Forum

Oops, I just noticed I had never introduced myself.

I'm Mary-Claire, or better mcvl (for Mary-Claire van Leunen).  I live in Seattle, and I'm working on a book about cooking from cookbooks, how to change a recipe to meet your particular needs and desires.  Working title: Domestic Intelligence.  I'm going to try putting the first draft out on a blog, and if I can get that to work, I'll send y'all a link.

I'm not a great cook, but I am a kitchen engineer.  I see a meal as a puzzle to be solved, so many overlapping and conflicting motivations going at once: how to make it the right size (I struggle with my weight every day), how to make it healthy, how to do it in the allotted time with my limited (through growing) skills and without making a mountain of dishes (no dishwasher), how to keep from breaking the bank, and above all how to make it supremely delicious.  M. F. K. Fisher wrote in her introduction to Richard Sax & David Ricketts's Cooking Great Meals Every Day (Random House, 1982) that one couldn't really cook great meals every day; I don't see why not.

I love Eat Your Books, and it couldn't have come at a better time in my life.  How did I think I was going to write Domestic Intelligence without it?

xxx, mcvl

***ROFL, am I ever glad you clarified that!  I was wondering why someone would want to call themselves 1145, and if they did, how come they couldn't figure out it should be MCXLV.

***I am a serials librarian, and read Roman numerals regularly.  :-)

Well have finished entering the food related books in the basement, which is most of my collection and my wife's auxiliary storage.

Now I get to start on her office, which is about four times larger and in the last two weeks we only picked up seven new ones.

My wife has officially adopted a large portion of what I had before I met her, but has no interest in most of the Charcuteire or preservation books. Not that she doesn't use the product, just no interest in doing it.

Hi,

I'm Jo living in New York, trying to discover how to get to the recipes.....I can get a list of ingredients and the name of the recipe, but c'est tout! Can anybody help?

By the way, I found out about this site from the Pittsburgh Sunday paper and if I can ever find a way to actually get to the recipes, I foresee becoming a big fan!

Jo, the site does not publish the full recipes as that would be a copyright violation.  It is assumed that you own the book (or have access to it) and you can therefore view the recipe in the book.  The list of ingredients helps you to decide whether you want to bother to look for the recipe in the book.

Saying hi!

Admittedly, I eat more than I cook and have a blog where I write about those meals with lots of photos (like the one below). http://www.foodpr0n.com for those interested. I don't post many recipes, but there are a few.

Other than that I have a small library, but I love the site and having it make all my books useful in new ways. Saves having to pore over all the cookbooks for crafting menus for a dinner party, as well as bringing recipes to my attention that I might have previously flipped by upon browsing.

What a fantastic site!! My name is Lori, and I live in Ohio with my husband, son, and 3 dogs. I absolutely love to cook, and have a ton of cookbooks that were not getting the proper use. I do meal planning weekly, and it was much easier for me to go an online website and print out recipes instead of using what I have. I am so excited to have a resource for my own books! So excited to try it out, and anticipate I will be a lifetime member upon the end of my 30 days...

So excited!! Thank you!

Hi there,

My name is Priya and I am a high school teacher and mom in Maine.  I love cooking for myself,

my friends & family, and I have been collecting/reading/cooking from cookbooks since I was 16.

I love cookbooks that show me a glimpse into one of the following things...

    1)  How cooking and culture are related

    2)  How to improve my family's and our society's health

    3)  How to make "real food" for my child that he will enjoy

    4)  How to keep cooking Indian food the way my ancestors did.

I can't believe there is an entire site for people who read cookbooks like novels like I do!  Glad to be here.

Priya :-)

Hi! I'm Wendy, and I live in West Michigan (USA). I have a passion for cooking and eating local food. I have a blog http://thelocalcook.com where I'm cooking through all the recipes from Simply in Season (sadly not indexed) and I've also been acquiring lots of other seasonal cooking books, so this site is a great start in helping me see what's in them.

Welcome Wendy.  Simply in Season should be indexed soon as there are 32 EYB members owning the book.  I entered a link to the book in your post as people may want to look at the details of the book, even though they can't see the recipes yet.  You do that by highlighting the book name, click the link 3rd from the right in the toolbar, then insert the URL from the book details page.  To get the URL you either have to save it before you start your post, or open another EYB tab and get up the book page there.

Home again, home again, clippity-clop.  I've just returned from Beijing, where Eat Your Books was not ... real ... ly ... a ... vail ... a ... ble -- such bad connectivity and so many layers of filtering that I gave up.  So I'm going back through all the new folks since I left --

welcome, Mary, I'm an empty nester too, and a grandmother, ain't it glorious?;

keep up the good work, Warner;

hope you'll stick with us, Jo;

omigosh, that photograph, jlunar, all those photographs in the blog, I have got to get myself to Toronto;

hi, Lori LoriPedro, I hope to learn more about weekly planning, something I've never learned to do;

love your take on cookbooks for thought, Priya;

hello Tara, I want to learn how you guide your boys into good eating (I've recently started cooking a little with three kids, two of whom won't eat most of what we cook);

hello Wendy, thanks so much for telling us about Simply in Season, I have a bunch of older Mennonite cookbooks but nothing new ...

and hello again to Jane, Anne, lov2laf, Lisa, Kristin, Linda T, SueMmm, Pepper, Foodelf, Andrea, jesshi, SilverSage, Lauren, Zoe, Minder, Leigh, Sarah, Vickie, Ania, Kat, Joy, Elizabeth, Sarah, ChefWendyB, Kerrie, Karin, Katti, Angela, Clare and Claire, judiu, Hazel, Bindii, Mary mlsymons, valerie, lorloff, Mary jamberry, Kirsten 5Pickles, Robert from Tasmania, Maree & Judy, Andy, Abby, Gwen (hello neighbor!), Christina, dear Booklady, of course Fiona and Susie, and all you others whose names I don't yet know.

I look forward to getting to know you all better and learning about all the wonderful cookbooks you have that I have never heard of.  In order to counteract jetlag I have had a little caffeine -- can you tell?  But really, one of the most important aspects of Eat Your Books is going to be the social networking part, where we get to know one another and offer advice and validation and comfort to one another.  It's good to be home, and it's good to be back with y'all.

xxx, mcvl

Welcome home mcvl - hope the trip was everything you wished for.  We too hope that the social networking side of the site takes off.  I went to see the movie about Facebook, The Social Network, recently and felt inspired that EYB could become the equivalent for cookbook lovers.

mcvl

welcome back. 

We do weekly planning, or rather my wife does, and have been posting the results for several years http://menu.vldyson.com/ . For a while, I've been adding photos of a plate on a regular basis.

I do charcuterie and meat fabrication and we plan in a bit more than two weeks on a major pork order. The hams will hang and the loins will become roasts and chops. And I will post on the process on my blog. http://blog.charcuteire.com/

Hot water bath canning of fruit preserves is very simple and other than the jars requires no special equipment. I first did half pints in a roaster, filled with boiling water.