Warning : Slightly Ranty Waters ahead.

Vegetables

I was introduced to my love of vegetables in 2008. Previous to that, anything that wasn’t a potato or corn had best stay off my plate. I didn’t mess around. You put green beans anywhere near my food and I’d burst into tears, flee the room in a whirlwind of sobbing hysteria, and slam my bedroom door shut for emphasis.

Me and veggies? We didn’t get along.

It’s been a bumpy road, but with my husband’s very patient help, I’ve managed to turn a lot of that around.

Hoo boy! The recipes that become available when you like vegetables are mind-boggling. Onions? Bring it ON. Green peppers? Mushrooms? Cabbage? Pfft. I am the cabbage QUEEN.

Green beans? *cue the flailing and screaming and sobbing*

…okay, it’s not vegetable paradise up in here, but I am admittedly leaps and bounds from where I was.

Cookbooks

So what does this have to do with cookbooks?

Well, previously, I had no use for cookbooks. Everything I ate came with instructions on the outside of the box. I would look through cookbooks at the bookstore and scoff – sure, that chicken looks nice, but look at all the veggies on that plate, and let’s get serious here – I am SO not the artistically-drizzling-sauce type.

But now that I like vegetables, it turns out I like cooking, too. Who knew?

So I find myself returning to those bookstores and flipping through those previously-scorned cookbooks.

And you know what? I scoff again.

Seriously, people, what ever happened to cookbooks for people like me? Did they ever exist? I take one look at a recipe that begins with “Three days ahead of time” and the gerbil stops spinning in my brain-wheels.

People seriously cook food that takes three days to prepare? I don’t even want to know about food that takes three HOURS to prepare, unless it’s in a crockpot and I can set it and forget it!

A Chocolate Addendum

And let’s be honest here – I love chocolate. I do. I have a full blown addiction that I have no intention of curing. 

I really don’t need my chocolate to be latticed and lightly dusted with a precise mixture of cocoa powder and confectioner’s sugar. You can just give me a bar of the stuff and I’ll gnaw away with all the busied cheerfulness of a beaver given his first log. 

I don’t care how incredible your elaborate chocolate shard concoction may be – if you spent more than about twenty minutes on it, you’re wasting your time. It’s chocolate. Going to all that effort is gilding the rose – it really doesn’t need your help. It’s fabulous all by itself, as god and willy wonka intended.

Back to the Cookbooks

After spending a few hours in the library (at least half of which was actually spent looking at the cookbooks, I swear! *hides a giant stack of fantasy novels behind her back*) – I have come to the following conclusions : 

1) People who write cookbooks have forgotten what it was like to think that macaroni and cheese was a perfectly viable dinner alternative.

2) People who read cookbooks are almost unanimously stay at home spouses or people with some kind of invisible income source and unlimited pool of free time.

3) This is all part of some Nazi plot to cause the majority of Americans to become dependant upon fast food so that they can take over the world with their McJack in the King’s Kentucky Fried Tacos and Waffle House conglomerate.

Possibly all three.

Types of Books

I have, for your convenience, classified the various types of cookbooks that I have found.

Every Time You Make A Recipe From This Book, Seven Diabetics Around The World Will Spontaneously Combust 
These are the dessert books, and they are incredibly popular. Chocolates, cakes, pies, cookies, and things I’ve never even heard of. Do we really NEED a book that has three hundred pages of cookie recipes? Really? I submit to you that we do not.

How to Cook! Featuring Ingredients You’ve Never Heard of and Using Tools You Don’t Own!
This seems to be the second-most popular type cookbook out there. If more than 1/4 of the recipes in your book involve things I can’t buy at my local grocery store, I might be talking about you, dear author. Leeks? Really? I’m sure they’re wonderful, but the Piggly Wiggly out in farmersville Wisconsin doesn’t exactly carry them. Also, I have a reasonably well-stocked kitchen, but I do not have a bamboo sushi roller, nor do I feel the need to invest in a panini press just to try out your recipe. You may as well just add powdered hen’s teeth and unicorn water to the list. By all means, branch out and introduce me to new foods, but do so in small doses only. I am easily frightened by vegetables I cannot pronounce.

How to Cook For Someone Who May Die If You Feed Them Incorrectly
These are great…if you know someone who is unfortunate enough to be diabetic or celiac. I am neither, and thus skimmed right on past them and cannot tell you what amateur chef sins they commit.

Closely related is the How to Cook For Someone Who May Be Incredibly Offended or Morally Opposed To Your Normal Food
It’s always good to have an idea of the diets of  your friends and family members, especially if they are likely to dine with you. Having a handful of handy vegetarian or Carb-free dishes to prepare for them would be handy, but I don’t need eleventy billion books on them. I need a book that’s actually entitled something like my goofy categories – something that covers all the bases without necessarily delving into hundreds of recipes depth on each one. 

There is a smaller subset of Down Home Cooking books, (with a satellite cluster of Cooking with One Hilarious Ingredient books)
With these, my main complaint is that some of the recipes take too long to cook, and they are almost universally Foods That Are Not Good For You. That, and I think one or two recipes involving beer is probably sufficient for me. An entire book of them is bordering on an unhealthy fascination with the  substance. Heavy meals of meatloaf and mashed potatoes and biscuits and gravy and cheese enchiladas and cakes and pies are nice on occassion, but a steady diet of them had me tipping the scales in a dangerous direction.

My attempts to find a healthy, easy, and simple source of recipes seemed to be foiled.

The Internet

Yes, yes, I know that there are tons of recipes and recipe sites out there in the world wide web. 

I have a blog. I’ve heard of the internet.

Do me a favor? Do a quick search for…oh…”chocolate chip cookie” or “pork chops” or “beef crock pot”.

In three hours, when you finally give up in disgust because every single one of those sites has literally HUNDREDS of recipes that might do what you want, I’ll…well, I won’t still be here, that’s for sure. I’ll probably be asleep, or playing World of Warcraft.

The problem with the internet is the lack of filtering system. I am not a good enough cook to look at five chocolate chip cookie recipies and pick one to use. I can read through the reviews – but guess what? Most of the recipe reviews on cooking websites involve changes to the original recipe! They’re basically brand new recipes!!

*flail*

So What’s a Girl to Do?

Well, I could just give up and go back to boxed meals and take-out. But the thing is, I’m not alone. I know I’m not the only person who wants to learn how to cook and can’t really find anyone willing to teach me. 

I’ll tell you what I did. I wrote down my goal.

“I want a cookbook that has A VARIETY of EASY, FAST recipes that are HEALTHY.”

Then I took that goal back to the library, and I went through the books with a fine-toothed comb. I immediately rejected all of the Special Ingredient books and all of the dessert books.

I went through the rest very carefully. There were a few books that I’d initially rejected as being too fancy-shmancy for me that actually turned out to not be too bad. Some of the Down Home Cooking books were healthier than I’d originally thought, too.

Avalon

I admit that I hit the motherload when I reached the dieting books. 

I found two books : 

15-Minute Low-Carb Recipes
and
The South Beach Diet : Quick and Easy Recipes

I wish to take a moment to point out that I am not on a low-carb diet, which is why I skimmed past both of these books on the first go-round.

Boggle your mind? It shouldn’t. Low Carb diets, when approached intelligently (ie : bacon, pork rinds, and cheese is not a well-rounded diet) are actually quite healthy.

My non-diet version of the recipes are mostly small changes. Every time a recipe calls for Splenda, I use sugar, and every time they mention some bizarre thickener, I either leave it out or use corn starch. If I want to make mashed potatoes, I’m going to use potatoes, not cauliflower. I love rice and noodles, and will add them as side dishes as I please.

That being said, both of these books are full of great recipes (especially the 15-minute one). The recipes are easy to do, fun to read, easy to follow, and introduce new ingredients to me at my own pace.

Did you know that Mozzarella, Tomato, and Basil makes an INCREDIBLE omelet? I didn’t. Did you know that you can make apple sausage burgers that are like sweet little meatloaves? Or that spinach burgers with a little tomato sauce are fabulous? How about a to-die-for pork and cabbage asian skillet? 

Summary

These books made cooking accessible to ME, the person who had never before cut an onion and probably shouldn’t be allowed near a can opener without adult supervision.

Every week, I try a new recipe. Sometimes it fails, but most of the time it’s a success. I could probably move on to more “sophisticated” books, but I’m having too much fun in the ones I’ve got, and haven’t even explored a quarter of the great recipes that I want to.

THIS is how I want to cook, how I want to eat, and how I want to learn. I’m doing it without a panini press, without a veritable truckload of books, and without extra trips into Madison to get bizarre ingredients from a specialty market. 

Two books. One happy cook.

Sidenote 

This week’s menu?

Chicken Cordon Bleu rollups over whole wheat pasta with a cream sauce and peas. Lesson learned? Set a timer for the chicken, otherwise it gets dried out. Times this lesson has been learned? Seven.

Beans and Andouille sausage over a mixture of different rices. Lesson learned? Andouille sausage is AWESOME, and pork n beans taste great with a bit of onion and green pepper added in.

Crock Pot Beef BBQ. Lesson Learned? I don’t care how tired I am when it’s done, I need to go ahead and pull the meat apart that night, not the next morning. Also, the husband will add pickle juice to anything. Times this lesson has been learned? Three.

Banana/Coffee Dessert. Lesson learned? Less sugar, more “body” needed for the sauce, and way more bananas needed. Failure unless I can think of a thickener that isn’t pudding. 

Chinese Chicken over Ramen Noodles. Not cooked yet – lessons yet to be learned (but hopefully don’t involve the words “never, ever marinate chicken with vinegar).