Indeed, there will be an official Library of Congress number attached to the Not Eating Out in New York project! As I mentioned here, the book will be published by Gotham Books, a division of Penguin Group USA probably in late 2009. But don’t expect it to be your average “blook” (should it go down in history, I believe my friend Aaron coined the term for this up-and-coming literary genre).

Keeping in mind that so many of you have written, commented and approached me to ask what really goes on in the kitchen of not eating out, I’m writing a full-on memoir of my journey, starting with a bland burger and ending with sheer culinary bliss. What you can expect to read: messy relationship stories? Check. More on why the hell I got started on this track and if and why I’m continuing/discontinuing it? Check. There will definitely be more about my family, who brought me up to cook. (I may have touched on these bizarre people from time to time, but my parents couldn’t have showed me more disparate cooking styles: my mom, who’s native to Taiwan and Chinese by heritage, is all on-the-fly stir-fries and hot sauce in everything, and my dad, total WASP from upstate New York, is all cookbooks and pies, lots of pies.) And, I’m adding ALL NEW recipes at the end of each chapter, so I’m saving the best for the book.

So if the thrifty recipes, ruminations, flops and rants that make up this blog start getting fewer and farther in between, it’s probably because I’m trying to write the BEST recipes, rants, and all the aforementioned stuff above for the book. Or, it could mean that I’m just slacking off at both. Good chance of that.