Well Done

I think I've written before about my obsession with cookery. However, since I just finished reading (with gusto) Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw, I thought now might be a good time to talk about new cookbooks in the library system.

A keyword search by "cooking" (sorted by date) will show you the latest additions to our catalog-including offerings from Emeril, Jillian Michaels, & local author Deborah Madison-& will also show you if we have any upcoming cooking classes. Some of the latest finds I have savored:

Life's Too Short to Chop Onions: 99 Dishes to Make When You'd Rather Be Doing Something Else by Kitty Greenwald
This small volume had some good, easy recipes. Plus the author has a fun style-chapters have clever titles like "Shut the Oven Door and Run".

Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin
This is one of those "memoirs with recipes". Possibly the best of its kind!

Taste of Venice/Brunetti's Cookbook by Roberta Pianaro & Donna Leon (recipes by Roberta Pianaro ; culinary stories by Donna Leon)
Taste of Venice has exquisite recipes-some of the meat & fish dishes have ingredients like cuttlefish, which I'm not sure how to find, & veal, which I don't care to eat, but there are many other delights to choose from. None of the recipes are more than a couple of pages in length, most are less, & all are straightforward, if not easy. The cookbook is enhanced by mouth-watering excerpts from Donna Leon's mystery series & essays about Venetian life on culture by Leon & Roberta Pianaro.

A co-worker has been watching Daisy Martinez on PBS & loving her, so I thought I would put in a plug for her new cookbook: Daisy, Morning, Noon, and Night: Bringing Your Family Together with Everyday Latin Dishes. Another co-worker is enjoying the recipes from The French Women Don't Get Fat Cookbook by Mireille Guiliano.

I'm also curious to take a look at: Yum-Yum Bento Box: Fresh Recipes for Adorable Lunches by Crystal Watanabe and Maki Ogawa; Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater by Matthew Amster-Burton; & The Lost Art of Real Cooking: Rediscovering the Pleasures of Traditional Food, One Recipe at a Time by Ken Albala and Rosanna Nafziger.