This week’s notebook addict is food writer Elissa Altman, who calls herself a “journal junkie” and shares these images at her blog Poor Man’s Feast:

Here’s some of her thoughts about her addiction:

I don’t know when it happened, exactly, or why, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve been fanatical about notebooks. When I was a child, I could never decide between spiral and stitch-bound for school (spiral always seemed to be sort of non-committal), and when I was old enough for a loose leaf, my father gave me a small, leather three-ring binder that his sister had given him when he was not yet ten. I still have it—it sits on my desk, filled with the same lined paper from 1974, which has not yet yellowed. For years, I’ve wanted to use it as my kitchen notebook, but I just can’t bring myself to; on the one hand, I worry that regular use will harm it after almost eighty years, and on the other, I worry that forcing utilitarianism upon it will somehow render it less meaningful to the universe. Which is just plain nuts, when it gets right down to it.

And more thoughts specifically about notebooks and cooking:

When it comes to the subject of food, and cooking, though, I find almost nothing more enticing to read than kitchen notebooks because they place the reader in the kitchen of the cook, with the cook. Given the choice between M.F.K. Fisher’s narrative and her notebooks, I’d grab the latter first. My best college friend once sent me James and Kay Salter’s Life is Meals, and after years of perusing it, the book now falls open to the entry about their old kitchen notebook. Recently, my colleague and fellow blogger, Heidi Swanson, published a post about creating a new cookbook manuscript, and it was an amazing look at her creative process, involving lots of notebooks. And her photo of all those notebooks? Oh Heidi. So sultry.

I’m getting hungry just thinking about it… hungry for food, and for a look at some of those kitchen notebooks!

Read more at Poor Man’s Feast: Notebook Lust: Confessions of a Journal Junkie.