My name is Vicki and I live on Flathead Lake, Montana. Like others on the website cookbooks are an entry into a new adventure. The cookbooks accumulated from pure curiosity about other cooks and cultures and now seem to have a life of their own, certainly now that they're started to be listed on EYB. No one can have too many cookbooks or too large a kitchen.
Cooking is always a pleasure and an adventure. My husband will read a recipe in some newspaper and request not the recipe but something along that line. Since the grocery store is fifteen miles away I make most bread products. But my real adventure comes through day to day vegetables, salad and main dishes. At meals we then discuss how and why the dish contains particular ingredients and cooking methods.
Part of the challenge for creating food that you've never tasted is the possibility of failure. And if it happens that's okay. It's all edible but part of the adventure is to absorb some of the culture.
For example my car book is Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese about Indian expatriates that doctor in Africa. Over the weekend I reread my books on Indian cooking and cooked all our meals with an Indian or African theme. Foods mentioned even in passing in movies, reading or listening intensify the experience for me.
Read a recipe with an appreciation of why ingredients and cooking methods were used. And always think in terms of what we now know about healthy eating. Incorporate that knowledge into everything we eat. It's our responsibility to create food that enhances our families life not harms it.
Think of a recipe as something recorded at one point in time; we then take the concept and make it our own.