Why do I keep reading cookbooks?

Yesterday I was flipping through The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook: 101 Asian Recipes Simple Enough for Tonight's Dinner (gorgeous book!) and it occurred to me that my relationship with cookbooks has come to a stalemate. Just as I feel that there is nothing more that I can glean from diet books and budgeting tomes, I think I'm deluding myself when it comes to what I am going to get out of cookbooks. There is only a certain amount of money that we are willing to spend on food and we rarely go over that, so none of the fancy ingredients I see in new recipes are going to make it into my shopping cart. Since there are only so many ways to cook chicken breasts and frozen vegetables, reading cookbooks is window shopping for me.

Even when I am willing to splurge a little and try something new, I can't find it at my local market. It took two different trips for me to find a box of barley, and finding quinoa is a lost cause. Again, we are in a routine that my husband and I are loathe to stray from. Food Lion is the grocery store closest to the house, so that is where ABM goes. If I ask him while he is in a good mood, he may venture down the road to Bi-Lo, but as the main grocery shopper he won't make that a regular stop. Using mail-order and paying shipping to get groceries goes against my miserly ways, so that's out.

As frustrated as I am at the moment, I don't think I will give up on cookbooks totally. I noticed that Food Lion has gotten in some small bottles of hoisin sauce, sesame oil, oyster sauce, and a few other things. At $2.50/bottle they are affordable enough for me to try out a new recipe. So I may be able to branch out . . . at least a little.

"Love Soup" by Anna Thomas

Love Soup: 160 All-New Vegetarian Recipes from the Author of The Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Genre: Cookbook
On my TBR List?: Yes, since Apr 2010


I have owned a copy of The Vegetarian Epicure since the mid-1980s. One of the recipes saved me from going hungry when I was living on my own and had my paycheck stolen -- but that is a story for another day. When I read in a Roger Ebert review that Anna Thomas had a new cookbook coming out and it was full of soup recipes, I couldn't wait for my library to get it in. As I wrote on my other blog, I always start craving soup this time of year.

Thomas paints lovely pictures of family and friends gathered at the table with warm bowls of soup and hunks of homemade bread. While Thomas' attitude inspired me to get in the kitchen, the recipes contained items that I never see in my local grocery store, like chard. Out of 160 recipes, I only found three that I appealed to my taste buds and fit my skill level. The collection is sectioned into warm-weather and cool-weather soups, so it would be great for someone who shops by the seasons. I would recommend this book to someone who has easy access to a farmer's market.



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