Yay, a thread that I can participate in. I have tons of cookbooks and I don’t even cook! I can’t participate in those other recipe discussions because, well. . . I don’t cook.
But I do read cookbooks and collect and go through the recipes at night before I go to sleep. Here are a few of my bedtime reading books lately.
The Garden Variety Cookbook (not vegan but lots of options for veggies and fruits)
Vegan Planet*
Rice and Spice*
The Best Bread Machine Cookbook Ever (I’ve made some of these and they were num!)
The Joy of Vegan Baking
I love *Robin Robertson books. Her recipes sound great but sound a little labor intensive too. So I just read about them; I don’t make them.
On preview: Just saw Bumba’s comment about cooking software. I have MasterCook also. When I was looking to upgrade my MasterCook, since the old version didn’t work on my laptop, I looked at all the available cookbook software out there at the time (several years ago). Some of it was pretty neat but I stayed with MasterCook because all my recipes are compatible. It’s not a snap to download from the website from a html recipe but I’ve done it without too much effort. MasterCook recipes download automatically.
Oooh, cookbooks! Well, as anyone who’s read any of my posts in here knows I hate food and will have nothing to do with it!
I have the standby’s–Joy of Cooking and an old Betty Crocker book that is the only place I’ve ever found a temp table for foil wrapped turkey, which lets you cook it in about half the time and it’s incredibly moist… I keep that book primarily for that table, although it’s a decent basic book that has some good cookie recipes in it. I love my four years of “The Gilroy Garlic Cookbook” and have probably made more recipes from those books than any other aside from Joy of Cooking. I have a gorgeous book with Indian food that’s hard to use because it gives all the measurements in metric and in weights but I don’t have a scale. That one I kinda by guess and by gosh when I want to make one of the recipes. I have an old paperback of cool Mexican dishes that I got Pollo con Poblanos from which is my surefire way to make anybody love bell peppers. I have the great old St Timothy’s cookbook that has a whole bunch of my recipes in it and more potluck standards than you’d ever credit from such a slim volume. The Time-Life International Cookbook I found in a used book store for a dollar has some amazing stuff in it–that’s where I got the pork with peppers recipe that’s a family favorite. I have the medieval cookbooks that are more reference than day to day use items. Then there’s the ephemera–recipes cut from newspapers, scribbled on chunks of paper, printed out from web sites and email, some of them decades old. There’s one cookie recipe that even though I’ve changed and amended I feel like I can’t make the cookies right unless the old recipe slip is sitting in front of me. I guess that’s kind of a fetish object, really. I have books on Thai food and pan Asian, an old book of New Orleans standards dating from circa 1950-something I picked up on a trip to the south, a couple of the Moosewood books (best risotto recipes EVER) and some other vegetarian books as well. I have slim pamphlets of jam and jelly recipes that were giveaways with the jars many moons ago.
Nope, I hate cookbooks, wouldn’t have one near me…
My favorite cookbook is the Betty Crocker Cookbook copyright 1973…back when fat, salt, and sugar were acceptable, and microwave recipes were a fun idea.
Seriously, the oil-based baking powder biscuits (mentioned in another thread as "pioneer buscuits) are a favorite in our family.
As this is an MMP, let me pass along the good news: God answers prayer! Y’all know I work for Wally World. I’ve been praying for some time that my SIL would get hired in, and he had the initial interview earlier this week. The Wal*Mart I work at is across town, but the store he had the interview at is less than 10 minutes from our house. Pending an ok background check/drug test, he’ll start next week.
I’ve known for some time that my SIL & Wal*Mart would be a good match. I’ve prayed that he’d be hired on for over a year. Both he & my daughter have applied, both online & at the stores, on a regular basis. Now he’s got the job, & he’ll be starting at a wage that it took me a year to work up to.
I love it when God answers prayer! As I always say, God’s in charge, not me. Good thing, too.
Can’t stay away, so I’m back with the description of another of my oddball favorites:
“The Working Girl Must Eat,” published in 1938. Although its underlying premise is that, if you are a young lady with a job, your goal is to find a husband to take care of you (and to lure him in you must cook him a good meal) it does have its refreshingly progressive moments.
From the introduction:
As encouraging as that sounds, the suggested menus and the recipes themselves don’t necessarily appeal to the modern palate. I give you:
MENU SUGGESTION 2:
Not that anything above is all that bad by itself,* but as a meal, that strikes me as pretty icky.
*Except for the tongue. My feeling about it is, while I’m eating, I don’t want to taste anything that can taste me back.
I’ve never posted in an MMP either, but as I’m a pretty new cook, I need as many cookbook suggestions as I can get. So I’ve got my notepad ready and I’m writing everything down. Carry on and don’t mind the new chick hiding over in the corner.
Great OP, Soapy! and happy Monday to all the Mumpers, old and new!
I have a stack of recipe books at home, most of them are mine but 'im indoors has bought a few when he’s had some crazy notion about wanting to cook something. We went to Russia a couple of years ago and when we came back he wanted to cook borscht because we’d had some in a restaurant there. He bought three different cookbooks in order to get a recipe, and since then he’s made the stuff once. Then there are the pile of books about making curry which he buys but never uses because he says they’re all wrong! And the heap of books about Chinese cooking he bought because he wanted to find out how to make decent egg-fried rice.
Me? I buy cookbooks because I want to and because I’m interested. My current favourite is my slimming club’s “Four Seasons Cookbook” which I’ve used several times to good effect. I also have a subscription to the BBC’s Good Food magazine and the Fat Club mag too. Got to get my fix, yanno?
Last year I bought an Alton Brown book on a visit to the US but haven’t actually read it yet (sacrilege, I know) but it’s under my couple of Mrs Beeton books!
The publisher is Little, Brown and Company, and the author is Hazel Young. PM me if you really want a copy and don’t mind doing a minor bit of sleuthing/waiting - I’m sure there is a way for you to get your hands on it eventually.
Well, all this [del]fresh meat[/del] new blood probably ought to be made aware of the Mumper’s Recipe Blog, wherein any tasty treat which is detailed here in a post finds itself. Oh look, my poke chops got in there! Huh, and I wasn’t even trying…
Speaking of which, this is what I had for dinner tonight–as you can see it was Lo-Cal Night!
Baked NOT Soup
2/3 cup butter
Big splop of roasted garlic paste
2/3 cup flour
7 cups milk
4 large baking potatoes, baked, cooled, peeled and cubed, about 4 cups
4 green onions, thinly sliced
10 to 12 strips bacon, cooked, drained, and crumbled
1 1/4 cups shredded medium sharp cheddar cheese
1 cup (8 ounces) sour cream
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
Preparation:
In a large Dutch oven or stockpot over low heat, melt butter, stir in garlic paste until all melted. Stir in flour; stir until smooth and bubbly. Gradually add milk, stirring constantly, until sauce has thickened. Add potatoes and onions. Continue to cook, stirring constantly, until soup begins to bubble. Reduce heat; simmer gently for 10 minutes. Add remaining ingredients; stir until cheese is melted. Serve baked potato soup immediately.
This baked potato soup recipe serves 6 to 8.
I did use 1% milk and low fat sour cream, but this is never gonna be heart healthy, no way. It was really good, though…
Great OP, Prof Rapunzel. As a kid I read cookbooks with a passion. I loved poring over the recipes and couldn’t wait until I got old enough to actually try them. Funnily enough I lost all interest in cooking as soon as I came of age, at least until a couple years ago when I started living by myself in Chicago.
Sorry for not keeping up with the MMP! I forgot how chatty it is around here.
Good Mornin’ Y’all! Up and caffienatin’ but not home.
Great OP Soapy! I lurves me some cookbooks too. One of my favorites is one that was published by, of all things, a bank back in the eighties. Every recipe I’ve tried from that cookbook is good, so I use it over and over. A lot of the recipes I’ve shared for the recipe blog are from there or from “church lady” as I call 'em cookbooks. I have an abundance of those kind of cookbooks because they have the good stuff in 'em. Also I do have a Better Homes and Gardens and Betty Crocker cookbook, cause, well, to not have those two seems un-Amurrkin!
Ok, time for me to purtify. We’re goin’ to that epicurian delight known as Waffle House for brekkies.
I’m not a “recipe book” cook. 8 (Lord, it’s 8 already) years after her Proud And Brand New Husband bought her first cookbook for SiL (specifically chosen because it explained things like “how to fry an egg,” as the example used in Spain to indicate that someone can’t cook is that “she can’t fry an egg!” - and SiL could not), we’re amazed that she still uses it. Every. Time. We’re more of the traditional Spanish school of cookery, “a bit of this and let’s taste it… hm, it’s missing something… I know, I’ll add a dash of that!”
I always collect recipes but rarely get around to trying them, partly due to lack of taste-testers. This thread gave me an idea for my Christmas wishlist: I know there’s a couple recent cookbooks geared specifically for people who live alone, as that’s another problem for me, most recipes aren’t easily scalable. How do you bake a chocolate cake for one, eh? Guess I could try chocolate muffins instead, uh?
PS: BT has finally gotten my phone line set up. Now they need to activate the DSL. I’s got withdrawal symptoms, I do!
Given this week’s subject, I do think we should at least nibble.
Does anybody know any good cookbooks for British food in Spanish? Wonder if there’s any local cooking courses… In theory, I can read English, but when it comes to food and stuff you do to it, there’s a lot of times I run into “uh?” country before the end of the list of ingredients
Nooner, I didn’t know you needed people’s help to get all hot an’ bothered
Let me rephrase: any good cookbooks using ingredients easily available in the British Isles. They’ve civilised greatly since I first traveled here 25 years ago (olive oil in supermarkets counts as civilisation) but I don’t think those peppers are the same kind of peppers we have at home. There’s kaboodles of stuff that looks like it may make for good curry, too, but I’ve never cooked a curry in my life. Help!
