I cook so little.  Yet, I'm finding I love it more and more - and this weekend I discovered I really, really enjoy reading through a good cook book. I've been checking in regularly with my favorite food blogger What Katie Ate, hoping beyond hope to see a post telling me her book is out.  It hasn't happened yet.  But, I do have another especially beautiful treat.  For my recent birthday, my good friend, Braden bought me one of the coolest cookbooks I have ever seen.  I spent over an hour (maybe two) sitting at the kitchen bench sipping coffee and eyeing through page after page of incredible recipes and mouth-watering photography.  I kid you not - I FaceTimed my sister Kim to make her look through it with me!  Then I brought it down to my mom a half dozen times to show her discoveries.  She laughed at me when I exclaimed "Oh my gosh!  There's a glossary!"  And boy is there ever.  How thoughtful.  Truly, glossaries are written expressions of kindness and thoughtfulness from an author.  That's how I see them.  I think my love for them started back in Junior High when I discovered how useful of a study tool they are.  But as an adult, with less tests, I'm no less grateful.

Here's a recent post from WKA, on a few of her favorite cookbooks:

Out of the 300 or so + cookbooks piling my shelves, there are about 20 I return to over and over when pondering what to cook for a dinner party or such. Obviously there are ones which stand out from the crowd for me: 'Cooking for Friends' by Gordon Ramsay springs first to mind, whilst the recipes are great and I've cooked often from this book, it's the unsurpassed Ditte Isager's photography that causes the stir in this book for me personally, she's one of my most admired photographers. Others are anything really from Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall; Heston Blumenthal; Jamie Oliver; Stephanie Alexander; Ferran Adriá, Neil Perry and the author who brings me to the purpose of this post; Stéphane Reynaud.

I think I might enjoy pictures of food almost more than eating food.  Perhaps because pictures can't make me sick.  And a close second is probably the process of making the food.  I love cooking... by myself or with close friends.  I love sipping wine in an apron.  I love the smell of sauteing garlic, bread in the oven, any and all of it!  I love shuffling the pan over the heat.  (See my very technical, experienced term there?  I'm practically professional.)  In fact, I love it all so much, I've already given myself a very bad reputation of making a simple meal take about 3 hours to prepare and cook.  How I do it, I don't even know... but if I'm every going to have a life (or a family!) I guess I better figure out how to speed up the process.  Maybe I'd even do it more often if I didn't feel like it took half of my day each time!