Ah, cookbooks I have known....

My mother detested cooking, and I am forever grateful to my maternal grandmother and to my high school cooking class teacher for teaching me how to read recipes, and giving me the idea that if I could follow a recipe I could cook just about anything.

I started out with The Joy of Cooking and the Better Homes and Gardens (red plaid ring binder) cookbooks as wedding presents. If I needed to know how to do something, like cut up a chicken, or how long to bake a potato, one or the other usually gave me an answer.

Although at one time I had tons of cookbooks, sadly I never got to the Julia Child level of cooking. I was more on the Peg Bracken "I hate to cook book" level. (Throw together three or four ingredients, call it good.) Oh and I used to have several "Cooking for Two" books, and Adele Davis, and several of the Moosewood-type cookbooks, all of which had some good things in them, that I used especially during my bread baking, sprout growing, and yogurt making phase of life, which seems like a hundred years ago....

When DH was alive I did a lot more cooking than I do these days, and had him convinced I was a brilliant cook. But then he was a meat-and-potatoes guy whose mother was also a terrible cook, so when I came up with stuff like lasagna or quiche he thought I was a domestic goddess. Heh. I was always best at things like chocolate chip cookies, really, but since that was his favorite thing on the planet, we were good.

Cooking for one, and gluten free, is not that much fun. These days I do a lot of stir fry, or salads, or basic things with salmon, or things that take no time at all in the microwave. Ho hum.

RDW