How many cookbooks do you have?

[Gardener123]

These days, I use the internet a lot for recipes, but I still buy the occasional cookbook, as to me, there is nothing quite like holding a book. I would say that I have about 10 on BBQ alone. All told I would guess that I have 100+ cookbooks. I run the gamut. I have cookbooks on

Chinese
Thai
African
Italian
Caribbean..... I love spicy, Caribbean foods, and not just jerk.
Mexican
Seafood
BBQ
Low Carb
Paleo
Indian...... I have about 4 of these.... I love to make Indian food.
Hot and Spicy
Hot sauces
Herbs ( The Herb Bible.... which has tons of recipes )
Chicken Wings
Hot Dogs...... This one is interesting as can be, as basically every country has a hot dog variation. I wanted to open a gourmet hot dog truck, but the township I wanted to do it in forbids food trucks.

And a whole bunch of others.

[rainbowgardener]

I have about 20, having cleared out some excess earlier this year. I'm a vegetarian so half of them are vegetarian including the classics: Recipes for a Small Planet, Vegetarian Gourmet, The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook, Simple Food for the Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing. Then there are several diet/ low fat cook books, a Chinese, a Mexican, Costa Rican, a bread cookbook, a tofu cookbook (which is one of the vegetarian ones) and Joy of Cooking for basic all around cooking.

[imafan26]

I have about 200. A few of them are large tomes like the culinary arts institute, joy of cooking, and some other bargain cookbooks I have picked up over the years, but a large number of them are the Pillsbury and Fast and Healthy cookbooks, they only have about 90 pages and are thin so a lot of them fit into a small space. I have culled a few of them since they repeat recipes and I have to admit, the healthier cookbooks are the ones where I like the recipes the least.

Once in a while, I set out to try something totally new, but I think every cook finds that they will always go to the same recipes over and over again.

I have instead found that tweaking and substituting the full fat recipes to be a more palatable way to go substituting more vegetables or different veggies and using less meat or leaner choices. Salt and sugar can be cut from most recipes.

It is hard to change a lifetime of unhealthy eating habits and some foods like kale, arugula, and lentils are an acquired taste. I have good recipes for kale now so I am liking it now, arugula is fine when it is very young. I still don't like lentils, barley or many of the other harder grains and the only beans I eat regularly is canned pork and beans.

[rainbowgardener]

I think every cook finds that they will always go to the same recipes over and over again.

not me. I have a few recipes I do over and over like the bean cheesy chard from Recipes for a Small Planet, but mostly I love trying new things and I am always doing recipes I have never tried before. It's a gamble and there have been a few fails, company dinners with recipes I was unfamiliar with. But that's the risk you take.

Currently I'm dieting, so takes a lot of the creativity out. There's only so much you can do with 1000 calories a day ...

[Gardener123]

1000 calories a day might keep my left leg fed.

I basically eat low carb,but with no limits on veggies. The best way to look at it is I generally do not eat any white, processed foods, or drink milk. I do use cream though.

My favorite foods are ethnic, and I do cook Indian butter chicken a lot. This week I will be making Lucky 13 chicken.

Cooking is my favorite thing to do. I am not a chef, but I am an excellent cook. Matter of fact, I may open a business for home cooking classes.

[JosephsGarden]

I have three cookbooks:

A decades old copy of "Joy of Cooking", "The Ball Blue Book", and a book in which my extended family members wrote down recipes for all our family-party favorites.

[tomf]

Much of what I cook I just put together, but I do use cook books as well.

[Lindsaylew82]

I'm a cookbook junkie! I like books with lots of pictures of food! I have a 5' long book shelf that is nearly full.

My favorites are:

Betty Crocker (red gingham) lots of general info. It was my first cook book and I consider it a good reference manual.

1000 vegan recipes by Robin Robertson. Vegan Mac and chard is my FAVORITE vegan recipe!

The Cupcake Doctor is a really fun book! (Awesome red velvet recipe)

I enjoy the photography in Cooking light.

I also have a subscription to Cooks Illustrated. I enjoy their trials articles and how they break down discussing each ingredient. Great art as well!

I've always enjoyed Martha Stewart cookbooks.

I adore canning. And all books related.

My favorites are
The complete ball book of preserving.

Canning for a new generation.

Preserving By The Pint.

I'm an absolute SUCKER for church cook books!

[applestar]

I couldn't tell you the number. They are scattered all over the house... Some are electronic and downloaded on the iPad, some are at bedside for night time reading, kitchen shelf, FR shelf, work desk shelf.... I believe there IS some organization to the madness because I think I can find any one I want. LOL. Most of them I've read at least three times cover-to-cover.

[Gardener123]

I adore cookbooks, and have perhaps 70-75. I especially like regional cookbooks put together by ladies' clubs or church groups...........

I just remembered that I have one put together by a church group in Belize. I bought it while on my honeymoon.

I like those types of books as well, but I prefer the types that focus on local recipes / local favorites. I have one from Myrtle Beach that I use occasionally.

[ElizabethB]

You Guys and Gals have me beat on the number of cookbooks. About a year ago I realized that books - both cookbooks and those for reading were taking up much needed space so I down sized. I have 16 cookbooks that I actually use, 2 three ring binders of family and made up recipes in plastic sleeves and 30+ FOLDERS of recipes in my Favorites. I just recently organized my Favorites and put everything in folders and sub-folders - much easier to find what I am looking for.

Most used are Joy of Cooking, my binders and my Favorites. Joy is held together with duck tape.

In addition to recipes in my Favorites I also have video's. I recently made Beef Wellington for the first time using Gordon Ramsey's 2 part video. I thought G was going to hurt himself.

Love to cook!

[tomc]

More than three (I have not counted), but less than 333. My last Chef's Reminder disintigrated a few years back. I wouldn't mind a copy of Cornell's Blue Book either.

[Kageri]

Just 3. Japanese cooking, the sesquicentennial book from my little hometown, and a general book we bought. I have a lot of old index cards and a few slightly newer with traded recipes or stuff from my great grandma. My grandma and mom never really cooked so there's a gap there and I've had to teach myself most things. My husband has done a lot of experimenting because of my ideas. lol We like messing with uncommon meats.

[imafan26]

I use my cookbooks a lot. Even though I often end up with the same recipes, I do like to try new ones and I am always looking for new recipes to try. As Rainbow said some are good, some are an acquired taste and some seem to have left something out. I am a baker not a cook, so I need a recipe with more precise measurements. I don't do well with anything that says "add some salt" or season to taste.

Recipes come in handy when I harvest something from the garden like eggplant and I only have five recipes for them. I did try ratatouille, but I did not like it.

I also have been on a 1000 calorie diet before. You would think salads would give you a lot to eat on that kind of diet but the catch is to find a dressing that tastes good and doesn't cost as many calories as a hamburger. The only permanent change I made from being on that diet was that I switched to diet cola (bad in other ways though) and I use splenda or reduce the sugar in a lot of recipes now because I find them too sweet. I have also cut salt from many recipes and I rarely add salt to anything. I do miss li hing mui though.

[Gardener123]

Well, since my post, I bet I added another 10.... But at least 8 of them were presents. Also, I was going through boxes in my basement that had not been opened since we moved here 4 years ago, and I bet I found 20 more, LOL.

[hendi_alex]

The wife has 75-100. I probably would have less than 5 of various themes plus a custom recipe folder, if that particular space belonged to me. Seems very inefficient to have so many books that often have only 2-3 recipes that are rarely used. Also, is so easy now to organize your own personal cook book or electronic cook book, that there is no reason to be storing books that always contain 90% content of no interest. There are just so many cooking resources on the internet or for storage on the computer.

[rainbowgardener]

yeah, I use my cookbooks a lot less than I used to. Frequently if I want to figure out what to cook for dinner using the ingredients I have on hand, I just go to allrecipes.com and do a search by ingredients. You can use your cookbook index to find for example broccoli recipes, but it is a lot harder to use it to find recipes with say broccoli and spinach. I don't like the recipes on allrecipes best, frequently they are quite bland and need doctoring, but it has about the best search engine I have found.

Also then I usually print out the recipe so I can use it, and then save it, so I am building up a collection of recipes I actually use that way.

[pepperhead212]

I am another cookbook junkie! Here are the photos I took of all that clutter, but I'm sure I've added to it since these were taken. I have a stack of wood in my workshop to make another bookcase, which I haven't gotten around to.
https://s24.photobucket.com/user/pepperh ... ter?sort=3

[digitS']

I remember this thread from summer and thinking I'd better not take the time to get into explaining my use of cookbooks. I still won't talk too much about what I have and I stopped counting at 20. Yes, they are mostly mine since DW is willing to wing it except for a few baking recipes that she has.

Quite a few cookbooks were gifts because others knew that I was interested in food. How can we not be interested in food - everybody eats !?

Baked goods do require attention to recipes, right? Here, they are often associated with traditional meals and I'd be afraid to vary them, anyway. There will be few side dishes when I'm the cook . I've given quite a bit of recipe research and a little thought to my main courses. They are simple but I've tried to make them simpler.

Stir-fries began to play an important role after garden fresh Asian greens showed up in my gardening. I'd already been a one-pot wonder, after several years as a single dad. I kinda began to realize that some of my old casserole recipes had rice and noodles in them and here I was putting veggies on rice and noodles whereas I was putting veggies in rice and noodles, before.

I've always liked soup and have several soup cookbooks. A good stock or broth is nearly always an essential ingredient. Well, broth also went in many of my casseroles. With stir-fry, I was splashing broth in with the veggies, too!

It all seemed to just be a proportion thing! My cooking now is focused on soup, stir-fries and casseroles. I make broth and try to have lots of ingredients to choose from. That, really, is about it.

Steve
chicken noodle soup for lunch today

[imafan26]

I haven't bought too many cookbooks lately. It seems most of the bookstores are closing shop and I don't really like to shop online. Sometimes I will pick up cookbooks at the library sale or the thrift shop, but now I find a lot of recipes on line from many sites. I like taste of home and food.com (formerly recipezaar), I even have posted some of my recipes.

I am more of a baker and less of a cook, so I actually like a cookbook with well written instructions, but at the same time, I like simpler recipes that don't require a lot of specialty ingredients or equipment.

I hardly bake now except for the holidays. It is actually cheaper for me to buy a pumpkin or custard pie than make it. I recently discoverd that cake mixes have been downsized from 18.5 oz to 15.5 oz. It doesn't quite fill the pan. I don't know how long this has been the case because, I so rarely used cake mixes since most of my cakes were from scratch. Well, I guess I will have to start making yellow and butter cakes from scratch too, or make cup cakes and use a smaller pan.

[digitS']

. . .It is actually cheaper for me to buy a pumpkin or custard pie than make it. . .

But, you can use one of your Kabocha squash and it will be ssoooo much better, Imafan!

Steve

[hendi_alex]

As if a store bought anything compares to home made from fresh ingredients!

[pepperhead212]

I also love to bake, but I rarely bake anything except bread (I haven't bought a loaf of bread since sometime in '76), unless I am taking it somewhere, or have a bunch of people to help me eat it! Especially with chocolate, I have no willpower - I hear it calling me from the next room. Yet I bake all those cookies at Christmas for gifts, and eat very few of them.

My favorite sweets baking author is definitely Maida Heatter, and the majority of the sweet things I make are from her books. Recently I have found another favorite series - Baked, by Lewis and Poliafito, a series of 4 books (so far), originating from a Brooklyn bakery. The only one I haven't gotten so far is the latest, Baked Occasions, but I'm sure it will be on the shelf sometime. I haven't tried anything from these books that I did not want to make again! Those Salty Caramel Brownies or theirs are to die for! A cousin of mine, after tasting those, told me she wanted nothing for Christmas except a pan of those brownies.

I've often wondered about those mixes they keep cutting the size of, since pans are still the same! My sister used to call me a food snob (not that I cared! LOL) because I told her that I could tell when a cake (or brownies) was made from a mix, as there is a flavor I taste immediately, which I used to think was the artificial vanilla, until CI found vanillin even better than extract in some things! So there is some other chemical in them, and the only things I have not tasted it in were some Girardelli mixes a friend made a few times (until I got her hooked!).

A large number of the books I have are on Asian cooking - Chinese, Thai and other SE Asian, and Indian. While some people think books on the same cuisine are pretty much the same, it is amazing how different they can be, and how many simply don't use all of the essential ingredients! Many people are intimidated by recipes that have 15 or 20 ingredients, yet this is what makes some of those classic dishes so good. Some books I can tell were written so that people could make a pseudo-Indian or pseudo-Thai dish, using supermarket ingredients, rather than diving in and getting all of the necessary ingredients, and doing the real thing. But then, I'm sort of obsessed when it comes to food! LOL Let's face it, unless you are brought up with these kinds of food, there is really no way to wing it, and come up with the right combination of ingredients in a Thai curry paste. It took a lot of taste testing for me to find my favorite recipes, often using different ingredients and different methods from various recipes, to come up with a favorite.


And BTW, here's a pumpkin pie recipe that will make you never want to eat a store-bought pie again. Since this appeared in 2008, I have been asked to make it for all of our family get-togethers. I have also made it with sweet potatoes, as well as home grown seminole pumpkin, but in all of them, it's the real butterscotch that does it:
https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/pumpki ... scotch-pie

[Gardener123]

The wife has 75-100. I probably would have less than 5 of various themes plus a custom recipe folder, if that particular space belonged to me. Seems very inefficient to have so many books that often have only 2-3 recipes that are rarely used. Also, is so easy now to organize your own personal cook book or electronic cook book, that there is no reason to be storing books that always contain 90% content of no interest. There are just so many cooking resources on the internet or for storage on the computer.

I agree.... so I went and bought a scanner. And then I will sell the cookbooks that really don't mean much to me.