I grew up in a cooking family.  We had home-cooked meals every night at my house and  ate them all together as a family.  Eating out, even fast food, was a once-in-a-while luxury, and we only occasionally resorted to frozen dinners.  My mother was the family cook, and she taught me the basics of cooking, and by the time I went to college, I was comfortable cooking spaghetti with meat sauce or my crowd-pleasing black bean burritos.  Aside from these occasional home-cooked meals, my repertoire was quite narrow, and I most often resorted to the single-guy-in-his-twenties fare of boxed macaroni and cheese.

My parents gave my brother and me copies of Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food one year for Christmas.  I have since worked my way through many of its recipes, and have found that the title is appropriate.  Bittman’s method is to teach the basic techniques for a given type of cooking, then to show all the variations you can make after mastering the technique.  Packed full of instructive illustrations, useful techniques, and most of all, many recipes, this encyclopedic tome is a must have for the serious home cook.  My wife and I actually used it so much that we had to buy a new copy!

1. What’s Cooking @ the Library?
2. It’s Hot in the Kitchen
3. Stir it once, stir it twice
4. Go Ahead, Play With Your Food
5. Paula Deen would be so proud!