Cookbooks

[stoutfellow]

One of my resolutions this year is to cook more - to take control of my diet, instead of eating lots of junk food and frozen dinners. I have found that the simplest way to handle this is to fix something big at the beginning of the week and make several meals of it. Casseroles, stews, things that stretch....

I have a fair number of cookbooks, but it would be nice to extend my repertoire. I've got: Joy of Cooking; The Moosewood Cookbook and a couple of its sequels; several rather slender ethnic cookbooks - Italian, Greek, Scottish; and some generic (and likewise slender) books with titles like Cooking with Spices and Herbs. Given the kinds of recipes that I'm looking for, does anyone have any recommendations for other cookbooks? Other ethnicities than the ones I've named would be particularly nice (Indian? Middle Eastern?), but generics would also be useful.

Comments

[desert-vixen.livejournal.com]

I like How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman for generic.

There's also 2500 Recipes: Everyday to Extraordinary by Andrew Schloss for a generic. Some of it is too out there, but a lot is interesting.

Others include: Feast from the Mideast by Faye Levy, It's All American Food by David Rosengarten (covers ethnic and American regional), and Wolfgang Puck's Pizzas, Pastas obviously by Wolf.

DV

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Thanks; I'll take a look.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

May I suggest a method rather than a cookbook? I am in your situation (single, etc.), and I used to cook on Sundays, then eat whatever it was I had cooked all week until by Friday I could no longer look it in the face and wound up eating fast food or something equally bad for me. And wasting food. A lot of food.

Then I discovered cooking for my freezer. The theory is to cook up a whole bunch of stuff at once (the most popular acronym for this activity is OAMC, which stands for once a month cooking, but there are as many ways to do this as there are cooks -- some people do it by protein, a chicken session, a ground beef session, a fish session, etc., and some people just double and triple recipes as they make them and put the extras in the freezer, and so forth), and then have something different ready-made (or with only minor preparation) every night. It works beautifully.

Anyway, it's tailor-made for a single person, because we can make one recipe of something that feeds four to six people, and get four to six meals out of it, whereas people with families have to double, triple, or worse, to make enough food to last more than a single meal.

Here's some links you might want to look at, there are good freezer cooking lists as well, and at least a dozen books:

http://snider.mardox.com/OAMC.htm (the friendly freezer mailing list attached to this site is the best one I've found)
http://snider.mardox.com/single.html (this is the only site I've found that caters specifically to singles doing this)
http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/lf_quick_easy/article/0,,FOOD_16383_5346316,00.html#Desserts

And books:
http://tinyurl.com/38mmft
http://tinyurl.com/32rcda
are a couple of good ones.

HTH.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Now, I don't have much trouble with eating the same thing for a week - I've done it often before. Still, what you suggest sounds like a good extra tool in the kit. Thanks!

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Extra tools are always good. Glad it's useful to you.

[colliemommie.livejournal.com]

I have some very good recipies for things that taste great as leftovers and freeze well too, if you'd like.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

I'd appreciate that, yes. Do you have my e-mail address?

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

I don't suppose you'd share with me, too?

I'm always looking for more good freezable recipes.

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

My cookbooks tend toward the vegetarian, what with being one myself. I'd highly recommend the Moosewood series, except that I see I don't have to.

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

Whatever you do, avoid To Serve Man.

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

Stir fries and curries are good for making in big batches. If you live near a Borders store (or Waldenbooks) try watching their discount tables for cookbooks. I've gotten a whole bunch of really nice ones there without paying very much for them. I have a bunch from a series of relatively thin cookbooks put out by Bay Books in Australia. If I thought you'd be able to find them, I'd go to the trouble of checking the exact titles and authors, but I haven't seen any of them for about a year, so they're probably not easily findable now.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

There's a Borders not far from my house; I'll take a look next time I'm in there. Thanks!

[filkferengi]

You should contact 17catherines, an Australian listie who collects cookbooks like I collect filk. She's an extremely creative & prolific cook. There was a recent scare she might be becoming diabetic, so she's started the low G-I diet & would have lots of recommendations for you that would be both healthy & very tasty.