[1] Whole-Grain Griddle Cakes

Joy of Cooking

We have a funny way of making pancakes in this house. Namely: we don’t have a big griddle to make them on, so they come off the pan one or two at a time. This leads to eating in the kitchen while waiting for the next one to come off the pan. We’ll also alternate who makes each one so that the other can enjoy theirs while it is hot.

As far as heat is concerned, let the pan get hot over a medium heat. Add your butter (what else?), add the batter, and wait until you see bubbles popping and not closing back up. Flip the pancake, then turn the heat off. Repeat a lot.

This says it makes “about fourteen 4-inch cakes”.… Continue reading →

The Joy of Cooking (1997 reprint of 1975 edition)

Joy of Cooking

I’m sure that you’ve heard of this book. You’ve probably even seen one. There are a million editions. My mom gave me a copy, and Natasha has one that she’s not certain the providence of (the one I’m talking about here). It’s the classic “give to your kids when they go away to college” book.

Of course, this one is from the 70s, and so it’s got some surprise recipes. Molded Creamed Fish? We’ll probably skip this one.

Number of recipes in this book: 4500
Number we’ve cooked: 1

You can click on the “joy of cooking” tag below to see recipes from this book we’ve made. The book link is an affiliate link via Amazon.com, so if you click on the book and buy something from Amazon.com,… Continue reading →

The Rules (as it were)

Since we’re buying no new cookbooks as of 1 June 2010, there have to be some ground rules on how this is going to work. Most rules are up for discussion, because they’re all sub-points of the one major rule: No new cookbooks until we’ve cooked at least 25% of the recipes from the cookbooks we already own (exception: certain huge books we’re aiming for 10%. I’m looking at you, Bittman). With that in mind, here’s what we’ve got at the start of the blog.

# Online recipes are welcome to be posted but do not count as cookbooks. If we attempted to cook half the recipes on the internet, we’d be in for several worlds of hurt.
# We are not canceling subscriptions to cooking magazines we already have, but we will not subscribe to something new.… Continue reading →

About this blog

Bill and I started this blog because we noticed that we own a lot of cookbooks. We’re not that couple who owns 800+ cookbooks, but we are that couple who would like to someday. And that was the problem.

We already owned several cookbooks, but we had a tendency to buy more and more. We enjoy cookbooks, reading them, cooking from them and even just getting ideas from them. However, at some point we realized two things. First, we kept buying NEW cookbooks, but we haven’t made a dent in using our old cookbooks. Second, we tend to cook a lot of the same things over and over. We both enjoy cooking, and Bill’s pretty good at it, but we both have our fallback meals (just ask Bill if he’s tired of hearing the word “frittata”).… Continue reading →