I've always had a love/hate relationship with upscale cookbooks and food magazines. I enjoy flipping through them, ogling the stunning food images and imagining a life where I have the time and energy to create dishes that take 7 pots, 11 hours and 26 ingredients. However, it's that level of intensity that so frustrates me, as while those recipes are nice to look at, reality says that they aren't something I can tackle. It's one of the reasons that the only food magazine that I've consistent subscribed to over the last five years is Everyday Food (the recipes are just so darn accessible).

However, according to an article in today's New York Times, it appears that those more refined and haughty food magazines are changing their ways and including recipes that home cooks can make on a budget and in that window of time that exists between the end of your commute home and the start of the dinner (half) hour.

Gourmet is including a new feature in their monthly publication called "Cook Smart" that tries to help the folks at home with easy, budget-friendly meals that will produce leftovers and keep them from calling out for pizza in desperation. Other publications like Food & Wine and Bon Appétit are choosing similar paths.

As readers and consumers of food media (I'm guessing that at least a few of you still subscribe to some of the glossies), what are you looking for? Do you use the food magazines that land in your mailboxes each month? Would you appreciate it if those glossies started printing more useful recipes?

We always make general resolutions like "eat better" or "exercise more," but what about specific food resolutions? Here are five of mine I hope to keep in 2007.

1. Drink more wine. I drink a lot of wine anyway, but I want to learn more about it and drink it on a more regular basis. Oh, and get into white wines more. I never drink any because I've tried some white wines in the past and didn't like them. But I gotta find something I like.

2. Cut down on cookies, cakes, and crackers. Yeah, they all say "0 Trans Fats!" on the boxes now, but they can't be that great for you, especially the amount I seem to eat.

3. Stop eating after midnight. When you're a writer, you work a lot late at night. Which means you might eat later too. And when you add in television and the fact that there are several pizza places near my apartment...ugh. And then the next day you were up so late you want to sleep in and not run in the morning. I gotta stop eating so late, staying up so late, so I can get up early and exercise.

4. Eat out more. I get into these long ruts where I don't go out to restaurants, especially new places that have opened. But there's a lot of great stuff out there and I really should explore a lot more than I do.

5. Actually make some of the food I see in magazines. I think I accumulated around 40 issues of various food magazines in 2006, but I don't think I made anything in them. I keep seeing great recipes and I keep saying to myself "that would be great to make, I gotta try that!" And then the magazine sits on my coffee table for three months and then gets put on the bookshelf with the rest of them. Do you do this too?

I don't know how I missed this last month, but the Chicago Tribune picked the 50 Best Magazines. Now normally, I am not a huge fan of magazines to begin with because I find them to be "brain candy" - less taste and less filling. However, I was still happy to see that several food magazines did appear in the Top 50, with Gourmet topping the glossy food mags at Number 9. The rest:

• Number 12 - Cook's Illustrated
• Number 18 - VegNews
• Number 32 - Saveur
• Number 44 - Everday Food

What? No Rachael Ray Magazine?!?!

Do you buy or subscribe to food magazines? Which ones, and why?