Every year, like so many others, I half-heartedly attempt a New Year’s resolution. Gone are the days where I try to guilt myself into going to the gym, being more organized, and wasting less time on Facebook. As I get older, I realize I’m just setting myself up for failure. But last year in an attempt to save more money and eat healthier (hopefully eliminating the gym altogether), I resolved to stop eating out so much and start cooking at home. While my resolution wasn’t a complete success—I still like to eat out a lot—I did learn that I actually can cook. Well, I can follow a recipe. This year I plan on getting more serious, which isn’t that hard to do since the Library has tons of great cookbooks with cuisines from all over the world. It’s fun to bring a new one home and try out the recipes rather than commit to buying one. A few of my favorites include:

Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics by Ina Garten

Clean Food: A Seasonal Guide to Eating Close to the Source by Terry Walters

How to Cook Everything: 2,000 Simple Recipes for Great Food  by Mark Bittman

There are also some great websites and cooking blogs worth checking out:

Fine Cooking

Their slogan is “We bring out the cook in you” and I couldn’t agree more. Thousands of free top-notch recipes that make me look like I am a better cook than I really am.

The Pioneer Woman

Ree Drummon, a.k.a. Pioneer Woman, shows how to cook delicious homemade fare with step-by-step photos.

Supercook

Life is about to get much easier since I discovered this site. You simply type in the ingredients you have at home and Supercook finds you a recipe. You can also start an account and keep a running list of ingredients.

The Library has plenty of cookbooks for children and teens. These books can help children learn their way around the kitchen and teach them the importance of eating right; international cuisines can serve as an introduction to a new culture.

Grow It Cook edited by Deborah Lock

Holy Guacamole!: and Other Scrumptious Snacks by Nick Fauchald

The Spatulatta Cookbook by Isabella and Olivia Gerasole

Cookbooks can be found in your Library under the Call Number 641. Books about food and culture can be found under 394.

Just about the last thing I want to do in the summer is fire up the oven, but in cooler weather soup sounds better to me than salad.  There’s always my thrifty Surprise Soup – want the recipe?  Look in the refrigerator, see what’s left over, add chicken broth and if it’s good, surprise! Occasionally I want to make soup that’s a little more, ah, planned. Looking in our catalog for ideas, I found:

Love Soup: 160 all-new vegetarian recipes from the author of The Vegetarian Epicure

A collection of soup recipes, many vegan, from a renowned vegetarian cook. According to the reviews, it includes a pickle soup recipe. I’m not sure I want to eat that but I do want to read the recipe.

An exaltation of soups: the soul-satisfying story of soup, as told in more than 100 recipes

This book comes from a fascinating blog (formerly a website) called SoupSong. Patricia Solley has been writing about soup online for more than 10 years, mixing soup history and local culture in with the recipes. Want to make a soup that’s a little out of the ordinary? Try Yemen’s saltah or a Turkish balik corbasi.

Closer to home, you could head to Buckhead to eat at Souper Jenny, recently featured in the AJC . The article includes some of Jenny Levison’s recipes and we’ve got her cookbook at the Library.

And while you stir, you can sing:

I spent my twenties wandering in the food service wilderness, toying with the idea of going to cooking school, dreaming of opening my own rib shack or bakery as I washed dishes in a country club kitchen, made toast and scrambled eggs for 300 at a church camp, worked the line in a hotel kitchen in a popular tourist trap and cleaned and shelled 60 pounds of frozen shrimp every single day at a nightclub. Cooking for a living is what I wanted and, for the young and energetic, food service is fun—it’s grueling and will leave you broke and broken, but there’s nothing like the adrenaline jolt of a hot, busy kitchen on a Saturday night when Chef is bellowing, “Let’s move it people, we’re in the weeds!”

Library work can be as physically demanding as kitchen work—you’re on your feet all day, lifting heavy stuff and working odd hours.  However, I’ve never gotten a second degree burn from accidentally bumping into a hot bookshelf and I’ve never nearly severed a finger doing storytime.  I now have a job that doesn’t leave me reeking of grease and gets me into my own bed well before 2:00 a.m. but I often look back on the pressure cooker days and nights of those various kitchens with a great deal of nostalgia. When the longing hits, I turn to our collection for solace. If you have a similarly checkered work history or just get swept up in the drama of TV cooking shows (YES, I’m talking about you Gordon Ramsay!) these titles are all in the collection:

Heat: An Amateurs’ Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta Maker and Apprentice to a Dante Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford

Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America by Michael Ruhlman

Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip—Confessions of a Cynical Waiter by Steve Dublanica

Service Included: Four Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter by Phoebe Damrosch

Cooking Dirty: a Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death by Jason Sheehan

The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen by Jacques Pepin

If you know anything about Paula Deen, you know she likes butter.  I have to confess that I like to have butter on a variety of dishes too.  Butter has been around forever. In fact, it is said to have been around two thousand years before Christ. As all good things, it was discovered by mistake when people were collecting a variety of milks and kept stirring the liquids which turned into what we know today as butter.

I discovered a great website devoted to butter. The website is interestingly enough called Butter through the Ages. The site is part of WebExhibits an interactive online non-profit museum.

Butter was the only food that the United States Congress defined before the creation of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 . Did you know that it takes 21 pounds of cows milk to make a pound of butter? The site includes a lot of interesting facts including the history, how it’s made, how to cook with it, and the composition of it .

The library of course has books on butter and a variety of Paula Deen’s cookbooks. Here is a sampling of books we have on butter:

The Great Big Butter Cookbook: because everything is better with butter

Butter

What Einstein told his Cook

On Food and Cooking: the science and lore of the kitchen

Paula Deen’s books

for ice cream.  Creamy, yummy, good for the tummy – July is National Ice Cream Month. Americans have been celebrating National Ice Cream Month since 1984 when President Ronald Regan designated it as a special occasion.

In fact, the third Sunday in July is National Ice Cream Day (July 19th this year.) President Reagan felt that since ninety percent of the nation’s population enjoys eating ice cream, we should celebrate!

The International Ice Cream Association (IICA) encourages celebrating because ice cream sales account for twenty billion dollars in sales each year and provides thousands of jobs. Nine percent of all milk produced is used in making ice cream. (I bet some kids wish they could have an ice cream cone instead of a glass of milk.)

Whether you like the fancy stuff or plain vanilla (the most popular flavor.), there’s something out there for you. If you were interested in making your own, check out Ice Cream by Pippa Cuthbert and Lindsay Cameron Wilson. (641.862 Cuth) or Ice Cream and frozen desserts by Peggy Fallon, (641.862 Fall.)

That’s the scoop on National Ice Cream Month. Be sure and have a sundae on Sunday, July 19th.

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!

It’s not crazy to say that one of the things that Georgia is known for is the food. We are the “Peach State” but we also grow peanuts, pecans and poultry in abundance. We are the home of Waffle House and Coca-Cola. We have restaurants associated with Gladys Knight, Emeril, and Ashton Kutcher.

Georgia also boasts serious coverage on the Food Network; ubiquitous Savannah chef Paula Deen shows viewers the tasty evil of Southern food. Alton Brown wears many hats in the food world: from Iron Chef America Commentator, riding a motorbike around America discovering hidden culinary gems, or on his classic science meets pop culture show “Good Eats”.

Still publishing cookbooks, Nathalie Dupree visited many television viewers spreading the gospel of Southern cooking when the only food networks were public broadcasting. In Decatur, Watershed chef Scott Peacock published The Gift of Southern Cooking with his mentor the late Edna Lewis, one of the early masters of Southern cuisine.

Other Georgia Cookbooks found in your library:

Agnes & Muriel’s Cafe Cookbook- Easy comfort food from the midtown Atlanta restaurant.

Atlanta Cooks – Recipes from the chefs, bakers, and pastry chefs from restaurants such as Bacchanalia, Food 101, Canoe, and the Sweet Auburn Bread Company.

Atlanta Cooks at Home – More recipes from local chefs of Rathbun’s, Shaun’s, Sala, Woodfire Grill, and Joel.

“I’m Just Here for the Food: Food + Heath = Cooking” – Alton Brown’s book where he is one part Mr. Wizard and one part Emeril, making cooking and science fun!

Nathalie Dupree’s Southern Memories: Recipes and Reminiscences – Some recipes, some culture, and a lot of Southern style.

Paula Deen: It Ain’t All About the Cookin’ – Only the most recent book by the prolific Paula Deen, also look for “Lady and Sons” cookbooks.

Every year my best friends and I host a Halloween Party. This year, I’m hosting it at my new house. I really wanted to come up with some super scary and super creative snack and decoration ideas. So naturally, I used the best resource at my fingertips…the library!

I browsed through this month’s periodicals for some ideas. “Everyday with Rachel Ray” gave me a great recipe for Pumpkin Ravioli (“Pumpkin Ravioli”) but “Good Housekeeping” proved to be the most helpful. First, it gave me a killer idea for decorating my entryway. Take fallen and dead slim branches and twigs from around the yard, and stand them up in pumpkins (use the pumpkins almost like a planter) then perch some ravens in the branches(“Halloween Magic”). CREEPY!

But the best idea for cheap and easy decorating was on page 175. “Good Housekeeping” suggested photocopying somber 19th century portraits from history books and mounting them on black card stock. Place the portraits on a mantle or a shelf and add to the creepiness with candlelight and fake cobwebs (“Halloween Magic” p175). I decided that Civil War history books would be my best source for sufficiently severe and frightening portraits from the beyond. So I headed over to the 970s and pulled a bunch of Civil War books off the shelf, marked the portraits I found to be the most unsettling with scraps of paper and then photocopied them (for 15 cents a page) right there at the library.

I took the copies home, cut them out and mounted them on some black poster board I had laying around. I put my own spin on the idea by hanging them up with black ribbon in a sort of horrifying collage on the wall in my hallway. I finished it off by putting an old candelabra, some tea lights and some cobwebs on my console table underneath. It looks GREAT! And the best part? It was virtually free!

Find more great Halloween ideas @ your library or try these great websites:

www.rachelraymag.com

www.marthastewart.com

www.goodhousekeeping.com

Works Cited

“Pumpkin Ravioli with Toasted Pumpkin Seeds.” Everyday with Rachel Ray. Oct. 2007: 118

“Halloween Magic.” Good Housekeeping. Oct. 2007: 174-175