Good Cookbooks?

[hoffsquared]

I'm looking for good cookbooks. I like to browse the bookstore but find that some I choose I don't cook from.

Here are some of my favorites:

The New Basics by Julie Rosso & Sheila Lukins
The New American Cooking by Joan Nathan
The Moosewood series
The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters
Barefoot Contessa

My kids love our Rachel Ray and Emeril kid-friendly cookbooks

[Veronica]

Cuisine at Home.

It's a bimonthly magazine, but they have also compiled the issues into yearly volumes.

Veronica

[NbyNW]

Probably the ones we use most are:

James Beard's American Cookery (might be out of print)
The Minimalist Cooks at Home - Mark Bittman
The Gourmet Cookebook - Ruth Reichl, ed.
Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone - Deborah Madison

[OakLeaf]

Any of Lorna Sass's pressure cooker cookbooks, if you're not already adept at beans and grains in the pressure cooker.

Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East Vegetarian Cooking is a delicious and mostly simple introduction to the cuisines of all of Asia, from the Middle East to Indonesia - kind of a one-stop place for beginning cooks to sample different flavors and decide which cuisine(s) you want to learn in more depth.

[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.

[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.)

[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.