Category Archives: Cook Books

If you see one you like and want to order it just click on the blue link and if Amazon has it, you’ll have it in the mail in a few days.  I did this to make it easier for you to find these precious gems.  Actually, my husband did, thank goodness I only have to write what I want.

This blog has been operating for over two years and it doesn’t seek to make money, but if you do buy a book you want I might get a few cents, egg money or whatever modern people call it these days.  I wanted to make it easy for you to get the best cookbooks possible, even if they’re out of print.

Now, remember, I order some of these, especially collectibles, every time there’s a wedding in the family.  So leave some for those who don’t know how to boil water.  I read cookbooks as novels now.  My favorites from Julia Child, Simca Beck, and others are with me always in my mind.

Mind that they’re all in storage, air-conditioned storage and I miss sitting down on the bed and laying six cookbooks around and planning a dinner party.  Some are plain, some with line drawings, and others with full-color photos.

I just got Julia Child’s Mastering #2 out of the library and it’s due and I haven’t even opened it because we’ve had guests.  So be it.  Keep reading and cooking! Dee

It was this week last year that we braved a 1,600 mile trip north and west to our current location in ski country. Two cars loaded with clothing, two laptops, my food processor and Jim’s PlayStation, and the dog.

I didn’t bring one cookbook with me. Since then I’ve bought three, plus a couple of cooking magazines that caught my eye. HELP!!! I miss my “stuff!” It’s all in storage back “home.”

Not even having time to travel over the past year, I opened my suitcase a few weeks ago to a large piece of bubble wrap, and realize that I brought one photo with us, our wedding picture in a frame my mother-in-law gave me when she and I first met, a few months before we were married. Why I saved the bubble wrap in the suitcase was evident: this was a temporary move, but now we’ve stayed.

Cookbooks, books in general, are a comfort to me. Living in another family’s home with their furnishings is one thing; living with the things one has amassed over a lifetime is better. Searching through new and old recipes to get ideas for dishes to please friends and family is a passion of mine that I now have to do online. I have found old sauce recipes and new dishes online and that’s great! Still missing the books, though. I don’t care about the Kindle or any other book reading device, give me paper.

Now we have snow tires that will need to be taken off and replaced by all-weather tires next month (we didn’t need snow tires in Texas) and our small garage is being taken over by Things We Need To Keep (a one-car garage storing eight tires). It’s a joy to live here with a view of the mountains and wildlife, and ironic that we’re happy here and envision city life or country life for our long-term future.

There’s a box that came a couple of days before our actual move, from my mother’s estate. We were in such a state of chaos that it was moved, sight unseen, to storage. Air-conditioned storage. We look forward to having our own things about us, and having a few memories unsealed as well.

Happy St. Patricks’ Day! I didn’t make anything but bought some shamrock cookies for my hairdresser who will hopefully transform me into someone who doesn’t live in a desert climate! Cheers, Slainte, Dee

lives. While we lost the culinary lioness five years ago, Meryl Streep has breathed life into the spirit of this American icon (one icon playing another) for a mainly enjoyable movie. Two of the first cookbooks I ever purchased were volumes I and II of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. You can buy them direct from this site on Amazon just by clicking on my exhaustively researched Cookbooks section at right. The credits today stated that the initial volume is in its 49th printing, that’s about one a year as I count. They share my precious bookshelves (well now climate-controlled storage) with the likes of Simca Beck, James Beard, and many others.

I’m sorry to say that the character of Julie in the movie is hard to identify with. Who can compare a Cordon Bleu graduate who writes the seminal book on French cooking for Americans (without servants in their kitchens) and changes the world? Especially given a depressed, narcissistic wife in Queens who cooks all the dishes in the book in one year and blogs about them. An admirable pursuit and she got an audience, book and movie and is no longer working as a government drone, which is what she wanted. Even the ebullient fairy princess of Enchanted couldn’t make this woman worth caring about. But what they accomplished was night and day.

Perhaps if I was 6′ 2″ I could have faced the disapproving head of Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and the stony-faced room of professional male chefs that Mrs. Child, the neophyte, chose to join. Probably not. I also was not blessed with the je ne sais quoi that was Julia Child. Twenty years ago when I quit the NYC rat race and went to cooking school, women were accepted. Perhaps not after graduation, which is why I chose to apprentice in the kitchen of a female chef and cookbook author.

The first half of school we learned the basics of French cuisine. I joked at one point that we should have checked our weight and cholesterol before we began and after Phase I. Classic cooking: butter; cream; eggs. And we had to eat everything we cooked. Egg day was always feared, for its difficulty as much as knowing eggs were all we would get to eat all day. Phase II brought in a stagiere who stocked the kitchen for us depending upon the lesson, and cooked us a balanced lunch. Consider that we spent two solid weeks on pastry and baking, so we had to have something nutritious to get us through what was nearly a 12-hour day for me with commuting. There were eight students in the class so we all got individual attention. I’ve had really great teachers in grade school, high school and college (not many, but a few really stand out even years later) but this was literally the most fun I’ve ever had in school. Luckily so, because I blew my entire life savings on it.

One hopes that this book and movie will bring a new generation to cooking, instead of take-out and the prepared aisles of the grocery store. It made such a difference when I shopped the outside (produce, meat, fish, dairy) aisles and only ventured inside for olive oil, rice, soy sauce, pasta and other staples.

Instead of my regular sign-off this evening, permit me to say “Bon Appetit!”