Last weekend, on facebook, I promised you a peek at the bookshelves in my kitchen.
That’s right, I said, BOOKSHELVES IN MY KITCHEN.
Yes, I have all-caps feelings about the bookshelves in my kitchen. I don’t care all that much about granite countertops or stainlesss steel appliances, but I love having a built-in bookcase for my cookbooks.
Here are three of the books I reach for most often in that room … (p.s. you can see an actual glimpse of my kitchen bookshelves on instagram).
The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying and Start Making
Plus, it’s inspiring, never shaming. This isn’t a book to make you feel guilty for buying your sandwich bread. More a book that nudges you to say, “Why wouldn’t I at least try making this if it tastes so good and takes so little extra time?”
At least, that’s the voice I hear as I flip these pages.
Also, despite what you might imagine after reading the subtitle, these are not gimicky recipes. This is good, basic, family food: yes, there are recipes for chocolate peanut butter cups and toaster pastries, but there are also crackers, pasta sauce, and breads. You can learn how (and why) to make your own applesauce, yogurt, and canned tomatoes. I even adopted her granola recipe. Apparently, granola is better with lots of cinnamon and a dash of almond extract.
From the vanilla ice cream to the vanilla extract, this is one of my favorite cookbooks.
Fold down this page. You are going to want to come back to this recipe a lot. If you are going to ditch one packaged thing from your pantry, I suggest the cereal box. – Alana Chernila
One of the biggest changes my family has made in our eating in the past two years is to add fermented foods to our diets. And while stomach bugs and the flu and various colds run rampant through all our friends and neighbors, for two winters in a row, these bugs have mostly passed us by. I no longer spend my winters moving from sore throat to nasty cough and back again, and when my children do get sick, they almost always bounce back quickly.
Fermented foods have been a major part of the human diet around the world for thousands of years, but, in the past 50-100 years, we Americans have stopped consuming them almost entirely. There is growing evidence that we should rethink that.
And don’t let the word fermented frighten you off. I’m talking about yogurt, pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, and kombucha, the soda-like drink my kids can’t get enough of. So, nothing nasty, everything delicious and tangy.
Real Food Fermentation
Here’s another reason to check out this book: unless you can purchase raw pickled goods from your Amish neighbors (ahem), then you have to make this stuff on your own. The heat-treated pickles on the supermarket shelf have had all of their living, immune-enhancing ingredients cooked out of them in the name of food safety. One exception is kombucha. Buy it from Whole Foods to see if you like it, but one glance at the pricetag and you’ll understand why I make my own.
When we make our own food, we regain some control over our lives – especially at a time in history when many of us feel at the mercy of events, governments, corporations, and industrial food producers. – Alex Lewin
Here is a book to watch out for in the second-hand shops: The Fun of Cooking
This is a book for kids by kids (from really little ones to teenagers). The recipes are good and diverse, but the real treat for me has always been the stories. This is a book with an urban/New York bent, and I loved imagining a world where kids my own age might hop on the subway to pick up ingredients for the dinner they’d make before Mom arrived home from work. So, pretty much the opposite of my life then.
It’s quite possible that my city-living dreams began with this book.
And dreams can be passed down. This year, my daughter made the teddy-bear bread for her teacher, just like I used to do.
Last year we had a baby-sitter named Jean Williams who taught me how to make teddy bear bread. I always make two of them so I can give one away to a friend. – Jessica, age ten
Tell me, do you keep books in the kitchen?
Oooo, we are kindred spirits! I was most delighted to find built-in bookshelves in our new house’s kitchen that we moved into over the summer. People often remark: you have a lot of cookbooks! Some of my favorite are “Super Natural Everyday” “How to Be a Domestic Goddess” and “Barefoot Contessa Family Style.” I still want to get Smitten Kitchen’s new book and try to find Donna Hay’s “Flavors” if I can find it. I don’t think it’s in publication anymore.
Danielle, I love Smitten Kitchen’s book. Especially her recipe for chicken roasted with grapes and olives. Sounds bizarre but tastes amazing. I don’t know “Flavors.” Will look it up!
What in the world do people do with their cookbooks but NOT keep them in the kitchen!? I love mine in the open shelf where I can see all the spines to inspire me. My favorite is the one I have been compiling over the years that hold generational recipes, still on handwritten cards and scraps of paper now stained and splotched. I’ll never recopy them as long as I can read them!
Handwritten recipes are the best, Teri! I love my recipe box, too.
I think I will go broke having you as my friend.
I too have kitchen bookshelves. But they don’t tell the stories yours do.
l have forwarded your words to my daughter-in-laws, my cooking inspirations.
I know, Sue, I’m a terrible enabler when it comes to book buying. 🙂
Grandma yanceys 90th birthday cookbook – our families southern home at its simplest! Back to the table – a celebration of family and food! The Arkansas ladies club only because somehow my mom found it and now I have it and it reminds me if the good in my childhood! Barefoot contessa, nigella Lawson and giada too!
Oh that Teddy Bear bread! I remember that book well!
My poor kitchen only has space for a few favorite and most-used books right now but my dream is a kitchen doubling as a school room. Lots of bookshelves, a big, scratched up table, kids with artwork and math problems and messy science projects, and of course, good smells coming from the stove. Might be a few more years…or more…but this military wife can dream. So lets just throw in a panoramic view of snowy mountain tops while we’re at it, shall we?
🙂
Great recommendations, Christie! I don’t have any amazing additions to add to the mix, though I do love me some Cook’s Illustrated 30 Minute Meals. Truly, while reading this post I found myself saying, “I want to be like you when I grow up.” Your vision of the world is so lovely.
Ashley, that is the sweetest thing anyone has said to me in a long time. Love you, friend! P.S. I love everything Cook’s Illustrated.
Would it be kosher to share that granola recipe?
My kitchen (which is the point of entry for my home) has spaces for a washer and dyer, and above the washer space, a shelf meant for laundry supplies. I don’t have those appliances, though, so the shelf holds cookbooks (especially my prized Encyclopedia of Cookery that was Mom’s). In the dryer space, next to the stove, I’ve put one one of those industrial metal shelving units. Canned and bottled goods and dry cat food on the bottom shelf; cookie jar, snack basket and the most frequently used herbs and spices on the top shelf; and on the middle shelf, food books. In the space where a washer would be, there’s my red barstool, which is a great place for a guest to sit and visit when I’m in the kitchen.
Have you read “Home Cooking” and “More Home Cooking” by Laurie Colwin? You’d love them.
Jill Krementz wrote the “A Very Young…” books! A Very Young Gymnast, to name one. Love seeing her name again.