The Pleasures of Cooking for One by Judith Jones

My latest find in cookbooks is Judith Jones' The Pleasure of Cooking for One.  I picked it up at Rabelais in Portland this past Wednesday on my food and art tour day there.  Rabelais is a must on my Portland excursions.  They have the best selection of food, wine, and cookbooks I've seen anywhere and the folks who own it couldn't be nicer.  Contact Rabelais via their website, or you can order it from clicking the Amazon link to the left.

If you've seen the hit movie Julie and Julia, you probably already know who Judith Jones is.  She is often credited with discovering Julia Child being the first to recognize what a tremendous pioneer she was for the American culinary world.  She has also published a collection of memoirs/recipes called The Tenth Muse, which has just found its way onto my reading list.  She references a few of the recipes from The Tenth Muse in Cooking for One.

Since I usually cook for just Dan and I, this is refreshing book to read with scaled back portions and lots of thought put into making things easy and time effective.  She even gives advice about what sorts of pots and pans to use for the recipes which are smaller than those commonly found in kitchens.  There is also a sense of practicality that many cookbook authors today are too often unconcerned with.  This book is not about photography and flashy techniques.  It is about honest, simple, good food that is nourishing and uses readily obtainable ingredients.

Julia Child: The Way to Cook DVD Set

For Christmas, I received enough cooking DVD's to keep me busy for a very long time.  Among them was a re-release from Knopf called The Way to Cook by Julia Child.  I'm already a pretty huge fan of Julia Child but watching these has solidified my admiration for her as a teacher. They were first published on VHS in 1985 and are a collection of short 5 to 15 minutes segments on the basics of French cooking.  I find Mastering the Art of French Cooking a little overwhelming because the instructions are so specific and the recipes take pages of text and hours to interpret.  Even though Julia's original publication is a milestone achievement for American cooking, I use it more as a reference than a practical manual in the kitchen.

Thanksgiving Chicken

In honor of Thanksgiving, I've been thinking about roasting birds. I've read a million Facebook status updates today about cooking turkeys, cranberry sauce, and stuffing, and it's made me a little homesick. I'll combat that with thoughts of one of my favorite things to cook, chicken.