It’s the Joy of Cooking

I love to cook, if you haven’t figured that out, but I’ve never really had to cook back home because my mother is the Chef de cuisine. She manages to put out a healthy and complete meal without going back and forth to the store. She can multitask like she has the arms of Shiva! I am still amazed by that. Since cooking only for myself and trying to save as much money as I can, I feel like I’m getting better about using what I have instead of constantly longing for that ONE herb that I was missing. I’ve learned to make substitutions and actually make sauces without a bay leaf. Amazed, I’m sure.

I am what you would, well what I would, call a cut-and-paste cook. The “Yahoo Answers” cook, if you will. I will look up a recipe for hours: Comparing cooking methods, ingredients, and measurements... I’ve spent a whole afternoon on allrecipes.com just reading up on the negative reviews on a Tuna Melt recipe. As meticulous as it sounds, I guess it’s my way to ensure that I’m not going to waste the time and ingredients on something that isn’t going to be delicious.

Until my big move, I didn’t really utilize my Joy of Cooking cookbook. This Bible has been around since the Thirties! I should trust it, right? No. It’s not you it’s me. I don’t generally trust the measurements unless it’s for baking. For example, I always tweak the sugar. There seems to be waaaaaay too much sugar in pretty much everything. Also, Joy of Cooking doesn’t have (enough) pictures, which scares me. And finally, it doesn’t have colorful photographs of busty Italians or Catchphrase-crazy Celebrity Chefs encouraging me to cook.

That was then, this is now: I’ve used a couple of Joy’s recipes. Not enough to say that I’ve made a dent in it but enough to convince me that its authors know what they’re talking about. But what really sold me, the recipe that made me sad to have ever doubted it, was the Crispy Chocolate Chip Cookie. Honestly, I did tweak the sugar but followed the rest of it and WOW! The best cookies I’ve ever made. They are crispy and delicious and freeze VERY well, keeping me from eating the entire batch in one sitting. I’ve been cutting 6 cookies at a time and stretching that over a week. I’ve been pretty good.

Freezing has been my new thing but I’ll save that for another post.