Do you buy cookbooks?
I confess, I get nearly all my recipes off the Internet. I think of something I want to cook, then I just google until I find one that seems simple enough or has the ingredients I have on hand, then start cooking with my laptop in the corner of the kitchen. The only cookbooks I really use are How to Cook Everything/The Joy of Cooking for “hmm, I want to eat string beans, what are some string bean recipes?” or “How do you poach an egg/make a souffle/cook a roast?” and Sydney Food.
Sydney Food is a coffee table cookbook, in that every recipe has a luscious looking full-page photograph. Unlike your average coffee table cookbook, though, Bill Granger doesn’t feel compelled to prove that he’s the world’s awesomest chef by giving all the recipes 29 steps and 47 ingredients, including the one you have to harvest by hand under the light of the full moon, then dry for six months (perfect for tonight’s dinner party!) Every recipe I have made out of it has been a great success, including my prize-winning pavlova, and the garlic yogurt (add garlic to yogurt + salt, yum!) is part of my standard repetoire.
All the other cookbooks on my shelf, I’ve maybe made one or two recipes from, or go paging through from time to time, but never see anything either compelling enough or simple enough to make. The Internet serves up heaping spoonfuls of recipes at a moment’s notice, so I don’t even bother looking at cookbooks at the bookstore. How about you? Do you love cookbooks, or do you just use the power of the world wide web to drive your cooking?
