Browse Through Your Cookbooks
It’s very likely that you have one or two cookbooks lying around the house. Maybe even a leaflet of recipes that came with an appliance you bought. How often do you actually look through them?
There are endless recipes online.
…so what’s the point of cookbooks anymore? Well, endless can be pretty overwhelming at times. Also, endless does not always mean great.
If someone got a chance to release a book with their recipes in, then hopefully they know what they’re talking about. It’s fantastic that we have the Internet for quick dinner ideas or variations on brownies that suit our needs and what we have in our cupboards - so by all means continue to find inspiration online as much as you want!
But, the other day, I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t looked at any of my cookbooks for ages. In one of them, Whole New You by Tia Mowry, I had even bookmarked tons of great-sounding recipes that I hadn’t tried yet. If you have a cookbook in your house, it’s probably either because someone gave it to you thinking it would suit you, or you bought it for yourself with that same idea in mind. So sit down comfortably, browse through your cookbooks and find some inspiration. Take notes somewhere about what recipes you’d like to try, or add some bookmarks or post-its so you can easily find them.
The wonderful thing about cookbooks is that you can put all your devices away, not get annoyed by pop-ups that ask you to agree to cookies on the site, emails coming in and everything else that is ready to take you away from the fun of cooking. If you want, you can even take notes in the book - they are there to be used, right? Easy to come back to in the future, and even helpful if you hand it down to someone else one day.
Some of the books I have are, maybe unsurprisingly, not just cookbooks, but books that both have information about health and nutrition, along with some recipes that use the ingredients mentioned in the book. This is actually amazingly inspiring! After reading a chapter about the benefits of a vegetable, I am so caught up in that world and just want to go straight to cooking with it.
Some cookbooks have absolutely amazing tips! One of the books given to me, “Bakeboka” by Norwegian baker and pastry chef Sverre Sætre (“The Baking Book”), has so much awesome information about baking techniques and the chemistry of it all, which makes you really understand where you can improve your baking. I use some of his tips in my video with 10 Tips on how to make perfect bread every time. It’s the kind of information you didn’t even know you needed to know, so you might never have looked it up anyway.
Nothing beats browsing through a book, touching the pages, looking at the wonderful photos undisturbed and in your own time. So get your cookbooks out and have a look yourself!
What cookbooks do you have at home? And when was the last time you used them? Post on Instagram and tag me @TheFromScratchBody and use the hashtag #TheFromScratchBody so I don’t miss it!
