Santa came early!

I have two new cookbooks! First, there is Baking: From My Home to Yours, by the fabulous Dorie Greenspan. I've been drooling over this in the bookstore--and now I can drool in the privacy of my own home! My second drool-worthy book is The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook, by Jennifer Appel and Allysa Torey. Expect to hear about both of these lots in 2007. Many thanks to my friend S for these lovely gifts! Cookies coming soon ... lots and lots of cookies.

Summer cookbooks

Is there a 12-step program for cookbooks? Because I think I might need to enroll. Not that I'm complaining at all--I love all the ones I have, and I've acquired four more in the past couple of months. First, my mom gave me a cookbook she found while on vacation, Nantucket Beach Picnics, by Deborah Moxham and Carla Finn. It's full of great summer-time food--salads, grilled foods, yummy desserts ... all so fresh. Plus there's a section on cocktails. How about a Moscow Mule? So then I went on vacation and just happened to stop in a book store in which they happened to have cookbooks. Not wanting to be rude, I bought two cooking-type books. Full Moon Feast, by Jessica Prentice, is something I'd seen discussed recently and had wanted to investigate. This is a discussion of the connection between food, hunger, and the moon's cycles, with various related recipes at the end of each chapter, or moon. Prentice talks about the need to eat locally grown and well-raised foods, using more traditional techniques. It's an interesting book, though perhaps not for everyone. Did you know that ants essentially herd aphids and then milk them? Apparently they do and, according to my grandmother, they do so by stroking the aphids in a certain way (aphid seduction??), which makes them quite docile. The second book I bought is Dishing Up Maine, by Brooke Dojny. The recipes are totally typical of Maine--which is why I wanted them, being in Maine and all. Lobster and other seafood, corn, tomatoes, blueberries are all well-represented. I returned from vacation to find a surprise on my doorstep. Susan had sent me From Manna to Mousse, a cookbook from the Beth El Sisterhood in New London, Conn. It's great--recipes ranging from mandel bread, which I love, to kugels and challah, which I also love, to beans upon beans and apple cakes etc. This is so perfect, as Jewish cooking season is just around the corner and I'm always on the lookout for new recipes. Thanks Susan! :)

Ye olde cookbooke

My cookbook collection is huge--anyone who knows me knows that. Despite my (self-imposed and self-ignored) ban on buying more, somehow the number of coobooks keeps growing, and the shelves are starting to sag a bit under the weight of all these books. I have a lot of the popular books that are out now--Barefoot Contessa ( times four), some of the other Food Network chefs, and couple of Marthas--but there are also the old standards like The Joy of Cooking. However, I will confess right now that I never fail to be entertained by old-timey cookbooks, especially the community or church-related ones. At a second-hand bookstore today I bought two cookbooks, and at $2 for both, how could I resist? The first one, simply titled New England Cookbook, is from 1966 and includes such recipes as roast pigeon, lima bean chowda, clam omelet, and eggs frizzle. Another recipe is rinktum tiddy, a tomato, egg, and cheese thing that's apparently served on toast. This cookbook, almost a booklet really, also has a number of maple recipes, including maple biscuits, maple sugar cookies, and maple sugar snow (this needs a recipe?) Interestingly, the form of maple most often used in here is not syrup, but a harder kind of sugar than you usually see--one hard enough to be grated into the recipes. My second purchase today was the Herb Cottage Cookbook from the National Cathedral Association. I could say something about the proximity of the National Cathedral and how beautiful it is, or about how I love buying herbs there (which I do!), but really it's just the recipes that drew me in. The one that first caught my eye is Flaming Beehive Enniscorthy--points to anyone who knows what this is. There's a note in the margins that says this is "spectacular!" Well it must be then, because who would make things up in a cathedral cookbook? There is also an intriguing recipe for something called only Government Sauce. Now in DC that could mean any number of things, but in this case it appears to be some kind of tomato-apple chutney. Something called Turquoise clearly also requires further investigation.