Cookbook fantasy life a rich way to escape on the cheap

When I opened Molly Wizenberg's A Homemade Life, I sighed. This was not, it turned out, a practical cookbook about how to discover your own inner home chef. Instead, it was a memoir filled with blog-like essays about her young and, despite the death of her father while she was in her early twenties, eye-bogglingly happy life. So happy, in fact, that she veritably gushes. One phrase she uses over and over is "spread like wildflowers," a mashup used to describe how her boyfriend -- the one she met through her food blog, Orangette -- takes over her life. And that reminds me of a fennel salad...