Fresh Approach Cooking

Meme, Meme, Meme. Kinda like internet chain letters, they are (seemingly) lists of questions bloggers send around and ask each other to answer.

Both Sarah at Delicious Life - a foxy LA woman who knows her food, and the multi-talented Lyn at Lex Culinaria (both of which are among my favorite blogs) tagged me to play this round on cookbooks and I am happy as can be to oblige. So here goes.

Total number of cookbooks you own - Somewhere in the mid 200's. There are quite a few I could most likely part with, (the Potato Experience comes to mind) but I just can't bring myself to do it. Even the worst ones have something of value in them, right?

Last Cookbook bought - I bought three recently. Nancy Silverton's Breads From The La Brea Bakery (more on that later), The exceedingly ethereal Kitchen of Light, from Andreas Viestad (because I have a strange fascination with Scandinavian cooking) and New Irish Cookery (because one of my dearest friends asked me to name five traditional Irish foods, and I couldn't. The Shame! The Shame!)

Last Food Book Read - I feel as if I have read them all, from The Potato to How To Cook A Wolf, Nathaniel's Nutmeg to How to Read a French Fry, so I have moved on to some more vintage books. The last one (which is always nearby) is a sensationally glamourous book given to me as a very thoughtful gift - My Favorite Things, By Dorothy Rodgers (The composers wife). It has a timeless elegance that I revere. She writes effortlessly about home decorating, entertaining and the subtle art of being a lady. The recipes are all so exceptionally classic you cant resist dreaming of a black tie dinner party dripping with Hollywood Glamour. I really love it. And since the equally ladylike Claire, who gave it to me, had to travel to - I'm sorry, was it 46? Yes,I believe she said 46 (though she may have been tipsy at the time) bookstores to find it for me, it is even that more special and something I will always cherish.

5 cookbooks that mean a lot to me - I wish like mad that I still had my (or, more accurately, my fathers) copy of the 1956 Okinawa Officers Wives Club Sukiyaki Cookbook. I lost track of it some years ago and it was the first book I think I ever cooked from. (Hopefully it is just stuck on a bookshelf somewhere in my fathers house just waiting to be rediscovered) The others that mean something to me are all ones that bring me back to my childhood (wow is this going to be the most cliche list ever) Julia Childs' The French Chef Cookbook, The un-PC-named Sunset Oriental Cookbook (which has the best recipe for tea-smoked duck, ever. Mouth watering goodness), The New York Times Cookbook, The Joy of Cooking and my favorite baking book of all time, Richard Sax's Classic Home Desserts (that one isn't from my childhood, I just dig it, not being much of a baker)

5 People I would like to see answer this: I will just say two people, since it seems like this went round like wildfire: Sylvie at Soul Fusion Kitchen and Tiffany at Breakfast at Tiffany's (which isn't a food blog, but isn't exactly not one either...)

I'm off to yoga and then an Orthodox kosher BBQ...can't wait to see what I'm served.

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More than 1000 cookbooks are published in the United States every year.

De Re Conquinaria written by Apicius in the 1st century A.D. is the world's oldest surviving cookbook

On a sort of unrelated topic, a great friend of my sister and brother-in-law, Steve Amick just recently published the book "The Lake, The River and The Other Lake" (he even named one of the characters after my brother-in-law) and it got a fantastic review in the New York Times. Check it out, he is an outstanding writer. (among other things!)

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