Along with our own Jane Kelly and 248 others, I attended the Roger Smith Cookbook Conference over the weekend. It was just as I'd hoped--good company, stimulating panel discussions, excellent food.

Among the panelists was my provocateuse du jour, Julia Usher--the author responsible for last week's Valentine's pledge, in which I promised to make fancy little heart-shaped cookies come hell or high water.  I attended her panel on book promotion (featuring bookstore owners and authors and moderated by my friend Celia Sack of Omnivore Books), and came away floored by the amount of work cookbook authors are doing to get the word out.

Usher described touring 120 events for one of her books, traveling with cookies, icings, and assorted decorating paraphernalia. At some stops, hardly anyone showed up; at others, she was mobbed.  But having traveled--just a little bit--for my own book, I know how exhausting even a brief reading can be. What's more, generally publishers don't spring for these trips.  Most authors do it on their own dime. And in the end, they can't even say for sure whether all that work translates into book sales.

Although all this talk of promotion left me feeling almost as tired as if I'd been doing all that traveling myself, it also made the prospect of decorating a few cookies, in the comfort of my own home with my daughter, seem pretty manageable.

So we went for it, last night, with some tools I picked up in New York and the clock ticking toward dinner.  At the end, the kitchen was an explosion of dried sugarcraft, and I had a crick in my neck from piping royal icing.  But the cookies looked almost as good as Julia Usher's, and though my book may not be a bestseller, and I can't work a crowd like a real pro, I was still one proud mom with one happy daughter--a daughter who remains, along with her brother, the best work of art I've ever produced.

Happy Valentine's!

I have to confess I'm not really that great at holiday food projects.  Every year I want to make an Epiphany cake, but never do since we don't follow any ecclesiastical calendar here and I never know when to do it.  I sort of wanted to make wings for the Superbowl, but one kid had an ear infection and I ran out of time.  Once I made a gingerbread house in time for Christmas, but then none of us could figure out how or when to eat it.  We woke up one morning to find a mouse poking its whiskery nose out the candy-cane windows.

But here's the thing: I really, really, do want to make Valentine cookies.  Partly to blame is Julia Usher, whose gorgeous cookie books make it look as though anybody, really anybody,  can marble and bead a cookie.  (See those valentine hearts in the lower left of the book jacket?  Yup, that's what started it.)

Partly to blame is Zoe, a 5-year-old who loves to bake with her mom.  And partly to blame is me, a born cookie sucker with unfulfilled decorative aspirations.

I know I won't be making them next weekend, when the much-anticipated cookbook conference in New York takes place.  But maybe, with a little planning, I'll just make it on time to turn out a little basket of hearts by late afternoon on February 13th.

What's your Valentine's fix?  could it be chocolate?  Jam tarts?  Or maybe keep it simple with a nice chilled bottle of cava? 

When you have several hundred cookbooks (or even over a thousand, as I know some of you EYBers do!), it's hard to admit that some of your books aren't for actual cooking. But it's true, isn't it?  There's at least a half-dozen books on my shelf that are strictly for looking at.  I've never even contemplated attacking one of the recipes, which would be like assaulting a citadel with a peashooter.  I guess I'm talking about the books that would be coffee-table books, if I had a coffee table.

When I was growing up, my dad, a graphic designer, worked on a couple of the first glossy food books.  One was called "Glorious Food!" (1982), after the New York catering company its author ran.  Another was Giuliano Bugialli's Foods of Italy (1984).  These were gorgeous productions, photo-filled and mouthwatering, but I only remember my stepmother cooking from them maybe once.  They were strictly for display, in other words, and you certainly wouldn't want to splatter the coated-stock interiors with tomato sauce.

These days, my favorite just-for-show books are also intensely visual, but they usually have some other kind of appeal as well.  One of my absolute favorite browse books is What I Eat, the fascinating documentary by Peter Menzel and Faith d'Aluisio, which travels the world looking at daily meals ranging from 800 to 12,300 calories (Also fascinating, if somehow less shocking, is the same team's  Hungry Planet).

I also have a known weakness for cake books, in particular Colette Peters' daft and surreal Cakes to Dream On, filled with cakes that look exactly like mattresses!  Fabergé eggs!  Sofa cushions!  Marble fountains!  And I love looking at wedding cake books like Toba Garrett's, even though they're far beyond my budget to buy or capacity to make.

I'm also fond of mini-books like They Draw and Cook, with each little whimsically drafted recipe an artwork in itself.  The recipes are practical enough that it could be a working cookbook too, but every time I open it I forget about cooking and just feel like leafing through the colorful pages.

Which books are your just-for-show ones?  And did you buy them for yourself, or were they gifts?  Is it enough to take them out once a year or so, look at the pictures and read the stories?  Or do you feel an obligation of sorts to put them to work?

Happy Year of the Dragon, everybody!  Today, there are dragons in every Chinatown and every Chinese storefront.  There are even dragons in every Chinese restaurant, in the form of xiao long bao ("little dragon buns" or Shanghai soup dumplings.  Actually pork.)  or maybe "Dragon Meets Phoenix" (Actually shrimp and chicken).  I think this betrays a certain fascination with exotica, or at least the idea of exotica.  At times that fascination has gone so far as to endanger whole species (think of shark fins, and birds' nests).  Be that as it may, such fascination isn't exclusive to faraway cultures.

When I was in school, I had a good friend who went on to spend some years working in the bush.  From his campsites he'd send me letters which never failed to highlight his distance from civilization, particularly the one that included a recipe for stewed iguana.  A part of me has always regretted not testing that recipe, and a part of me has always been relieved I never had to.  I think a great many of us--adventurous eaters but practical cooks--feel that ambiguity.

These days, I tend to review cookbooks in an Everyman sort of way.  I keep it inexpensive and fairly accessible, which is helpful to my readers but also to me.  That means I test chicken a lot and veal not so much.  Yes to shellfish, no to sushi-grade tuna.  The most exotic thing I've cooked in the last few months was the Christmas goose, which hardly counts (well, yesterday we had "thousand year old" preserved duck eggs, but those come pre-cooked.  And they're actually only 90 days old).

In the EYB database you can find alligator, pigeon, grouse, armadillo (in the Joy of Cooking, no less!)  There's squirrel, and there's kangaroo; there's bear and possum.  What a magnificently diverse table this represents!  at least for the unrepentant carnivore.

I suppose such wistful thoughts about game are a way of expanding my imaginary culinary horizons, even knowing that I'm not heading into the back 40 with a rifle and hauling back a brace of hares for supper.  But surely my EYB friends have more adventurous larders!  What's the latest oddest thing you've cooked?  Did you love it?  or was it just for the sake of the thrill?

My son and I spent the last few days in San Francisco, that gastronomic paradise, because I had a couple of book readings and a companion ticket burning a hole in my pocket.  What a splendid town for a pair of adventurous eaters!  We stuffed ourselves with tacos and dim sum and Bi-Rite ice cream, sushi and banh mi and fine little pastries.

But one of the non-comestible highlights of our trip had to be our visit to Omnivore Books, in the Noe Valley district. (If you haven't had the chance to go, be sure to put it on your list.) Housed in a single room, Omnivore is the "clean, well-lighted place" we all seek in a bookstore.  From floor to ceiling, and on sturdy tables in the middle of the room: cookbooks.  It's a bit like the overflowing room in most of our houses where the cookbooks live, only cleaner (cleaner than mine, anyway) and perhaps a bit better organized and up-to-date.  At mid-day on a Saturday, customers roamed the little room like treasure hunters.

I have this well-documented belief that cookbooks endure as physical artifacts even in a digital world.  And I think a culinary bookstore speaks to that special status.  We see and handle cookbooks more than the other books we own, and we have a longing to touch and handle them before we buy them.  How else are we going to know if it's going to be a keeper?  How else will we know if it's useful, thoughtful, and new?

Well, yes, there are cookbook communities like this one, and cookbook reviewers like me.  We can offer each other guidance, recommendations, a few tips for navigating the vast sea of published cookbooks.  And yes, it's sometimes convenient to take those recommendations and then buy online, especially during the holidays.  But a cook's relationship with a cookbook is so personal, so intimate, that a face-to-face introduction in a bricks-and-mortar store is never wasted.

According to Celia Sack, Omnivore's owner, there are only eight culinary bookstores in America.  Only eight!  That's not nearly enough of these havens of tranquillity and shared interest.  Yet I suppose it's more than many other specialties can boast; I mean, how many knitting bookstores have you heard of?  How many fishing bookstores? or gardening bookstores?  So, if you live in Portland, San Francisco, New York,  Las Vegas, Charleston, or New Orleans, consider yourself lucky.  And if you don't, and your cookbook obsession is starting to outgrow the confines of your living space....have you ever considered becoming a small business owner?

I'm testing a slow cooker cookbook this week, and it's making me consider (or re-consider) the ways we try to conserve time as cooks.  It was only last year that I came to slow cookery, and I instantly loved the convenience.  Strictly speaking, a slow cooker isn't a time-saving device so much as a time-banking one.  You still have to invest a good number of minutes in dinner, but you get to choose which minutes--preferably before-work minutes.  Then, when you walk in the door, you can have a glass of wine and unwind rather than scrambling for an onion and a knife first thing.  It's a 6pm timesaver, for people who like to plan ahead.

That made me think: really, there's two types of time-saving cooks.  The kind who like to control their schedules way in advance, and the kind who absolutely, positively don't.  

Timesavers for Plan-Ahead Types

Slow cookers: Up and dressed at 6am, done with the newspaper and looking for something to do? You're definitely a candidate for making dinner in a slow-cooker.

Big batches: Got a 10-gallon stockpot, a 16-inch skillet, and an oven big enough to accommodate a full sheet pan?  Good.  You can make enough for leftovers straight through Wednesday, meaning no dinner prep! for 3 days.

Bean soaks: Putting your dried beans to soak overnight.  Since you still have to cook the beans for an hour afterward, this really only counts as a timesaver in comparison to cooking your dried beans the other way--boil, soak, boil again over a 3-hour period.  

Meat marinades: Oh, the joy of marinades!  If you have the presence of mind to make up a big batch, dump a piece of boneless protein in some of it and freeze the rest in ziploc bags, you've got dinner in little more than the amount of time it takes to heat the grill.

Timesavers for Last-Minute Types

Salad:  The ultimate shortcut--not turning on your stove even once. Colorful, easy, and--bonus!--good for you.

Canned beans:  Because who can possibly know they want to eat beans 24 hours in advance?  Let's be real!

Pre-chopped produce for stir-fries:  Because when you're frazzled, stressed, and tired, having to chop stuff, with a knife and all, isn't just time-consuming, it's downright dangerous.

Trader Joe's:  Fondly referred to by some as "My Friend Joe".  Why prep it when you can nuke it or pop it in the oven for 25 minutes?

Takeout!: What to do when you look in the fridge 20 minutes before table-time and see nothing but 3 pounds of lamb shanks and an artichoke.

Let's Go Out:  As if we need an excuse!

Sometimes I'm in the first category, sometimes in the second.  (And I'm sure there are lots of timesaving techniques I haven't thought of.)  What type are you?  And what's your favorite ace-in-the-hole for those harried weeknight dinners?

The first week of January: holiday roundups are over, and after a week of bingeing on festive food I need to get back on my treadmill, which kept getting covered in books throughout December.  Time for cookbook cleanup!  

Only problem is, somewhere between 200 and 300 books came in over the fall, I want to keep them ALL, and my bookshelves are already full.  It's time for some ruthless winnowing.  Heartbreaking, but there you have it.

This morning I rolled up my sleeves and hit the "Single-Subject" section of my library.  Do I really need 4 books on pasta?  8 books on meat cookery (and even more than that on seafood)?  Bit by bit, I part with a book here, a book there.  So long to the matched set of little gift cookbooks on Apples, Squash, and Tomatoes--so pretty, but not actually useful. So long to the fifth book just on soup.  Adieu to the Very Ambitious Salad book and the hardbound edition of the seafood book I use in paperback.  Farewell to the book on flavored butters--I think I can figure those out for myself.  Goodbye, disappointing stew book!

All in all, I drop about 40 books into the "gift" pile.  Hurray!  Now I have room for I Love Meatballs! and Salsas of the World and yet another book of salad dressings!

To tell the truth, the single-subject section is actually the easiest to winnow.  Most of the books are not on Eat Your Books (an indexed book is harder to part with! don't you find?), and the quality is not as consistent or the depth of knowledge as great.  The main virtue of a single-subject cookbook is that it makes it easy to look up, say, a blueberry recipe when blueberries are in season.  But Eat Your Books makes that kind of search so easy anyway.

Tomorrow, I'm moving on to the Baking section, which--despite being the least used section of the  library--accounts for the most calories I consume over the course of a year.  But's that's OK.  At least I can find my treadmill now.

The last week of the year has a special gift for the cookbook-obsessed: perspective. From our vantage point at the very end of a long, busy year of food publishing, we can see trends that weren't so obvious before.  There was a great swell of Mediterranean cookbooks, including a sudden spate of rustic Italian.   There were long, loving glimpses of the home kitchens of chefs.  And there were mountains of cookies.

But as I sort through the piles, I notice one usually-stalwart category was missing in American cookbook publishing in 2011--Chinese cuisine.  I think Terry Tan published an important Szechuan cookbook in the UK, though I never saw it here, and there were a few quick-and-easy generic Asian books.  But nothing on the order of Grace Young's marvelous Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge (2010) , Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking (2009) or Fuchsia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook (2007).  I guess I'd gotten a bit spoiled, expecting another blockbuster, world-changing Chinese cookbook (preferably addressing a neglected region of that vast terrain) every year.

But I see Fuchsia Dunlop's got another title coming in 2012, so there's hope. And while I'm making my next year's list, Santa, I could use some more in-depth books on Indian cooking, a book just for layer cakes--not too simple and not too complicated either--and anything focused on West or East African cuisines.  Also a really good shellfish book.

How about you?  Is there a gap in your cookbook shelf that just cries out to be filled?  Or is there that one category that never seems to have enough books?  

Just for fun this morning, I ran a little EYB search (Occasion: Christmas; Course: Main Course)  to see what holiday proteins our cookbooks feature.  The results read like some kind of crazy, carnivorous 12 Days of Christmas (I know I'm leaving out our vegetarian friends here): 

• 85 beef joints
• 82 whole turkeys
• 81 pork joint
• 77 whole ducks or geese
• 62 hams, cooked or not
• 43 roast chickens
• 24 lamb roasts

When I stepped back in the holiday menu to check, I saw there were 876 Christmas recipes to 45 Hannukah recipes, which pretty accurately reflects the somewhat goy-oriented state of cookbook publishing.

My own holiday meat of choice this year is going to be a roast goose (a somewhat fetishistic object for me, as detailed in A Spoonful of Promises).  That's Christmas Day. On Christmas Eve I'm going to my cousin's house, where my contribution to the pan-Chinese feast will be some kind of pork belly, probably red-cooked.

On both New Year's Eve and Day, dumplings will be on the menu at the households of two different sets of friends, neither of them Chinese.  Go figure!  I'm just happy I won't be the only one folding and wrapping my way through a hangover, the way it used to be years ago before we knew many people here.

At some point this week I'll also be "secretly" making my husband his  chocolate-covered orange rinds, which are a sort of private joke within the family because the whole thing is so not a secret.  I even put them in the same candy tin every year. I wrap the tin before putting it under the tree, but it still rattles in an obvious, familiar way if you pick it up.

What's your holiday food tradition?  What food is it not Christmas without?  Are you hosting or bringing? And while we're at it, what's your favorite day-after remedy?

We all love "usable" cookbooks, but "usable" is different for everybody.  And one big part of "usable," I've come to realize, is the availability of specific ingredients.  Each of us carries with us an internal dictionary of the ingredients we consider normal--the ones we know how to get without thinking about it--and a sort of anti-dictionary consisting of the ones we consider hard-to-find or exotic.  I think of these hard-to-find ingredients as "threshold" ingredients, but what I really mean is "beyond the threshold"--as in, the threshold I won't cross to obtain it.

Every year, I try to expand my "normal" list of ingredients a little bit.  I think it's pretty decent-sized now.  For example, I know where I can get red fermented bean curd, rendered leaf lard, and habanero chile powder.  At the supermarket, I know the weird corners where you find the malted milk powder, the agave syrup, and the canned hominy.  The week that Whole Foods finally got farro in the bulk section, a Red Alert went off in my brain.

On the other hand, unlike most of America, I can't find the pet food, sliced bread, or breakfast cereal.  They're just not on my radar.

So I suddenly realized, when revisiting the very popular Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook, that the reason I didn't find it as approachable as other people seem to was that so many of the recipes had at least one Threshold Ingredient.  Not other people's thresholds, necessarily, just mine.  For me, Fruity Pebbles is a Threshold Ingredient.  None of my stores carry gelatin sheets (just gelatin powder).  Citric acid and glucose might be there, but it'll take a knowledgeable stock clerk and long walk.  And till today, I'd never heard of feuilletine, which is basically crushed crepe flakes, and definitely not at any local market I can think of.

This, plus the heavily nested ingredients format (some recipes are little more than a list of 5 other recipes plus assembly instructions) made me leary of the book.  But I'm keeping it on theshelf, in the hopes that as my "normal" list expands, or as my hunger for radical desserts increases, the book will come within range.  And I should emphasize that I certainly don't mean to disparage the book, or the thousands of readers who seem to have made it their own.

How about you?  What are your Threshold Ingredients?  What ingredient stands out in a list for you and shouts "Don't Try This At Home!"?  It's OK--you can share.  There's no shame in it!