i shouldn’t really be buying more cookbooks…i don’t really “use” the ones i own now. the thing is, i don’t really use recipes that often. i end up buying cookbooks because they’re inspiring and beautiful. but i am vowing to put them to better use–there are a lot of recipes in them that would expose me to ingredients i’ve never cooked with before. so there. now i get to think about buying new ones, right??
like tender, vol 1.i have bought nigel slater’s cookbooks as gifts, even though i don’t own one of his books, because they looked that good when i was flipping through them. and then they were so well-received and i heard so many good things about his recipes that i thought i should check them out. then he went and wrote a cookbook about vegetables. and he used kale on the cover, which i’m crazy about, and like this beautiful, romantic picture of it too. i have to have it.
i want sunday suppers at lucques for no reason of my own. countless bloggers and recipe writers over the years have raved about it and now their obsession had rubbed off on me. lucques, chef goin’s LA restaurants, is supposed to be fantastic. i’ve seen her on a couple of cooking shows, being interviewed, cooking, and i have a feeling the recipes in this book will be a little…advanced. but then again, what’s the point of buying a cookbook if you aren’t going to learn anything.
and speaking of learning, i’ve decided that i really want to learn how to bake–particularly bread. last week i saw an old episode of “baking with julia child” in which the guest bakers were none other than jeffrey alford and naomi duguid! the episode blew my mind. you know i have a healthy respect (read: fear) of baking but they talked about kneading dough 880 times, creating a humid oven, how to get pita bread to puff up in a skillet (they learned by trial and error–who knows how long that took), and my fear turned into awe. i would love to know that much about bread-making one day. i think a good starting place would be to learn how to make these “easy”, no-knead breads of jim lahey’s that everyone seems to love. so i need to buy my bread, you see. i will actually use it. promise!