Category Archives: Cook Books

It was this week last year that we braved a 1,600 mile trip north and west to our current location in ski country. Two cars loaded with clothing, two laptops, my food processor and Jim’s PlayStation, and the dog.

I didn’t bring one cookbook with me. Since then I’ve bought three, plus a couple of cooking magazines that caught my eye. HELP!!! I miss my “stuff!” It’s all in storage back “home.”

Not even having time to travel over the past year, I opened my suitcase a few weeks ago to a large piece of bubble wrap, and realize that I brought one photo with us, our wedding picture in a frame my mother-in-law gave me when she and I first met, a few months before we were married. Why I saved the bubble wrap in the suitcase was evident: this was a temporary move, but now we’ve stayed.

Cookbooks, books in general, are a comfort to me. Living in another family’s home with their furnishings is one thing; living with the things one has amassed over a lifetime is better. Searching through new and old recipes to get ideas for dishes to please friends and family is a passion of mine that I now have to do online. I have found old sauce recipes and new dishes online and that’s great! Still missing the books, though. I don’t care about the Kindle or any other book reading device, give me paper.

Now we have snow tires that will need to be taken off and replaced by all-weather tires next month (we didn’t need snow tires in Texas) and our small garage is being taken over by Things We Need To Keep (a one-car garage storing eight tires). It’s a joy to live here with a view of the mountains and wildlife, and ironic that we’re happy here and envision city life or country life for our long-term future.

There’s a box that came a couple of days before our actual move, from my mother’s estate. We were in such a state of chaos that it was moved, sight unseen, to storage. Air-conditioned storage. We look forward to having our own things about us, and having a few memories unsealed as well.

Happy St. Patricks’ Day! I didn’t make anything but bought some shamrock cookies for my hairdresser who will hopefully transform me into someone who doesn’t live in a desert climate! Cheers, Slainte, Dee

lives. While we lost the culinary lioness five years ago, Meryl Streep has breathed life into the spirit of this American icon (one icon playing another) for a mainly enjoyable movie. Two of the first cookbooks I ever purchased were volumes I and II of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. You can buy them direct from this site on Amazon just by clicking on my exhaustively researched Cookbooks section at right. The credits today stated that the initial volume is in its 49th printing, that’s about one a year as I count. They share my precious bookshelves (well now climate-controlled storage) with the likes of Simca Beck, James Beard, and many others.

I’m sorry to say that the character of Julie in the movie is hard to identify with. Who can compare a Cordon Bleu graduate who writes the seminal book on French cooking for Americans (without servants in their kitchens) and changes the world? Especially given a depressed, narcissistic wife in Queens who cooks all the dishes in the book in one year and blogs about them. An admirable pursuit and she got an audience, book and movie and is no longer working as a government drone, which is what she wanted. Even the ebullient fairy princess of Enchanted couldn’t make this woman worth caring about. But what they accomplished was night and day.

Perhaps if I was 6′ 2″ I could have faced the disapproving head of Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and the stony-faced room of professional male chefs that Mrs. Child, the neophyte, chose to join. Probably not. I also was not blessed with the je ne sais quoi that was Julia Child. Twenty years ago when I quit the NYC rat race and went to cooking school, women were accepted. Perhaps not after graduation, which is why I chose to apprentice in the kitchen of a female chef and cookbook author.

The first half of school we learned the basics of French cuisine. I joked at one point that we should have checked our weight and cholesterol before we began and after Phase I. Classic cooking: butter; cream; eggs. And we had to eat everything we cooked. Egg day was always feared, for its difficulty as much as knowing eggs were all we would get to eat all day. Phase II brought in a stagiere who stocked the kitchen for us depending upon the lesson, and cooked us a balanced lunch. Consider that we spent two solid weeks on pastry and baking, so we had to have something nutritious to get us through what was nearly a 12-hour day for me with commuting. There were eight students in the class so we all got individual attention. I’ve had really great teachers in grade school, high school and college (not many, but a few really stand out even years later) but this was literally the most fun I’ve ever had in school. Luckily so, because I blew my entire life savings on it.

One hopes that this book and movie will bring a new generation to cooking, instead of take-out and the prepared aisles of the grocery store. It made such a difference when I shopped the outside (produce, meat, fish, dairy) aisles and only ventured inside for olive oil, rice, soy sauce, pasta and other staples.

Instead of my regular sign-off this evening, permit me to say “Bon Appetit!”

I didn’t bring one with me. Not one. Meats are different here. Today I wanted to try a brand-new homemade rub on some pork baby back ribs but could only find them already marinated. I’ll have to try another store and a butcher I can get to know.

There are reasons I didn’t like our new grocery’s sister store back home. I need to find a place that will help with meats and produce (Jim is allergic to fish but I cook it for myself occasionally).

I don’t really need recipes unless I’m trying a different cuisine, but it is always a comfort to have my stalwart cookbooks at hand to look up a roasting temperature or remind me of Julia Child’s 1970′s French Onion Soup.

Today I have the Internet, and I printed out the recipe and made a smoked paprika bbq rub but then didn’t have the ribs to put it on. Hey, when I first moved home to TX, I found an entire hog’s head in the freezer section. It freaked me out. Now in our temporary digs here the meat section and butcher’s counter is very different than back home.

Granted, this is Easter Sunday and I need to check out the goods at several groceries within a mile or two. While I ended up with thin pork chops, we ordered pizza so I’ll be able to re-think recipes tomorrow. Recipes and taxes. Cheers, Dee

It’s midnight. I laid down for a while and napped, then arose and finally showered. The dishwasher finished running and I’m just now starting a load of clothes to wash. It’s 44 degrees and raining. Yesterday it was 84 degrees.

We are full to the gills with moving boxes and not nearly done yet. Mostly we are blessed by friends who come over and spend several hours in the trenches, packing. Tonight Jan brought us tasty BBQ AND dessert and helped pack our Italian majolica, my mother’s bone china and all the most expensive framed art on the walls. [We are leaving the priceless quilts on the walls for now as we'll put them in the car and leave them with Jim's folks for the duration rather than put them in storage.] Jan was tired when she went home a couple of hours ago. Nothing like having an art museum curator to pack the delicate stuff!

I know, it’s an embarrassment of riches. First an MIT grad helped Jim wrap the big bulky stuff (sleigh bed, sofa) then an energy and finance whiz for the smaller items to wrap, now a museum curator. I think Obama’s stopping by tomorrow for a couple of hours, then Warren Buffett on Saturday to finish up.

We finished most of the books, including my extensive and esoteric cookbook collection that includes volumes on home cheese making and a trail mushroom guide, Sicilian vegetables, a Jewish settlement cookbook and one from a friend’s mother’s church and JIm’s mother’s VA cookbook. I didn’t even know what I had!

When we moved here from Austin we rented a garage downstairs for a week. Whenever we had a dolly load of packed boxes, Jim brought it downstairs. Here we’re just inundated. Tomorrow we finish the books and shelves, rest of the pictures, and start on the laundry room/pantry, master closet and kitchen. Hope I can sleep tonight but I may just be too bone-weary to do so.

Today we went to the office supply store so we could have an “in your face” way to designate boxes that must go with us in the car. So the yellow ones designate “Fragile” and orange designates “Car.” As I went around tagging the car boxes I put one Car sticker on the dog so we wouldn’t forget her. Hey, one needs some light moments in the exhausting tedium of moving a life into storage.

Hope you’re having a great day. I think we have three packing days before us before we hit the road. When Jim moved from Texas to San Diego he had three linear feet in a freight truck. When we moved from San Diego to Texas we had 12 linear feet. He tells everyone the girl he met in San Diego and married there cost him Nine Linear Feet! Now we’d take at least the entire 20′ truck.

Perhaps we remember the days when all our belongings went into the trunk (college) or pickup truck (post-college). But even in 1,028 sf that we moved into with a kitchen, office and bed… now we have a dining room, living room and bedroom and that’s a lot of stuff.

Hope you’re having a great week. We can’t wait to get done and have a paycheck start coming in from work starting a week from Monday. Cheers, Dee