My Favorite Cookbook

I love to cook. I come from a long line of fabulous cooks. My sister cooks to de-stress and she makes amazing meals. My mom is also a tremendous cook. By the time I was 12, she had me making our Friday night meal all by myself. Granted I started small; hot dog wraps and mac and cheese, but I eventually graduated to more difficult and intricate meals.

I’m also a messy cook. My mom is very neat, so she learned to just leave the kitchen when I cooked.

One of the best gifts I was given when I got married was my own recipe box filled with all of our best family recipes. My mom, grandma and I sat down for several afternoons and copied all the recipes from my mom’s recipe box that I wanted to take to my own home. This is very special to me now as I cook meals, to pull out a recipe written in my mom’s writing or my grandma’s, as my grandma is no longer living.

In the last few years I’ve started cooking from Giada deLaurentis’ cookbooks. I adore her Italian recipes. They are simple, but oh-so-delicious. I have two of them so far and my favorite recipe is for marinara sauce. It’s easy and quick and once I made it I have never gone back to spaghetti sauce in a bottle. You can see by the page in my cookbook that it has been used many times. There are olive oil and tomato sauce splatters all over it:

But, my favorite cookbook by far is an absolute mess. This is the cookbook I’ve created. It’s in a ratty, spiral notebook that is coming apart at the seams. Every time I find a recipe I like in a magazine or newspaper, I cut it out and tape it into this notebook. I’ve also photocopied recipes, but never gotten around to taping them in, and they are just stuffed randomly into this notebook. There is no rhyme or reason to this notebook/cookbook, it’s just jammed together. However, my most favorite and most often used recipes are in here; Fabulous Fajitas, Poppy Seed Dressing, Cranberry Chicken, Brownie Mocha Trifle.

Someday I want to organize this better, but for now, I know exactly where every recipe is in here. I would be lost without this mess of a cookbook.

Above my stove on a shelf are neatly organized, seldom used, beautiful cookbooks. But, this is my go-to nearly every night. Someone please tell me I’m not the only one with a cookbook like this.