blackmail (e-black e-mail?). At most, I will send a personal reply to the instigator and I should have done as much for this most recent one. I kept it on my open list for a while, because recipes are easy and my friend is a good cook. Ah well.

More recently, today, as a matter of fact, I read in the Sunday New York Times an interview with Ruth Reichl, former and last editor of the now defunct Gourmet magazine, who has just published a novel. She refers casually to her blog, that she says she pays no attention to, but she must do something with it, stir it a bit or keep it simmering on the back burner. She says it's about food. Of course. Why not? I mean, what else?

So, that nugget of information, that a blog can be about food, coupled with a niggling guilt that I hadn't complied with a friend's request for a recipe, led me to the thought that I might write a blog about food, once in a while. After all, I have published, among other things, three cookbooks. Being a writer who cooks and not a cook who writes, I had no professional help or a designated kitchen. I did all my own testing and most of the tasting. Any guests I had for meals during the gestation period of each book knew they were going to be my guinea pigs as I tried out recipes of my own devising on them. I encouraged them to comment and criticize, if necessary. It's an expensive way to write a cookbook, with all that food and all those guests. Celebrity cooks don't do it that way, I'm sure. And, like celebrities these days who are famous for being famous, famous cooks are famous first and cooks second. I don't mind. I have written elsewhere about the trials and hazards of taking a cookbook on the road, so to speak, of cooking in a bookstore or on the radio (I cooked something noisy). Both venues offer more than a soupçon of difficulty. Very work-intensive.

So, anyway, and well.... Tomorrow I will write a recipe. I'll think of something soon. Any requests?

I don't go to many movies. The operative word here is go. When I watch them now, I see old ones on TV or new ones on demand, for money. But my son Matt and I go to the "picture show" as it used to be called long ago. He does't like talky movies and I don't like horror, so we go to Marvel movies, shoot-em up, bang bang, action stuff. Hence Spiderman Two this weekend. Well, duh. And also aaargh.

Usually I let the falling buildings and flashing 3-D images wash over me and let them go but this blockbuster woke me in the night. It had too much plot, too many arbitrary decisions with no explanation and way too many unanswered trail ends. I was busy writing in my head trying to fill in the blanks. Some of it was just stupid, though. Too bad, because good supporting actors were wasting their energies. Just think: Colm Fiore, the human villain, as opposed to some unexplained iron men, is going to be King Lear this summer at Stratford. And Sally Field has gone from Mrs. Lincoln to Peter Parker's aunt, unaware after all these years that he was laundering his own Spiderman smalls. The principals, Spiderman and his girlfriend, are charming and fairly good actors when they get to play something other than the angst of the moment, and I would rather have watched them do something other than making out on the tallest building in the city. Maybe that's just me because I have a fear of heights.

So I was awake far too early and went on from there to other considerations, too much to cope with at three in the morning. It's almost six now and I'm going to swim. I call my morning swim wet meditation and I really need it today.