This summer was particularly spectacular because I was able to read multiple books during my vacation, and I wasn't hindered by having to go to teacher workshops, teaching summer school, moving, going to summer school, or those other pesky things that tend to get in the way of summer vacation for so many of us teachers. It was actually a vacation. I read four books. They were...
1. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. This book is awesome. I recommend it highly. Hosseini is an exceptional writer and storyteller.
2. The Kite Runner by Hosseini. Same thing. But I liked A Thousand Splendid Suns better. We also got this book on audio from the library, and it was fun to listen to the author read his own words, especially with all those pronunciations.
3. Respectable Sins: Confronting the Sins we Tolerate by Jerry Bridges. A must-read for all Christians; I know I could identify with pretty much everything this guy said. It was very convicting. I would love to read this book together in a small group Bible study. It was that good.
4. The Best Life Diet by Bob Greene. I talked about this in another post. I just checked it out from the library, but I'll probably buy it because it has a lot of good recipes in the back. Mostly I like that I don't really have to count calories and it promotes a healthy lifestyle that includes activity and a variety of foods.
I liked all of these books, but obviously for different reasons. I'm not one who really prefers fiction over nonfiction, or vice versa. Just a good book.
And speaking of books...I love cookbooks. I have a whole cabinet of them. I even subscribe to a cooking magazine that I get recipes out of to use. Problem is, it's a lot quicker and easier to get on the internet and go to a website where you can type in the ingredients you have in your pantry or freezer and figure out what's for dinner that night that way. I love looking through my cookbooks, but when it comes time to go to the grocery store I rarely feel like going through every cookbook to find the recipes that sound just right for the next two weeks. Does anyone else have this problem? Better yet, does anyone have a good system of how they use their cookbooks or recipes from magazines they subscribe to? I used to just go through my magazines (the ones I get that have recipes are Southern Living, Real Simple, and Cooking Light) and look at the recipes and think, "Ooh, that sounds good, I'll have to come back and get that later." Which of course I never did. So now as I'm going through the magazine I will actually rip out all the recipes and put them in my recipe keeper, which is a binder that my mom gave me that has different partitions for different types of recipes...main dish, side, you get the idea. That thing is busting with recipes I still have not tried. So they make it that far...I need another system to get me to get them out of there and actually use them.
A few posts ago, I showed you the pickles that Chad made using all those cucumbers from our garden. Well, we opened up a jar, and they are soooo yummy! My favorite ones are the thicker slices; they are still crunchy, and the thin ones have gotten floppy. But the canning worked and now we have pickles to last us a while. I'd give you some, but they are just too good. Sorry.
I hope everyone has a good weekend. I for one will be sleeping late in the morning.
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3 comments:
Here's my system for keeping recipes and cookbooks under control. First I went through all my cookbooks and got rid of the cookbooks I was pretty sure I wouldn't use again, as there were a lot of collected books from before the Internet, so now everything fits in a very small bookcase.
I keep a pair of scissors handy whenever I look through a new magazine and clip the recipes right then. I kind of make it a point to evaluate recipes so that I don't keep clipping ones that are pretty much the same as I already have--which I have a tendency to do.
Then the thing that helped the most was to actually go through all my clipped recipes and staple or paper clip the ones together that are really similar and throw away the duplicates. I tend to collect a whole bunch of recipes that are really just variations on a theme.
Since I really like vegetable recipes I went through my vegetable section and organized the recipes alphabetically--from Artichokes to Zucchini. Saves a lot of time when I am looking for a side dish.
I also organized my recipe folder under different headings than you would usually find. Instead of "Meat" or "Poultry" I use headings like "One Dish Meals" or "Mexican" or "Italian" because when you are looking for a recipe, you usually have some idea of what you are looking for.
I am now resisting the urge to buy new cookbooks, although it's tough at Half Price books as I really like to look at the pictures.
All good tips. I knew you'd have a solution.
I like to go on to epicurious.com and find a recipe that has the ingredients I'm interested in - like spam and saffron and beets, something that requires only one, or something that requires all three. It really is a good web site, and recipes are rated by the amateurs (I look for recipes that have 4 spoons). So you could look for swiss steak, or round steak + tomatoes + carrots.
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