I have a quick and easy idea for you. Chicken Naanwich with Saffron, Capers & Raisins. Get it? It’s a sandwich made with naan and it’s the perfect solution for “one of those days”.

I think you know what kind of day I'm talking about. The kind of day when you wake up in the morning and rather than bound out of bed you lay there a bit longer than you know you should. After all, there's a dog to walk and he’s already clicking around on the hardwood making his needs known– besides there is bread to “win” and bacon to “bring home”. Why does a big city life require so much bread and bacon?

So you drag yourself out of bed, aware of a building mantra in the back of your head. It starts out as a whisper. But you can hear it “I don’t wanna cook today.” You try to ignore it as you pop a bagel in the toaster, but the voice gets louder and more persistent “I don’t wanna cook today!”

You push the voice back and quickly decide against packing a lunch. Even the idea of chopping carrots and celery for a quickie bag lunch starts to feel a lot like cooking. “How about lunch out today?”

“Lunch on the run” (you convince yourself) means you’ll have a lot more time for those errands that don’t run themselves. See how smart you are?

I found some beautiful fennel bulbs at the Hollywood Farmers Market today. They are the small, flat elongated fennel bulbs sometimes called Italian Fennel. They are far less common than the rounder, fist-sized bulbs I see in grocery stores. I just knew they were to be the subject of my Market Matters post.

But they are so special, looking at them caused me to slow down and think about what I was doing. I didn't want to present another fennel salad just like all the fennel salads you've seen on blogs and in cookbooks everywhere (you know, the one with orange). I don't mean to say that an orange and fennel salad with whatever slight variation the cook brings to it is not a good salad. In fact it's a classically good salad. But it doesn't really say anything new about fennel or about me.

Which got me thinking. I don’t often talk about what I think about cooking as a means of self-expression. I think that's because it’s hard to define my sensibilities when it comes to food, because I like all food. You’ll practically never hear me say “Oh I don’t eat [fill in the blank]”. Sure there are things I like better than other things, but there are no categories of food that are exempt from my adventurous palate. Food and the experience of life are just too intertwined for me to make such broad rejections.

Still, I have felt a bit lost in my direction here at Sippity Sup these past few months. I look around the blogs, I look at cookbooks and I get the impression that food is getting less and less personal. Less and less original. Too generic. Too easily categorized. All the food I look at is starting to look the same to me! The food on my blog could be the food on your blog, or any one of several great magazines.