booooooooooooks.

[schmerica]

pearl_o: I add books to my to-read list at a much, much faster rate than I actually read books.

fox1013: /giggles
fox1013:What books?

pearl_o: ....dude, right now my to-read list is a word document over 1000 items long.
pearl_o: and i am adding a bunch of stuff i bookmarked on amazon last night.

fox1013:Erica? Darling? You are a freak.
fox1013:/smooches

pearl_o: /beams
pearl_o: I LIKE LISTS.
pearl_o: They are so organized!
pearl_o:And alphabetical!

Sort of the same topic but not really: who wants to recommend good cookbooks to me? Not for my to-read list, but for my crazy packrat COOKBOOKCOOKBOOKCOOKBOOK collecting. Right now, I use Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and The Best Recipes in the World constantly; I love Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess but was disappointed in How to Eat; I respect The Joy of Cooking but only ever really use it when I'm making a bazillion cookies at Christmastime. Specificity of region, technique, or ingredients is fine, as long as it's a good book. What do you guys like?

Comments

[katallison.livejournal.com]

My current favorite is The New Best Recipe, which is by the people who do Cooks Illustrated magazine, and which I love because -- dude, it is SCIENCE!! They conduct experiments, controlling for all relevant variables, in order to determine the VERY BEST way to make everything, including a lot of basic stuff that I sort of thought I knew how to make, in my half-assed, picked-up-the-technique-randomly sort of way, but I now really KNOW how to make. They also have lots of good info on cooking equipment, and basic stuff like making stock, and they are not at all puritanistic about you must do everything the most difficult and traditional way--they're all for shortcuts when they work well. I just love this book.

Others that I've cherished include Annie Somerville's Fields of Greens, which I don't actually cook from all that often but everything I've tried from it has been glorious; and John Thorne's Outlaw Cook which is less about recipes and more about a sort of philosophy of cooking, except infinitely less pretentious than that makes it sounds; and Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, which, again, I actually value more for reading than for cooking from, and if you haven't read Colwin's fiction, get it onto your list somewhere; it is wonderful stuff for those bleak moments when you need to feel loved and consoled and cuddled to the bosom of a cookie-giving universe. (It's surprising how much I love her fiction, in fact, given that it is all about domestic happiness, which is not so much my turf, but anyway.)

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, yes! I had checked that out of the library last summer, and it was gorgeous and exciting to browse through, but I didn't really get to cook with it at all.

Laurie Colwin is indeed on my to-read list, and I think it is originally from seeing you mention her on your lj.