Back to Cookbooks

June was mostly rainy and overcast, which made my cool-weather-loving heart happy but my garden less so. Especially the tomatoes, peppers, and tomatillos. Some of the seeds we planted never germinated (or if they did, the critters got to them first), but the brassicas and corn are flourishing. Knee high by the fourth of July.

I can’t remember the last time we had a garden this sad by mid-July. It makes me grateful last year’s harvest was so plentiful. There’s still lots of salsa verde and tomato sauce in the freezer. At this point, I’d settle for a fresh tomato sandwich or two by the end of garden season.

Rising prices have me wanting to squeeze every bit I can from the garden, micromanaging the kitchen in hopes that I can help buffer the cost of gas and groceries and everything else.

I’ve been wanting to expand my kitchen skills, anyway. I miss the days when you could visit personal blogs and find people’s favorite tried-and-true family recipes. That’s what inspired me to learn to cook in my early twenties. That, and doing something with all the produce from our first gardens.

Nowadays, I struggle to find recipes online that inspire me in the same way. Content creators invest in photography now, but there’s a generic quality about the experience of browsing for dinner on Pinterest that I can’t get past. Whether it’s the process of searching online or the recipes themselves, I’m not sure. There’s a difference between old, worn-in, coffee-stained, scribbled-on recipes and ones churned out for the sake of analytics.

Thus, I’ve been turning to my long-neglected cookbooks for help. I have a modest collection, gathered over the years or passed down by friends and family, yet most have done nothing but collect dust since before my oldest was born. That’s around the time I stopped having the bandwidth for teaching myself new kitchen skills. Go figure.

I’m starting with Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat, a book I’ve owned for years but somehow never read. Alongside it, I’ve started a kitchen notebook where I’m collecting our family’s favorite recipes, preservation methods, garden notes, and techniques I want to try from my cookbooks. I’m hoping it’ll be a useful resource for my husband or kids when they want to make a batch of our favorite cookies or a Dutch Baby for breakfast. Maybe it’ll become one of those well-loved, worn-in notebooks. A trusty resource my kids reach for when they’re grown.

If you have any cookbook recommendations, or even a favorite recipe (even if it’s online), I’d love to hear all about it.