[Erin]

I am currently in Seattle, an emergency trip leaving my out of town guests in the nervous hands of my husband, (no sisters and easily embarrassed). Last night I was taken out for a cheer up Erin dinner and was given a copy of The Contessa's "Barefoot in Paris"! I am so excited, I almost slept with it under my pillow. Everything looks so wonderful, I am now off the Greek kick and in a full blown Frenzy of French Food!
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"It's watery....and yet there's a smack of ham."

"It's hot ham water."

[David]

Erin, it is a wonderful book! i love the way she gets so down to earth and chatty, and the photography is wonderful!
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Vivant Linguae Mortuae!!

[Delsbread]

I love Deborah MAdisons Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone. Even though I do eat some flesh, I love what she does with grains , beans and vegetables. Her recipes are straight forward and the ingredients are available--even in Ohio.

I also love the Dean and Delucca Cookbook. Yummy!!

[tea leaves]

Are a few favorites of my cookbooks. Once lived out of Richard Olney's Simple French Food and served chicken with marjoram to probably thousands of catering customers, my original joy of cooking a post college move out of the house gift, and have had very very good times in Nigella's "Domestic Goddess" and Julia's "Baking with Julia" tomes. Currently rereading Thomas Keller's French Laundry cookbook and Jean Goerges Vongerichten's Simple to Spectacular to solve midwinter, there's no more holidays, it's snowing again, what shall I cook dilemma! But...on the horizon, a visit to Paris for St. Valentine's Day in 3 weeks! Yippee!
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"Nobody can teach you how to make the perfect cup of tea. It just happens over time. Wearing cashmere helps of course."

[SWISS_CHEF]

For me cookbooks are for inspiration, I almost never follow the recipes exactly as they were written. I currently have about 60 cook books (had many more but we moved from the US to Switzerland six years ago and I gave most of them to my Mom). There is only one that gives me really great inspiration everytime:

When we decided to move to Switzerland....I had a HUGE collection of old Gourmet magazines (something like a 1000 of them) It was stupid to move them, so I decided to throw them away.....I realized that there were so many great recipes in those magazines that I had never tried, so I decided to butcher them. Every evening for the next two weeks I cut out recipes that looked interesting.....I tossed the clippings into a shoe box...then another .... then another. They sat in those boxes for several years....one day I decided enough was enough and I bought 10 rolls of Scotch tape and about a thousand of those plastic sleeves for notebooks. I taped every recipe on sheets of paper and put them in the sleeves. I cataloged them in a huge notebook and that is my cookbook. I works great because I can remove one recipe and it is in a plastic sleeve so it won't get dirty in the kitchen. It is such an eclectic mix of recipes you would have to be brain dead to not get inspired.

Well, it worked for me anyway!
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The sound of a cork being removed from a bottle of wine is surely the sound of a man opening his heart.

[brighidsdaughter]

I'm having an "all food, all the time" weekend & in this total immersion have rediscovered my love of Lee Bailey's books. Beautiful photography, straightforward recipes, and engaging prose arranged by menu rather than the usual chapters by course or type of food. I like his style of arrangement so much that I used it as a model back when I was writing a monthly magazine food column.

Glad to know I'm not the only one who chops up cooking mags! At an estate sale several years ago, I found a collection of over 10 complete years of Vegetarian Times. They were priced 25 cents each. I wanted them, but kept my interest hidden. I returned late in the day, and all were still there. I bought a few kitchen gadgets. When I asked if they'd reduce the price if I bought all the VT collection, they *gave* them to me just to be rid of them since they'd had no offers all day! I eventually got them cut up and put into a loose-leaf binder. Although we're not vegetarian, about 75% of our meals are free of flesh-foods so these recipes are both used and cherished.

[potterstreet]

i have relocated to munich, germany for a year and left my beloved 50 plus collection of cookbooks at home and am really and truly pining for them. i love mark bittmans' stuff as well as the classics like joy of cooking and, believe it or not, fannie farmer, for basics. i also love marcella hazan's essentials of classic italian cooking, anything by julia child, jacques pepin and james beard. i also enjoy patricia wells' book about bistro cooking and the other about trattorias (names escape me). i have a few by madhur jaffrey and think she is great. i also have a nifty book called french farmhouse cooking by susan herman loomis, which i use a great deal. i do like martha stewart - she has never led me wrong, never!

over here in europe i use the internet constantly for recipes and that's how i ended up here. quite happily i might add!

[Rainey]

[Sarape]

I'm in the minority, but I own no cookbooks. I just try and invent recipes and then I modify them until they suit my tastes. I also have no cooking training: formal or informal. I wasn't part of the cooking team while growing up, so I never learned anything from my mother or grandmothers.

Here's an example. I make a good version of hot cereal which includes about 11 ingredients. I've since modified it using some of Daiy_Queen's ingredients -- peanut butter from her pumpkin and PB recipe, and I'm going to try adding something like her butter-milk-pie recipe to my "hot cereal" dish.

I've also never written down one of my own recipes. Seems strange, since I like details and things in other areas of life. Probably need a psychologist to understand this quirk.
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' She says, 'I am the glamorous type.' I said, 'So what?'

[cigalechanta]

Sarape, my books are only to inspire me. I use substitutions and different ways of cooking rather than what a recipe calls for. I never fry unless it's an egg for breakfast
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Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly
..................................MFK Fisher

[Dairy_Queen]

This ties into the Comfort thread and Lost recipes, but it had to deal with cookbooks so I'm posting it here.

I was looking at cookbooks on ebay, which is pretty much where I buy them all now adays, and one link led to another and another and I found this.

Found Meals of The Lost Generation

Publishers notes:"Paris in the 1920s was alive with writers, artists, musicians, and dancers. It was here that Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Man Ray, and Josephine Baker came to create and to congregate. And when they got together, it was often for a meal. In Found Meals of the Lost Generation, Suzanne Rodriguez-Hunter has brought thirty such gatherings to life: she describes the setting, the guest list, the conversation, and, of course, the food - providing recipes for every dish. The reader-cook can join Ernest Hemingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald for escargots a la Bourguignon, Sylvia Beach and James Joyce for ham braised in Madeira, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas for jugged hare, John Dos Passos for clam risotto, and Jean Cocteau for afternoon tea. Side dishes, desserts, and suggestions for the appropriate wines and liqueurs are also included. The result will delight lovers of cooking and literature alike, and make for some memorable meals."


http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=378&item=4516206380&rd=1&ssPageName=WD1V

[David]

Delightful!! I've just ordered a copy through amazon.ca, they had 2 used copies in their system.
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Vivant Linguae Mortuae!!

[Dairy_Queen]

Hey, David, I'm glad that it piqued your curiousity. It sounded very intriguing; of course, you must play Gershwin when you read it...American In Paris, naturally.

[David]

Yesterday our local paper carried a small article about the just released "Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America". Running 2 volumes and 1,541 pages expect the tome(s) to set you back about $250!! It contains 800 articles by 200 writers and covers Betty Crocker to Dutch Ovens. So if the foodophile and the bibliophile in you is looking for a major hit----this might be it! Do some research though and check out some other reviews---the one in our paper was less than laudatory.
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Vivant Linguae Mortuae!!

[hib]

I use The Joy of Cooking at least once a week, The Moosewood Collective has some nice recipes and when I was in the Netherlands last year for Xmas my new in-laws gave me the Return of the Natked Chef - Jamie Oliver and I've had a lot of fun doing those recipes.