Cooking with Cookbooks

Cookbooks, with all the technology that we have these days, apps, ai and the internet. When was the last time you went looking through a cookbook for a recipe. I can be very bad for this. I know the recipe is in there somewhere but I’ll just have a quick google and see what comes up.

I am also very bad for buying cookbooks. I have 3 shelves full of them, some bought as I like the chef, others just because they were cheap. Either way they sit on my shelf collecting dust just waiting for me.

There is a lot of time, effort and knowledge that goes into each of those books. Research, development, testing, making, taking photos, writing, publishing, printing and shipping. Just so I can let it collect dust.

The more time I do spend reading and looking through them. The more I see recipes that I want to try. I get inspired to cook more.

I do find that with living in China some of the ingredients are hard to get. Trying to get different types of cheese here can be almost impossible sometimes. Or I find it online, order it and by the time it is imported and arrives, I’ve forgotten what I wanted to do. I love Mexican food, I needed some dried chillies before for a recipe. They took 5 weeks to arrive. I had forgotten that I’d ordered them.

A missing ingredient can sometimes make you not want to make the recipe. I say if you can’t get it, substitute it for the closest thing you can.

There is a lot of knowledge in your cookbooks. Over this next year we will be trying to bring you some of those recipes with our own little twist on them. So go read your cookbooks, look at the pictures and get inspired to try, cook something a little different, cook something that is out of your comfort zone. Try cooking with cookbooks and not letting them die on a shelf collecting dust.