Cookbook Addiction Meets Gauntlet Toss

Ladies and gentlemen, start your ovens!

Over dinner a couple of weeks ago some friends and I were discussing my ever-growing cookbook collection and the urge I fight (with some futility) not to add to it.  Visiting online bookstores does little to help this compulsion.  A small click of the mouse and, like pushers, they show me their wares, more and more cookbooks that they feel certain I might enjoy.  With limited bookshelf space and a failing economy, it’s become an expensive habit.

“You know,” my friend said authoritatively, “studies have shown that people, on average, use only one recipe per cookbook they own.”

“Who exactly performed these studies?  And why?” I questioned, trying to drill holes into her thinly veiled opinion that, perhaps, I could simply make more recipes in the cookbooks I already own.  

Begrudgingly I had to admit it, though, she was right.  Then it came to me.  Out of so many cookbooks that I own, many of them surely had hidden gems waiting to be discovered by my stainless steel fork.  I started to get excited.  

“Perhaps I could go through my collection,” I said, “and devote an entire month to one cookbook.  I’d make recipes out of that book and that book alone for thirty days.”

“Do it!” my friend chimed in supportively.

And so where to begin?  Last year I tested recipes for Colleen Patrick-Goudreau’s newest cookbook, The Vegan Table.  The recipes I tested were phenomenal, and her newly published book is the most recent addition to my collection.  It was an easy choice.

My copy of Vegan Table is bursting with scraps of paper noting the recipes I want to make first, my cloth napkin is folded, and my spatula is ready.  Bring on June 1st.