The Cookbook Weed Continues

Getting Mathfriend to look at the shelf and pull down suspect cookbooks instead of just looking at suspect ones I select yields a great many cookbooks that are definitely suspect on closer examination-- like the Irish cuisine book that appears to have taken all of its recipes from Irish country clubs and therefore looks nothing like what I think of when I think of Irish food. "Roasted Chicken Breasts with Smoked Salmon and Avocado Sauce" isn't... Irish. And it's a bit more dinner-party than I'd ever make myself. The book on Irish pub food looks much better and there are a few recipes in it that are just waiting for me to get the appropriate cut in the meat share. But then that one was acquired by one of the previous occupants of my second apartment, deliberately, and she just never got around to using it and left it behind when she moved out. I liberated a number of cookbooks when we all moved out of that apartment.

In addition to the bizarre Irish country club book, books deaccessioned today include a homemade pickles book which hasn't got anything I can eat, a "party nuts" book (which isn't useful because however associated with praline pecans I might have become, I'm not actually a big nut person-- it's just benign_cremator really loves pecans and praline is good for occasions that don't warrant a full-on pecan pie), the book with the low-fat cottage cheese cheesecake, and a tea book which has very few recipes at all and is mostly a lengthy look at different types of tea.

I've wound up, in weeding, making the distinction of "books I acquired on purpose" and "books I did not acquire on purpose." Now, the ones that weren't on purpose are still usually ones I purchased, but they were at a library sale where books were a dollar and I was trying really hard to build my cookbook collection. Or I found them in a Little Free Library. Or liberated what was left behind after roommates moved out. The ones that were acquired on purpose I sought out deliberately, them or something like them. Sometimes acquisition was still serendipitous, but I was looking for Specific Thing when I bought them. Sentimental value is a third category-- I will likely never use Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven, but it was my mother's, so I keep it.

And then you get books like Cooking with Mr. Latte, which is less a cookbook than Sex and the City with food instead of shoes (with Mr. Latte being the Mr. Big equivalent, though Mr. Latte is much better at... any sort of human interaction... than Big), but it amuses me.

Mathfriend is suspicious of my "make your own mass-produced treats like hostess cupcakes" book (he spent a while trying to figure out what "Chikn in a Biskit" was), and I'm less attached to it now that we've established I can eat a lot of the things I was trying to figure out how to replace (and in general as my ability to create my own sweets has improved, mass-produced sweets have gotten less attractive), but I'm still going to try it first. That was one of the most on-purpose books in my collection.

We did try the cheesecake recipe from Wintersweet. I don't know how it tastes yet because you have to chill them for eight hours and before I do that I want the baking dish cool enough that I'm not worried about it exploding from thermal stress because stupid pyrex. I did finally acquire cake flour and superfine sugar-- Wegman's came through-- so I can now begin to contemplate recipes from Baking by Flavor. And I lost my white whole wheat flour to pantry moths. This does not appear to have spread to anything else, the contaminated flour has been removed from the house entirely, and tomorrow I must away to TAGS for more plastic containers.

Meanwhile, what I am eating tonight? Ramen with frozen spinach and frozen homemade meatballs. This is why I have ramen and meatballs-- because when you've spent a few hours making a cheesecake who wants to go make dinner?