As you might imagine, I love cookbooks. And I have plenty of them, on all sorts of topics, by all sorts of experts. Rick Bayless on Mexican food, Julia Child for French cuisine, Mollie Katzen and Deborah Madison for vegetarian fare, and plenty of other more esoteric topics.
I love to read them, and I have a stack of new ones on my desk right now, from "Cook Like a Rock Star" (Clarkson Potter, $27.99), by the Food Network's Anne Burrell, to "Vegan Pie in the Sky" (Da Capo, $17), by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.
The authors all offer lots of possibilities (especially the over-the-top Burrell), and I've been flipping through and flagging recipes I want to try. But where do I go when I want to find a new dish that I know will be good?
Epicurious. I've said it before, but being able to read recipe reviews and advice from real cooks is invaluable. And just a few reviews aren't enough; I'm looking for recipes that are so good that they've inspired dozens -- even hundreds -- of cooks to rate them highly and post reviews.
I found one recently that filled the bill, and then some, with more than 600 reviews. I was in the post-Thanksgiving food doldrums recently, tired of turkey and longing for something different. Inspired by a delicious curry I had recently at Cafe Django in Bloomington, I went looking for a bold recipe that I could have fun with, and I found a winner with Chicken Curry with Cashews, adapted from Charmaine Solomon's "Complete Asian Cookbook" (Tuttle Publishing, $29.95).
It was released in paperback about five years ago. It originally was published in 1976, and the recipes have stood the test of time -- especially my chicken curry dish. Yes, the whole house smelled like curry, but the dish turned out great. And even though I haven't cooked many curries, this one was a real success, even with a few tweaks that I couldn't help making.