Cookbooks

I am addicted to recipe books. My gram likes to remind me that when I was a kid I told her “if you can read, you can cook” and I still believe it today. You may not have the best technique in the world, but a good cookbook will take you pretty far in the kitchen.I love to cook. I love to bake. I love to feed my friends and family. I love to go food shopping. It’s a wonder I am not twenty times the size of the house. I think I have over a hundred cookbooks all told, and my collection just keeps growing. Most are dogeared and written in and well loved. Some were my mothers (whose idea of cooking was dialing the telephone) and some we my grams. Some I picked up on a whim and turned out to be a gem. Some I’ve never made a thing out of but they sure are a good read. Some are stored outside in the garage because my bookshelf is overflowing. I read them like books. Some of the newer ones are books that just happen to have recipes thrown in for good measure. Those are the best kind.

I got to rambling, sorry. What I wanted to get at is, whatever happened to grandma’s handwritten recipe box? My gram has a love affair with cook books too – in fact, I just bought her four more because she liked mine. A few months ago (last Halloween-ish) I bought a black lined journal and started gluing in recipes I liked out of magazines. That way I could limit my stuff on my shelf and I’d have all the awesome recipes I found in one easy to reference spot. It grew. It also includes some I’ve printed off the internet from here and there. Did I try something new? Was it a hit? It gets glued into the book. What an amazing gift of “family recipes” it will turn into some day!

See that awesome journal I used as my post image? I picked that up last night. Why? I almost sullied my clippings with handwritten recipes! Oh no! I couldn’t have that. So off to the book store I went. By the way, I paid less than list price at the actual store, so you might want to check that out if you want to pick up your own. It’s already got about fifteen delicious recipes in it from Raw Fu and I’ve got some delicious ones to add from Punky Moms and my own scattered brain as well. Before I started writing, I added the year at the top of the first page and a little inscription. I am hoping it turns into “grandma’s recipe box” in another fifty or sixty years.