Cooking Baking Eating

I seem to collect cook books.

I worked in a craft store for more than two years, and I was given the task of ordering, organizing, and keeping track of all books in the store. You could be sure that I knew exactly where each book was, how many we had, and where to find certain things in each book. I really am a book nerd.

Now that I have started doing the cooking adventures, my love of cook books has expanded. I can read them cover to cover like a regular novel and be completely entranced.

One of my favorite books is my Joy of Cooking book. It was given to me by a friend after my husband and I started hanging out with them more on weekends and grilling together. This was the first cook book anyone had ever given me; at least that I can remember. This was the first book I ever made something out of that turned out great, a blackberry and raspberry pie.

Needless to say this book has a great meaning to me. Especially since the friend who gave me this book passed away not long before my wedding. Even though I know it would be better to have a hard bound book and not one that could easily fall apart (like it is starting to do at the edges) but I really can’t see myself ever getting rid of it.

Now, not all the reasons why I love this book are purely sentimental. This really is a good book to have on hand. It will show you how to do almost everything in the kitchen, from how to cook meats properly, to pie, to everything. It even will tell you how to cook things that I don’t think I will EVER try.

I’m not a fan of how they lay out the ingredients and directions. They put the ingredients IN the directions so all of your ingredients are spread out. In a sense that’s nice since you don’t have to refer to a list for what you have to do and can just read the recipe, but i guess i just am used to the traditional way of doing things. It is definitely one of the books that every chef needs to have in their collection, especially beginners.