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What Cookbooks Are you Actively Using?


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Say over the past month, what books have you turned to repeatedly? With the exception of Bittman which I use for cooking times mostly, they all are more for inspiration and interest than specific recipes, although I use them for that too.

 

Mine are:

How To Cook Everything- in which I usually don't quite like the recipes and have to tweak them.

Flour and Water (thanks Okanagancook) for its great stuff on pasta.

Think Like a Chef- which has helpful discussions as well as great recipes. Top Chef contestants would do well to memorize it. It predicts what Tom will love and hate.

Rustic Italian Food- Marc Vetri's really excellent thoughts on food in general, pasta, and salumi.

Jacques Pepin's Table- No explanation needed. Great recipes.

 

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David Lebovitz.  The Perfect Scoop.  Keep needing to make his Buttercrunch Toffee.

Claudia Roden.  A Book of Middle Eastern Food.  I like her Tabbouleh and Hummus recipes always.

Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen.  Learning about adobado dishes.

 

Otherwise...it's recipes in my binders which I have gotten from here and there and everywhere, including from eGullet.

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Darienne

 

learn, learn, learn...

 

We live in hope. 

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~Martin :)

I just don't want to look back and think "I could have eaten that."

Unsupervised, rebellious, radical agrarian experimenter, minimalist penny-pincher, and adventurous cook. Crotchety, cantankerous, terse curmudgeon, non-conformist, and contrarian who questions everything!

The best thing about a vegetable garden is all the meat you can hunt and trap out of it!

 

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I'll be the first to admit that I get a little carried away.

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Anna Nielsen aka "Anna N"

...I just let people know about something I made for supper that they might enjoy, too. That's all it is. (Nigel Slater)

"Cooking is about doing the best with what you have . . . and succeeding." John Thorne

Our 2012 (Kerry Beal and me) Blog

My 2004 eG Blog

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  • 3 weeks later...

A lot of different books but the best i use is the one my mother made! All classic Italian receipts from their Italian friends!

 

Feel free to put them all on eG!

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The regulars:

 

Marcella Hazan - The Essentials

Madhur Jaffrey - Invitation and A Taste of India

John Thorne - pretty much everything, but especially Serious Pig

Fuchsia Dunlop - Land of Plenty

David Thompson - Thai Food (less so recently due to laziness)

 

More and more I cook from recipes that I find online, and more and more I improvise and change them as I cook.

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No Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art?

But of course! Was in the kitchen and missed its photo op.

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Anna Nielsen aka "Anna N"

...I just let people know about something I made for supper that they might enjoy, too. That's all it is. (Nigel Slater)

"Cooking is about doing the best with what you have . . . and succeeding." John Thorne

Our 2012 (Kerry Beal and me) Blog

My 2004 eG Blog

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Bittman's How to Cook Everything and Fish.

Julia Child's How to Cook.

Judy Gorman's Vegetable CookBook (I really need to find a better vegetable book.

Jennifer McLagan's Bitter. (I wish she'd given a bit of space to Swiss Chard)

Jack Bishop's Pasta Verdure

There are other books with a recipe or two that I use so frequently that I've typed it out and have it filed in a loose leaf binder so when I want to use it, I can clip it to the cabinet above my counter space.

These are mostly recipes where I'm actually going to measure ingredients and try to follow the recipe faithfully. Bread recipes for instance.

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"A fool", he said, "would have swallowed it". Samuel Johnson

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Just a fun list I come back to often. More for just ideas than recipes.

 

'Dead and fermented' by Henrik Yde

'A work in progress' Rene Redzepi

'Japanese farm food' by Nancy Singleton Hachisu

'Faviken' Magnus Nilsson

'Smoke and pickles' Edward Lee

'Heritage' Sean Brock

 

I like books with more inspiration, backstory, and just a general sense of why as opposed to just recipes. I like to think rather than just cook. Find a lot of the more in depth books inspiring these days.

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Cheese - milk's leap toward immortality.

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I had to put most of my cookbook collection in storage for what I thought was a few months and a year and a half later, there they are, behind lock and key.

 

I get a box of organic vegetables delivered once a week, and the books out on the run include Victory Garden Cookbook, Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, Slater's Tender and Ripe, Chez Panisse Vegetables, Fruit, and Desserts, Dolores Casella's Vegetables, Time Life Vegetables, Verdure, Red White and Greens, Elizabeth David's Vegetables.

 

Consult them constantly.

 

I have a huge digital collection, I don't keep paper anymore, so any recipe of mine, anything I find interesting becomes a Word document.  

I like to bake nice things. And then I eat them. Then I can bake some more.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Over the past few months, I've spent quite a bit of time using Truly Mexican by Roberto Santibanez, mainly trying out various adobos and salsas for our weekly taco night.  I had never tried Mexican cooking before, so it's been enlightening.  I also go back to Cooking from New England by Jasper White regularly.  Growing up in the Northeast, it's always inspiring.

 

I'm trying to clear my pantry and finally embrace on some southeast asian cooking using "Hot Sour Salty Sweet", one of my oft-read, never-cooked-from cooking-porn books.

"If the divine creator has taken pains to give us delicious and exquisite things to eat, the least we can do is prepare them well and serve them with ceremony."

~ Fernand Point

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How to cook everything (I totally agree about the tweaking)

Both volumes of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking

Red, White and Greens by Faith Willinger

Chinese- Cooking for Everyone edited by Emma Calley

Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook

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Add me to the How to Cook Everything list. 

 

The Breadmaker's Apprentice

 

Beard's New Book On Bread

 

And a huge electronic archive filed under the tab "Recipes I'm Going To Try"

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Don't ask. Eat it.

www.kayatthekeyboard.wordpress.com

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Add me to the How to Cook Everything list. 

 

The Breadmaker's Apprentice

 

Beard's New Book On Bread

 

And a huge electronic archive filed under the tab "Recipes I'm Going To Try"

That last one made me laugh. I not only have an electronic archive, I also have the good old bulging paper file folder. Both of which get added to regularly.

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Deborah Madison Greens I've used regularly ever since it came out -- still fresh and wonderful.

La Bouche Creole by Soniat.

Richard Olney Simple French Food and the French Menu Cookbook

 

A newer book I'm using a lot lately is Susanna Hoffman's The Olive and the Caper, a Greek cookbook. 

 

For baking my battered Betty Crocker 1950 Cook Book is the go-to.

 

And the bulging binder of tried and to try recipes. 

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A16 Meat Balls.....to die for

Flour & Water egg pasta....simply amazing dough

Marcella's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking...Tomato, pancetta tomato sauce

 

These three got raves from friends we had for lunch.  One person, whose son is a chef, said that this was THE BEST pasta meal he had ever had...and he is almost 65 y.o.  Nice comment and made the half hour I spend kneading the two batches of pasta dough worthwhile.

Edited by Okanagancook (log)
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I joined Eat Your Books at the very beginning and have a lifetime membership for $50.  Now, that was a great decision because I use it all the time.  The one thing I have not been doing is keeping track of what I make using their bookmark feature.  I do that the old fashioned way with a spiral notebook always open in the kitchen where I jot down the date and what I made from which cookbook.  Took me awhile to find the name of that tomato sauce above but I only have 10 months of notes.  :shock:

 

So, looking back at the books I have been using has been fun.

 

Lately:

 

Frankies

A Matter of Taste

Local Flavours

Global Grill

D. Thompson's Thai Cooking

Will it Waffle

Foods of the World Series:  Germany

Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill Cookbook

Ted Reader's Gastro Grilling.....baked sweet potatoes that are then injected with "butter love" which is a combo of spiced rum, maple syrup and butter...that is a great combo

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  • 2 weeks later...

All of Fuchsia Dunlop's books. I cook out of them at least 3 days a week.

 

What does everyone like out of Japanese Farm Food? I've flagged a bunch of recipes, but haven't made any of them.

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Here are the books I used the past month or so. Blue tabs for recipes I've tried over the years.

Also a huge fan of Eat Your Books. How else would I keep track of everything... It's a great resource to search through my 100+ cookbooks (and cocktail books).

 

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FrogPrincesse, EYB for sure and I have to thank you for sharing your recipe experiences on that site.  People are getting better and better at offering their thoughts.

 

 I have all the books in your picture save for Ready for Dessert and the Country Cooking of France (have the Country Cooking of Ireland though).  I have not made much from Sunday Suppers yet mainly because I have been trying to get a little weight off me before the summer but the recipes look quite involved but fun to make.

 

Tomorrow I am making two prime rib roasts for seven people and will use the Cooks Illustrated:  Meats recipe for a low and slow cooked roast.  Have made it several times.

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