Kitchen

[Irish Rosebud]

I really like what Sooner said. My food prep and meal planning are constantly evolving.

I've never really used cookbooks except for Joy of Cooking (published in the '50s, inherited from my mom), Michel Guerard's Cuisine Minceur, Bittman's How to Cook Everything, and The Best Recipe (Cook's Illustrated). I've given a couple of those as gifts to newlyweds. My DIL swears by Everyday Food: Great Food Fast (Martha Stewart). Never really watched any cooking shows except for old PBS -- Jacques and Julia and the Romagnoli's Table -- and some episodes of Alton Brown.

I've gotten into baking Bundt cakes the last few years. I downloaded an e-book from Amazon called "Kiss My Bundt" with a lot of great recipes and tips.

I look for new recipes to try all the time. Some I find here but mostly from the America's Test Kitchen magazines, food blogs, Epicurious, old copies of Martha Stewart's Everyday Food magazine (now discontinued), or magazines like Fine Cooking or Cooking Light or Saveur or Gourmet special issues. I've got a lot of cooking magazines rather than cookbooks. When Gourmet stopped publishing, they offered me Bon Appetit instead for the remainder of my subscription. Some offer! I was already subscribing to that!

I'm getting more adventurous. I gravitate now toward anything Thai (love lemongrass and coconut milk and chili paste). Also Indian recipes using fresh ginger, curry, and garam masala; a good recipe is Cook's Country's slow-cooker Mulligatawny soup with chicken. Yum!

[peachesncream]

I don't have a favorite or most-used cookbook. I get many recipes online.

I still buy a cookbook now and then. I tend to cook my way through a book, and then move on to something else. Or I check a copy out from the library.

I keep Joy of Cooking around for reference, and I use it often to look up things.

[house cat]

On 4/28/2014 cindyinfl said:

On 4/28/2014 house cat said:

On 4/28/2014 cindyinfl said:

My all time favorite cookbook(s) are from Gooseberry Patch- I have most all of them , and every recipe I've ever needed was in one of those books. I cook a lot in my crock pot, and GP has tons of good crock pot recipes. I have over 100 recipes books, but I always turn to these. Some of my other cookbooks haven't been opened in years!

I can't order all of them (wish I could), so I was trying to decide. I think I've settled on the hardcover version of Big Book of Family Recipes. Do you have this one? Is there another favorite I should start with? Thank you.

Yes, I have Big Book of Family Recipes. It is an excellent cookbook. Did you look at the Gooseberry Patch website itself? Often, they run sales on their cookbooks, plus they also have a lot of recipes posted there. I buy a lot of my GP off EBay. since I crock pot cook a lot, I use the slow cooker cookbooks (GP offers many relating to slow cooking). Good luck, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. Glad I could introduce them to you. Once you're hooked, you're hooked!

I never even thought of looking at their own website. I ordered two from Amazon, "The Big Book of Family Recipes" and "101 Casseroles". I know I'll love them.

I don't have a lot of cookbooks, due to lack of space, but the ones I have I love and use often. I'll let you know what I think when they arrive. Thank you!

[allaries]

The old Betty Crocker cookbooks. That is the first cookbook given to me when I got married. That one was lost so I found one on Ebay. I had to pay a lot more for that one.

[sfnative]

I've really enjoyed reading about what really amounts to our approaches to figuring out what to cook or bake or perhaps an answer to a question. Since I've been using my slow cooker lots more lately, I'm definitely going to check out the Gooseberry Patch book on that subject.

Because I came from a home where dinner was canned vegetables with some form of meat fried in a skillet, I was determined to learn how to enhance mealtime, once I got married. This was back in the day: started watching Julia Child and The Galloping Gourmet. I actually learned more practical technique from The Galloping Gourmet, such as knife cuts, what to use to pound meat without pulverizing it, & when making a meringue using a countertop mixer, mix the ingredients until when drawn up with a whisk, the egg whites "look like elephant sn-t." Graphic, but it works!

Thanks, again!

[Lotus]

I don't have many cookbooks at all.....but I've had this one forever (circa early 80's)!! I received it as a "gift" from a book club.....Doubleday or something similar. I LOVE this book!!

PS.....recipes do not contain soup. Just regular recipes with a little history story behind each one.

[KJPA]

I almost always search the internet as well. What I'd really like is a site where I can enter some items I have on hand and want to use but need a recipe for them. Has anyone heard of that? I think some hardback cookbooks used to have an index in the back where you could look up major ingredients and find a list of recipes in the book that used them.

[RedTop]

I automatically go to my oldies: a Woman's Day Collector's Cook Book from 1960, a locally published cookbook of Our Favorite Recipes from the Advent Christian Church that has no date on it, but I feel dates back into the 1950's. This cookbook belonged to a favorite aunt who has passed, and all of the blank pages are filled with recipes written in her handwriting. My last go-to is a 20th anniversary edition of cookbook favorites of United Methodist Ministers Wives dated 1955. I also refer often to recipes in a very old Kerr canning book. Of all the cookbooks I own, these are my very favorites.

[Dam Yankee]

On 4/30/2014 KJPA said:

I almost always search the internet as well. What I'd really like is a site where I can enter some items I have on hand and want to use but need a recipe for them. Has anyone heard of that? I think some hardback cookbooks used to have an index in the back where you could look up major ingredients and find a list of recipes in the book that used them.

Here ya go. I use this site frequently. You enter in up to three ingredients and it pulls up recipes that use those ingredients.

http://www.bigoven.com/recipes/leftover

[seattlegirl98026]

Another fan of Better Homes & Gardens!