What is your favorite cookbook? Especially in regard to making regular old weekday family dinners?
I like the Leanne Ely books—Saving Dinner
As long as we’re talking recipes, what are your favorite cooking and meal-planning websites? I had a good time playing around at the interactive Robin Miller’s Quick Fix Meals toy at Food Network, but there aren’t many recipes there; you have to click over here to find the archives.
This week’s edition of Carnival of the Recipes is all about slow-cooker meals, hosted by (appropriately enough) the Slow Cooker Recipes blog. I love my crock pot. Speaking of which, I have half a roasted chicken in the fridge awaiting crock-pottish inspiration…I’m envisioning some kind of chili-chicken-corn chowder, but I don’t have a recipe. Winging it in the kitchen is not my special gift, let me tell you! Time to cozy up to my pal Google…
UPDATED: Found this and this. This one looks tasty. This one too, but Rilla can’t tolerate my having cream. (Wah.) Still, between them all I think I can come up with something.
UPDATED AGAIN to add the Loveliness of Baking fair. Yum!
There are several white bean soup recipes in the Joy of Cooking. I think adding chicken would be yummy. I love anything by Rick Rodgers, but those are better special occasion recipes. Rachael Ray had a great white turkey chili recipe last year that was “yum-o”!
I like the More with Less Cookbook. I do a bunch of bulk cooking from that. The master mix for waffles and pancakes is really good.
But for weekday meals I like my Habitat for Humanity cookbook.
Joy of Cooking is my old standby. But I also collect “Taste of Home” magazine issues, because most of the recipes are very practical.
Moosewood Cooks at Home, New Recipes from Moosewood, and Moosewood Low Fat Favorites get tons of use in my kitchen. I just got a copy of Jack Bishop’s A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen and so far am enjoying that. Once a week, I use a recipe from Lorna Sass’ Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure, too. Usually I make 3 big entrees and that’s enough for most of the week, and lunches.
More With Less is a great one, too, although I’ve not been using that so often.
Jamie Oliver’s Family Dinners. We are *huge* Jamie Oliver fans here, even with our various food allergies/ chemical sensitivities, etc. We make ‘most everything from scratch, but over 20 minutes worth of prep?? Not worth it for a week-day meal (so says Hubby).
Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison! And we are not vegetarian.
I like cooking, wish I cooked more often (my heroic husband does most of shopping and cooking), and I love cookbooks (especially Silver Palate series and Barefoot Contessa series for special events). But only one cookbook has inspired me to attempt daily dinners: The latest edition of Joy of Cooking. It has a tempting recipe for everything.
Just sitting here taking notes… 🙂
I have a whole bookcase of cookbooks, including a 1990’s edition of Joy of Cooking and a much lved copy of More with Less, and 9 years of Canadian Livng Magazines.
But my go to books are the same ones I learned to cook with. Edna Staebler’s Schmecks books and LLL’s Whole Foods for the Whole family. My mother’s copy of the latter fell apart, so I have a discard from an LLL group library. (The old edition has a better index.)
The Joy of Cooking. Rachel Ray’s Thirty minute series. Those are the things we rely on when we need a recipe.
I think you could probably substitute yogurt (especially the richer Balkan/Greek style) for the cream and still enjoy the recipe :).
My favorites are The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, How to Coook Everything by Mark Bittman (which doesn’t tell you how to cook everything, but tells about the basics for a lot), and my old Joy of Cooking, now falling apart.
But I do a lot of experimenting, and tend not to follow recipes faithfully, which is just fine as long as you’re not baking 🙂