Of Cookbooks and Treats

There will be more winding today, besides the ordinary stuff.  I'm not quite sure what I want to wind, but there is always something interesting to work with.  There is also a loom that could be dressed, and it is likely that will happen, but in between, there is all sorts of time.

One of the things I am doing between is playing in my cookbooks.  You thought my only collection of books was knitting books?  No, there is oh so much more.

My mum gave me a Betty Crocker Cookbook for Christmas when I was 16.  I suspect that she was doing it in self defense, wanting me to get me past endless chili meals (which is pretty much all I ever cooked) and bread which I loved to bake. This collection was started by my mom! 

Before I was married, I was in the old Book of the Month Club, where once a month, they sent a catalogue and you choose a book.  This sort of thing has been utterly supplanted now by online book resources and subscriptions but I dearly loved getting a catalogue of books. For a time, they had an offshoot called the Cooking and Crafts Book of the Month Club and I joined that too.  I was exposed to books I wouldn't have found in my local stores and would rarely have found in my nearest city with it's chain bookstores. 

I have some really lovely cookbooks from those days.  They are the backbone of my cookbook library.

I would have never picked up a book like The Classic Italian Cookbook or The German Cookbook without the Cooking and Craft Club.  Nor would I have found Jane Brody.  These were things of far off places that wouldn't have been found easily in the small world I lived in.

There would never have been a soup cookbook in my house or a book devoted to just pastry or breakfasts.   And yet, I am so happy to have these all.

  

This last picture is my reading for the day.  With the opening of another restaurant in our small town, a coffee and sandwich shop, our bakery is no longer producing sweets and treats. Up until now our sweet tooth has been served very well by our better than the average bakery, but now, well, it's time to pull out the best books and read and be inspired. 

We will still get our breads from the bakery.  It is important to support local small businesses but grocery store baked goods just aren't up to snuff.  So, the cookie jar at this house is going to be back in action.  The cake pans will be caked and the muffin tins will be muffined.   

Not a lot mind.  Certainly not more than once a week. Probably not even that.  There are no kids with high energy here to consume the excess (though there are some grandchildren just down the road).  I think I will start with something different and yet familiar Bread Cake.

The recipe is from The Bread Baker's Manual, by Rosalie Cheney Fiske and Joanna Koch Potee, which is long out of print, but well worth scoring on the used market if you can.  It's a small book, but full of great things.

That pretty much fills my day.