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Eagerly Awaiting Nigella

Be of good cheer, Nigella fans, as I bring you tidings of great joy: “Nigella Express” will be serialised in The Times Magazine, starting this Saturday. And since it’s the London Times, the first installment should be posted sometime Friday, US time. I’ll be at the computer obsessively logging on to www.timesonline.co.uk from Friday morning on.
The single best day I’ve had in my years of freelance writing was the one I spent shopping and cooking with Herself. Usually I find it’s not a great idea to meet your heroes; too often they are shorter, plainer and grumpier than their public personnae. Nigella, however, was smarter, funnier and ridiculously more gorgeous in person.
OK, enough of this babbling like a 1960’s teenage girl who once touched Paul McCartney’s jacket cuff. Back to cookbooks. I’ve had terrific success with dozens of Nigella’s recipes and “How to Eat” is high on my list of “Cookbooks I’d Want if Stranded on a Desert Island or Confined to Prison for Poisoning Dick Cheney.”
When I heard about “Nigella Express” I immediately posted a request on one of the online used book sites — my technique for getting early copies of books I crave. It’s no secret that book reviewers for magazines and newspapers sell their review copies this way and I’ve had 100% success in getting books before they hit retail shelves or appear on Amazon.
Until now. Not a single copy — even though the British edition will be in stores in September, which means there are books in existence. Why haven’t they made it to my beloved cyber stores?
And then I realized: every danged reviewer is holding on to his/her copy. Reading it. Cooking from it. Loving it.
Selfish; selfish; selfish.

Tags: Nigella Express, Nigella Lawson

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 5:29 pmand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.