The Joy of Cooking

This might sound silly, but right now I am in the process of reading The Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition. A jolly man in a red fur suit left it underneath the tree this year and I am never letting it go. Surprisingly, I'm super-pumped that I will now be preparing time-tested dishes such as "Mongolian Hot Pot" and "Burnt Sugar Cake." Not only is this book chock-full of recipes that I have never even heard of before, but its reference section is sick. The section on peppers was really interesting (and let me tell you that it was more informative than the websites I found explaining various kinds of peppers on the internet a few months ago). I didn't even know which area I wanted to start in; all last night I flipped though various areas just reading whatever I could.

This morning, after reading comic books in bed for a few hours (beginning at 5am), I settled back in at the kitchen table of my parents' house and started reading the The Joy beginning at the inside sleeve. After some deliberation, I've decided that I am going to read The Joy of Cooking from cover-to-cover so I don't miss a single thing. Reading cookbooks might sound like the hobby of a professional chef or a crazy person, but so be it. 9 times out of 10, cookbooks are more useful than half of the blogs I read and 6x less depressing than the news (reading the local Delaware newspaper today was such a bummer, I couldn't get past the first section.)

Also, The Joy of Cooking has a website run by on of the grandsons of Irma Raumbauer, the woman who wrote the original edition.

Reading this book also has me thinking about the movie Julie & Julia which I saw in theaters and plan to watch again this weekend.