I love cookbooks

I love to look at them, I love to read the recipes and imagine myself making them. I love to get new ideas from the cookbooks. I have had a large collection of cookbooks, many of them picked up at garage sales.

I tend to think that people actually ate better when cooking wasn't opening a box and adding water. I really resent the children cookbooks that don't teach kids how to cook but rather how to open cans and boxes.

One of my goals for both kids is that they will know how to prepare a recipe without using conveinence foods; that they will be able to make a soup from ingredients that they find in the fridge; that they will not only be able to follow a recipe but improvise and improve on a recipe.

Oops. I didn't mean to get on a soap box.

Anyway, I was saying I used to have a lot of cookbooks. A lot. But I got brave and went through the shelf and pared it down by 2/3rs (at least) and took a huge stack(s) into the used bookstore. I kept some of them, the special ones, the ones I use all the time. I kept my Grandmother's Betty Crocker cookbook from the 50s. I also have my Great-Aunts Joy of Cooking from the 50's. And no kitchen is complete without the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook with the red plaid. Plus a few others but now I have space on my bookshelf.

Space for more cookbooks.

Mostly kidding.

But I feel so much lighter now and free-er. And I don't feel one tiny bit of regret about any of those cookbooks. Now if I could just do that with other stuff. . . .