Good Cookbooks?

[Blueberry]

Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian
The Joy of Cooking (old and new)
Also love the Art of Simple Food and the Moosewood Series (though I find most recipes a little fussy for daily use)

[Eden]

I see a few of my favorites up above already, but I also really like
A New Way to Cook - Sally Schneider and
Soup, A Way of Life - Barbara Kafka

[GLC1968]

The New American Plate - awesome healthy recipes that are mostly easy to make but taste very complicated!

The Victory Garden Cookbook - old and out of print - but totally worth finding for the amazing resourse! It's all vegetarian and the book is organized by vegetable, so it's a great thing to have if you garden or belong to a CSA where you all of a sudden have a bunch of some veggie that you don't know what to do with...

Any of the South Beach Diet cookbooks. They are chock full of recipes that are healthy and fresh. Every single recipe we've tried has been excellent (dieting or not!).

The Eat Clean Diet Cookbook by Tosca Reno. There are 3 or 4 versions of these books out now. Amazingly creative and delicious food that is natural, unproccessed and void of most sugars and unhealthy fats. Again, every single recipe we've tried from these books has been outstanding.

[indysteel]

The New American Plate - awesome healthy recipes that are mostly easy to make but taste very complicated!

The Victory Garden Cookbook - old and out of print - but totally worth finding for the amazing resourse! It's all vegetarian and the book is organized by vegetable, so it's a great thing to have if you garden or belong to a CSA where you all of a sudden have a bunch of some veggie that you don't know what to do with...

Any of the South Beach Diet cookbooks. They are chock full of recipes that are healthy and fresh. Every single recipe we've tried has been excellent (dieting or not!).

The Eat Clean Diet Cookbook by Tosca Reno. There are 3 or 4 versions of these books out now. Amazingly creative and delicious food that is natural, unproccessed and void of most sugars and unhealthy fats. Again, every single recipe we've tried from these books has been outstanding.

Thanks for the suggetions! I just ordered the New American Plate from Amazon. It sounds like just the ticket for where I wanted to head in terms of cooking.

[Eden]

Oh - and its not exactly a cook book, but the book Timing is Everything by Jack Piccolo is a terrific cooking reference book.

[Crankin]

I use the fast recipes from Cooking Light almost exclusively. At the end of the month I cut them out and save them. I also use a couple of the Cooking Light cookbooks (15 minute meals). I also get Food and Wine and use stuff from that. For the basics I use a Good Housekeeping cookbook I bought for my son when he was in high school, and a couple of Jewish cook books handed down from my mom.
I have a lot of other cookbooks, but most of them are full of recipes that are too fattening, especially the vegetarian ones.

[shootingstar]

Hmmm. Have about 10 cookbooks gathering dust abit. Have one of the Moosewood books while some are a blend of fusion cooking with real cheffy twists, and other books are traditional Asian recipes with photos or illustrations on technique. There are 3, I value because the books are no longer in print but have real value because....China has changed so much in the past decade that some of these photos are probably not quite relevant /scenery has been radically altered.

For past 5 years, I get recipes from magazine websites for:
Cooking Light -healthy recipes (though Eating Well, is even healthier. Cooking Light still tends to use too much sugar.)
Eating Well - healthy recipes
Epicurious.com (which covers Bon Appetite & now-defunct Gourmet magazine)
Saveur

Either he or I, only consult a recipe..um about once per month or less. Rest is memory or we throw ingredients together for culinary magic.

[hoffsquared]

Thanks for all these. Next time I'm at the bookstore, I'll try to find the ones mentioned here.

I use the internet too but I really like to browse through my books at the kitchen table when planning (or at least making an attempt at) out meals for the week.

[OakLeaf]

The Joy of Cooking (old and new)

Yeah, gotta keep the old edition for the wild game recipes and the bartender's guide.

Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home is a bit more "everyday" than their other cookbooks.

Honestly, I get most of my recipes from the Internet. Recipesource.com, foodtv.com or just Google. Google indexing is a lot better than it used to be - they finally figured out that when someone googles a couple of ingredients, they're not looking for restaurant menus. Look at three or four recipes, see what they have in common and where there's room for variation, mash 'em up.

[Tuckervill]

cookingforengineers.com is one of my favorite recipe sources. Usually it is just a refinement of something I've made many times, or wanted to try, like pecan pie without corn syrup.

The 1948 Good Housekeeping cookbook is the one I keep open all the time, and which taught me to cook many many things as a young mother. It was passed down from my grandmother, and I bought one in better condition to use instead of the one with her handwriting in it.

Most other recipes I get online, even though I have a huge stash of cookbooks. Most of them are fundraiser cookbooks from churches and the Jr. League, which I LOVE.

Karen

[Blueberry]

Another good resource (aside from the internet) is Everyday Food. It's a tiny magazine, but most recipes are (relatively) healthy, simple, and reasonable to make for a week night dinner.

Truthfully, I use a big binder of recipes I've put together from the internet as much as anything, though. Foodtv is a good source.

[Blueberry]

Yeah, gotta keep the old edition for the wild game recipes and the bartender's guide.

Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home is a bit more "everyday" than their other cookbooks.

And "new and improved" means corn syrup added to some recipes I have the old and the middle version. I need to get the new version, as I understand it really is improved. Hopefully, I'll never have to cook possum, but at least I'd know how

Good to know about the Moosewood. I'll have to check that one out.

[7rider]

Yeah, gotta keep the old edition for the wild game recipes and the bartender's guide.

I don't know how "new" my Joy of Cooking is. It's about 10 years old now. I know it's not the OLD one....but I'm unsure if it's been re-done yet again. I pull mine out frequently for information on the basics.
- "How long am I supposed to roast that [insert food item] for and at what temp?"
- "How do I truss a chicken again??"
- "I have a [blank]. What on earth can I do with it??"
It's a good book for that. I rarely follow specific recipes from it (or any of my books.)
(Come to think of it, tho', I never did check it for puffballs.)