My Cookbooks

I’m going to be completely unoriginal again today and show off our (mostly mine) cookbook collection.

Right hand side bookcase

You’ll find our cookbooks on two Ikea Billy bookcases just adjacent to our kitchen – please excuse the state of the house – I need some time to do a good sort through.  Also, don’t feel sorry for our mostly empty wine rack – we have a case of red hidden elsewhere (always prepared!)  The picture perched precariously on the wine rack is a gift from my Dad to my nephew Niall, he bought it for him whilst traveling in Cuba – it’s a photograph that has been painted.  For some reason, it has never made it back to my sisters house.  No matter, it’s started to become part of the furniture here.

There’s a lot of familiar volumes here I’m sure.  Let me introduce a couple of my favourites.

The Supercook volumes on the bottom shelf in the picture above were my grandmothers, then my mums and now mine.  The recipe I cook from them is a very inauthentic Chili Con Carne that is quite yum.  You can also see one of my more recent purchases: Burma, which I bought because my mother was Burmese and I don’t really know much about the culture (a condition which this book has lessened a little).  Mum left Burma at age 10.

Left hand side bookcase with kitchen

Here’s the bookcase closer to the kitchen – the bottom shelf had almost all of the ABC magazine Delicious, from the Launch issue to 2010 when I started to feel that it was repeating itself.  There’s Dr K’s Women’s Weekly cookbook collection on the shelf above.  See our dried chilies? We had a bumper crop this year and decided to try creating a ristra.  There’s also The Delia Smith Complete Cookery Course which was a birthday gift from my Mum.  I was absolutely delighted to find that the recipe mum used for bread pudding was included in this book (note this is not bread and butter pudding, that is a completely different beast) – my mum passed away in 2000, a year later I found the recipe in this book when I was really craving some of her home cooked specialties so it was wonderful to be able to make it again.

You can tell we live near the Swan River by the three Mortein personal repellent sprays on top of this bookcase (there are plenty of mosquitoes here all year round).

So, will you be sharing your Cookery bookcase? Or do you just have a shelf?  Funnily enough, Cookbooks are one thing I haven’t bought as an ebook, I wonder why?  Is it the physicality of the glossy pages filled with food photography that holds me to the medium?  I get Donna Hay and Gourmet Traveler e-editions now, why don’t I look for cookery ebooks?  Something to ponder there, I guess. Or not.