Cookbooks

When I was in Minneapolis last week, I spent a lot of time going through my cookbooks, and I wound up marking a bunch of recipes that I’d like to try. I haven’t bought a cookbook in a while, but I loved getting new ones a few years ago, after I first read Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries. Even when I was adding to my collection regularly, I didn’t often use them for their intended purpose — I liked paging through them for information and inspiration, but when it came to tracking down actual recipes, I preferred (and still do) the internet. It’s reassuring to read the feedback on a particular recipe before you bother starting.

Anyway, I decided to crack them open and get cooking, since I’ve become really bored with food lately. Yesterday was the Vikings’ first regular season game, so I invited my parents over to the Hinckley house for football and lunch. This time, the recipes all came out of Tessa Kiros’ Falling Cloudberries, which is a gorgeous book. (I don’t like to copy out recipes from published cookbooks, but I would recommend this book for the photos alone.)

I chose from the Greek and Cypriot sections of the book, originally settling on tzatziki, chickpea-feta-coriander (cilantro) salad, and pitas, and then, after I’d already started cooking, I decided to add keftedes (a ‘variation on the classic Greek fried meatball’, which I made with veggie mince instead of pork or beef). There were also slices of garden tomato and a watermelon that my mom grew. (At the very back are some date cookies from the store, which I’d had in the freezer already.)

Everything was really tasty, but the pitas wound up being too dry/tough, especially by the next day, so I sliced them up and made pita chips. Much better! I’ve got three more cookbook meals picked out for this coming week — my goal is to try three per week for a while, just to get out of my food rut, and hopefully to provide something interesting to photograph and blog about!