I’ve hit a culinary block. I am sick of everything I cook and need new inspiration.
The Feminist Mormon Housewives were talking about the Moosewood Cookbook, the vegetarian bible, the other day. I love the The New Moosewood Cookbook
But I’ve gone through the Moosewood and need something new. I picked up Rachel Ray
I haven’t seen a cookbook that really excites me lately. I’ve been picking up most of my recipes off the internet, but it just isn’t the same thing. I like the whole vibe you get from a cookbook. The personality of the author, the food styling, the personal notes in the margin.
Anybody have a cookbook to recommend?
Apt. 11d 
Try the New Basics cookbook by the Silver Palate folks. Great stuff, easy to make… Also, the Vegetarian Bible by the female chef at Greens (huge vegetarian SF restaurant.)
Both are great for when you are staring at some random ingredients and don’t know what to do with them.
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I’ll talk up A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen to anyone who will listen.
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I like Deborah Madison a lot, though many of her recipes tend toward the elaborate.
My mother recently went through a big binge of cooking from Cooking Light; I think many of the things she tried were very good. When I was on bedrest while pregnant, my mother stayed with us for six weeks and cooked for me (yes, my mother is a saint) mostly from the “Best of” collection. I don’t subscribe to it myself because I don’t generally cook with meat at home.
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I like Deborah Madison a lot, though many of her recipes tend toward the elaborate.
My mother recently went through a big binge of cooking from Cooking Light; I think many of the things she tried were very good. When I was on bedrest while pregnant, my mother stayed with us for six weeks and cooked for me (yes, my mother is a saint) mostly from the “Best of” collection. I don’t subscribe to it myself because I don’t generally cook with meat at home.
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I love the Silver Palate books, too. But I’m at the same place with them as Laura is with the Moosewood Cookbook. I love the chicken with asian peanut butter sauce recipe and make it all the time (can’t remember the real name at the moment).
I just bought a crockpot cookbook that’s pretty good–Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker Cookbook by Beth Hensperger. I like using the slow cooker, but always hated the mushroom condensed soup sort of recipes I always found for it. This book has much fresher and more ethnic cuisine.
I also have 2 Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, and I do use her recipes, but there are too few usable recipes per book. I really don’t like the way every coookbook has to have a representative sampling of game recipes, as if most of us ever cook venison…let’s stick with the fish, chicken, pork, beef, and vegetarian, please, or at least have WAY more of those sorts of recipes.
Also, I have a “Naked Chef” book my MIL gave me. I guess he’s a TV chef, I’m not sure. I have a few recipes from him I like very much (though one is for skate, which I’m not sure where to buy, I just substitute regular fish).
And don’t forget Joy of Cooking! The updated version does have more modern recipes.
I was getting Bon Appetit for a while, but found that all their recipes began to seem the same. I’m bored too, so I’ll look forward to hints from everyone else. (Does anyone have Jacques Pepin’s easy & fast cookbook? I forget the name, but wanted to know if it was good.)
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Whoa, how did that show up twice? I only clicked once!
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Vegetables Every Day, by Jack Bishop.
It doesn’t have any vegetables-as-main-dish type recipes, no vegetables-n-cheese-n-egg casseroles; it just gives simple, tasty recipes for preparing just about every vegetable you can think of.
A completely different kind of cookbook that we use for fun is Molly O’Neill’s New York Cookbook. It’s full of recipes to try on a lark, with a few that have become standbys (like the Pasta Primavera).
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I got the America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook for Christmas. So far, I have really enjoyed it and it hasn’t failed me yet. In the magazine dept. I like Cook’s Illustrated (www.cooksillustrated.com)and I think Everyday Food has some good stuff too.
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1000 Vegetarian Recipes by Carol Gelles. I’ve even gotten my “meatatarian” husband to try a bunch of these recipes.
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I’m a fan of ‘How to Cook Everything’ by Mark Bittner. Want 23 recipes for peas, as well as other veggies which can be substituted in those recipes?
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12 Best Foods Cookbook: Over 200 Delicious Recipes Featuring the 12 Healthiest Foods by Dana Jacobi
The black Soybean and Butternut squash stew is a staple for me. especially in the winter when you can get the pre-cut squash at Trader Joes. I leave out the bacon since I’m a vegetarian but if you think Bacon makes everything better I’m sure you will love it. The chocolate pancakes are really good too but they are definitely a treat not a staple.
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We have been trying recipes out of Rick Bayless’ “Mexican Everyday”. The recipes are easy and quick. The chipolte shrimp is excellent. I also like “A New Way to Cook” – Brown butter orzo is great and she has lots of ways to incorporate rich things like butter and cream so you get great flavor without killing you with loads of calories and fat.
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I’m an avid cook; there are three cookbooks I use regularly, and recommend to everyone. I tend to use cookbooks as a reference, not for the recipes.
1) Joy of Cooking–the 1975 version by Rombauer and Becker. I don’t tend to use the recipes, so much as the techniques and the “know your ingredients” section.
2) Mastering the Art of French Cooking–the classic Julia Child book.
3) The Classic Italian Cookbook, by Marcella Hazan. When using this book I do follow the recipes, more or less, as I’m still learning Italian cooking. The ingredients are more limited and the prep time much lower than for the French/Southern cooking that I know well.
Also, one recipe I love is Waddling Thunder’s Coq au Riesling, from this link–http://www.crescatsententia.org/archives/2004_10_14.html. My wife calls it “awesome chicken stew”–which it is.
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I really like Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa cookbooks. They’re mostly quite easy to prepare and very tasty.
I also think Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food magazine is great. Every month there’s at least three things that I either make or inspire my cooking in some way.
Donna Hay has several lovely cookbooks that are full of simple and interesting recipes and great photos.
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Moosewood’s Daily Special book is neat – it’s all soups and salads, but a wonderful variety of hearty, full-meal options that have kept me interested.
I also have been enjoying the magazine Eating Well, and agree about Everyday Food. Eating Well has a good mix of vegetarian, fish, pasta, and meat, and most aren’t overly complicated while being quite tasty.
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Marion Cunningham’s The Breakfast Book is my favorite, even just to browse and daydream about lovely brunches. In the Moosewood family, I like Still Life with Menu and Sundays at Moosewood best. Recent acquisitions are Savoring the Spice Coast of India and The Everything Indian Cookbook. Martha Stewart hors d’oeuvres cookbook is fun. So are the Greens cookbooks, although they are sometimes too complicated to cook from, really.
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The Breakfast Book. I love that book! The best pancake recipes ever. And coffee cakes.
She had a restaurant for a while in Berkeley. Breakfasts to die for. Great call, af.
And definitely: eat at Greens, let them do the cooking.
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I’m a recent convert to Deborah Madison, too (and, again, adding bacon or ham often works with vegetarian recipes!). As anyone who reads my blog knows, I also like Nigella’s cookbooks–Feast is very good even for non-special occasions. For older cookbooks, the Pierre Franey/Craig Claiborne NYTimes 60-Minute Gourmet cookbook still has some good stuff, arranged as menus, which is kind of fun. Nigel Slater (Real Food, Real Fast Food) is fun to read but I actually make very few of his recipes. I post recipes on Fridays, if you’re interested, but that’s still recipes on the internet, and I agree with you about the problem there.
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Thanks, guys. I can’t wait to go to B & N and check out your suggestions. I need help.
I blame the kids for dampening my cooking enthusiasm. They aren’t bad eaters, but they are still kids. So that rules out all sorts of interesting vegetables or spices in the cooking. They are also going through the segregated food stage. They like chicken and rice and carrots, but put it all together in a wok with a little garlic and onion and they rebel. Strict food apartheid. It’s killing me. I could make separate meals, but that’s a pain.
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Fast Vegetarian Feasts, and Light Basics Cookbook, by Martha Rose Shulman. She has a website: http://www.martha-rose-shulman.com/.
1000 lowfat recipes, by Terry Blonder Golson.
I have found our local library to be a great resource for checking out cookbooks. Sometimes, a cookbook will have one great recipe, which I can copy, but the rest will be “same old, same old.”
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Hmm- I have been most inspired by the Amateur Gourmet blog for trying new recipes.
For old reliable cookbooks I use the original Silver Palate, have but don’t much care for the New Basics. Cook’s magazine is nice because it gives different kinds of seasonal recipes and figures out the fastest/best way to do them. My favorite cookbook is about 15 years old and no longer available. I think it is called the Cucina cookbook (Italian of course) and everything is served room temperature or cold. It’s all yummy.
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For speedy cooking I like the Desperation Dinners and Desperation Entertaining cookbooks. The first has hundreds of meals that take 20 minutes or less, and the second has lots of good crockpot and company-friendly options. Their 20-minute Magic Brownies are amazing.
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One more to recommend–especially after you mention the issue of “not mixing things”.
Giuliano Hazan, Every Night Italian
These recipes are simpler than the ones in his mother’s cookbook, but they are probably more child-friendly.
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I LOVE Everyday Foods. It’s a funny little magazine but the recipes are easy, delicious, and some are very fast. Not weird ingredients, not complicated, and not so strange your kids won’t eat them.
I also love two cookbooks by Todd English, Olive’s Table and Fig’s Table. They both have wonderful and slightly fancier reciples that are great, rustic, and very delicious.
FInally, I’ll recommend a cookbook called California Kosher. You DO NOT have to keep Kosher to love this book. It doesn’t have any shellfish or pork recipes, but it has a lot of very fresh ingredients, citrussy type recipes, and what comes out of your kitchen is very healthy, and tastes great.
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I love a good cookbook. My favorites are:
1) The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, by Nancy Harmon Jenkins. We sue it a lot, especially for easy pastas, fish and chicken. The minestrone is many-stepped, but wonderful.
2) The Cook and The Gardener, by Amanda Hesser. She spent a year in France cooking for a family, and the recipes are arranged seasonally. I make the a cod dish from this book, which takes all of 8 minutes in the oven, very frequently, and my kids love it.
3) Fresh Foods Fast, by Peter Berley. Vegetarian, although it’s easy to improvise with meat if you prefer, truly fast, and truly tasty. Arranged very nicely with complete 2-course menus, by season.
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I can’t believe only one person has mentioned Mark Bittman’s _How to Cook Everything_! It’s not just 23 recipes for peas but also a well-organized index (pea-soup, pea-spread, pea-salad, when peas come in season, frozen peas, how to buy good peas, etc.), and each recipe has multiple levels of difficulty/complication as well as a variety of ethnic variations. It’s the first cookbook I turn to for dinner parties and what I skim through when I just can’t think of what to make. I strongly recommend it.
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This perhaps isn’t an everyday cookbook, but Gordon Hamersley’s Bistro Cooking at Home has some awesome recipes. He is promoting bright, not-overly-fussy flavors inspired by, duh, classic French bistro cooking (good–they use lots of herbs and wine), but everything he’s devised has an interesting twist to it and so far at least is not hell to prepare, either. My favorites so far are a grilled flank steak with this subtle coffee and black pepper marinade, and especially a rack of lamb with a curry, date, ancho chili and almond crust (totally awesome). There are lots of enticing fish and vegetarian recipes too.
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I second the recommendation of the 1975 Joy of Cooking. My problem with recommending cookbooks is that all my favorites are probably out of print. Check out the Sunset Book of Breads — I own 2 editions and they have different recipes.
But I have a suggestion for the kids not liking cooked veggies: I always let mine help in the kitchen, and they loved to munch on the raw veggies going into the meal. Voila! They have already eaten their veggies. Now they can skip veggies at dinner and you don’t have to care.
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The Gourmet Cookbook. And Nigella Lawson’s Feast.
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I love anything by Nigel Slater, especially “Real Fast Food”, but all his books are great. He’s British so you might have to do some conversions, but it’s worth it. And the way he writes about food is amazing!
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Second Nigel Slater: I own ‘Real Fast Food’ and ‘Appetite’. They’re not necessarily dinner-party cookbooks, but the emphasis on simplicity and satisfaction is a refreshing contrast to some over-fussy writers.
Prue Leith’s Vegetarian Bible was recommended to me a couple of weeks ago, and it looks pretty damn good.
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Sorry I missed this one — I was conferencing! But I love all of Jamie Oliver’s books — easy peasy recipes, and tasty. I HATE Rachel Ray. I like Sundays at the Moosewood Restaurant a lot, and also Patricia Wells’ Bistro Cooking. COuldn’t live without Madhur Jaffrey’s Introduction to Indian Cooking, and if you can get it, there’s a great UK cookery book called The Cookery Year.
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How often does the average American eat fast food per week?
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