Let me ask you a question – how many cookbooks do you own? Less than ten, ten to twenty, twenty to thirty, more than thirty? I have upwards of FIFTY cookbooks, and that doesn’t count the ones that might be buried under other books in the boxes in the basement. Quick easy dinner recipes, those are my weakness. If a cookbook promises me that it will provide me with recipes that take 30 minutes or less to prepare and are made with non-gourmet ingredients that I think my family will eat, you can bet I will buy it. And yet, I rarely ever COOK any of the recipes in the cookbooks I buy!
The one exception is an old softcover copy I have of the Betty Crocker Cookbook. I bought it from Doubleday Book Club or Literary Guild maybe, when Chris and I moved into our first house during my pregnancy with Nathan and I was finally going to have a grown-up kitchen to cook in. As opposed to the tiny apartment kitchens where I was lucky if all of the burners on the stove worked and the oven actually reached a reasonable temperature for baking. I knew next to nothing about actual cooking besides making tacos from kits or my husband’s favorite, Hamburger Helper. I used that Betty Crocker cookbook to learn how to make everything from French Toast to Pot Roast. The pages are dog-eared and splattered with batter and sauces, and starting to separate from the binding, but I don’t want a new Betty Crocker cookbook because the one I have is perfect!
I also subscribe to a couple of cooking magazines, like Taste of Home and Cooking Light. I dog-ear a lot of pages in those but for some reason, rarely actually make the recipes I mark. Why? I have no idea. I guess I like to READ recipes, I just don’t get motivated to actually MAKE them. Is it just me? And of course, there are who knows how many millions of recipes available online, a person could cook something different three times a day for their whole life and not make every recipe there is.
So what about you? Do you collect cookbooks? Cooking magazines? Have a bookmarks folder overflowing with recipes you found online? Tell me in a comment!
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