How to Cook Everything, Bakewise and Cookwise & The Time Traveler's Wife (again)

Fraggle, welcome to the water polo team!

I'm glad that you joined because I've recently looked into three books about cooking, which you might be interested to learn about.

1. How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman -- this was a pretty interesting book for me. It really did have tons and tons of recipes for nearly everything that I have always been curious about how to make, and the best part is that it kept stuff simple (including ingredients). I found it to be similar to the Reader's Digest do-it-yourself guides, where they give you suggestions about essential tools and ingredients and also a lot of explanation for even doing simple things. It didn't have photos (bummer) and some of the recipes weren't all that exciting, but as a starting place, I thought it was good.

2. Bakewise and Cookwise by Shirley Corriher -- these books are advertised as the science of baking and cooking. They are supposed to explain why ingredients do what they do and what parts they all play. I was interested in learning about substituting applesauce for butter/oil, but alas, it didn't really get into that. I was frustated with these books. Unlike the above book, these were all of those really strange recipies and ingredients that really, I'm never going to use. Why couldn't she just explain stuff about ingredients that normal people use? I'm not sure. The books weren't a complete loss. There are some interesting tidbits in there, but overall, I didn't find them to be as useful as I had hoped.

Apparently, I am hungry all winter and like to read about cooking and baking.

I checked out the Time Traveler's Wife as a book on CD, but realized that it was the abridged version. What I listened to, I have to admit, I really didn't enjoy at all. I'm not sure what the actual book is like, but the CDs seemed to have sentence structures that would start to annoy me pretty quickly. I noticed a lot of short phrases or even one word sentences. Like, "Running. Laughing. Walking on the beach. I used to do these things." I made that up, but stuff like that...not sure I can handle much of it. Is the real book written like that too?

--diana