Sean and Michelle went to a fundraiser dinner tonight, so there’s no cooking tonight, just leftovers for me. I’ll be having some of the leftover Chicken and Dumplings I made on Sunday. I am sure I’ll put the recipe up here one day since it turned out pretty well. I know, I know, you’re saying, geez, we’re only a few days into this and we’ve only had one day of recipes. I promise, I am cooking the rest of the week so there will be stuff on here. For today, I thought I would just take a few minutes and let you know where I get a lot of my recipes from in case you want to check out these books or websites.

One cookbook that I use very often is “The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook.” This cookbook covers just about everything you could ever want to know. They cover all the basics of cooking, techniques, ingredients, what works and what doesn’t, and they make lots of recommendations of brands for all kinds of different equipment and ingredients. If you want just one cookbook to start with, I would recommend this one to use. A lot of the recipes I use come from this book. The America’s Test Kitchen website has a lot of the recipes on it as well, but you have to pay to subscribe to the website (www.americastestkitchen.com), so you might as well use that money to buy the book yourself. It is available from Amazon here:http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Test-Kitchen-Family-Cookbook/dp/1933615486/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326843698&sr=8-1

Another cookbook I use a lot is Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything.” Whatever America’s Test Kitchen doesn’t cover, this one sure does. It’s a thick book that really does seem to cover everything. He also goes over lots of techniques as well as covers lots of recipes, and the newer version of the book does cover more vegetarian dishes. There are lots of variations on recipes also so you can change things up on classic recipes you have used for a while. There are over 2,000 recipes in this book, so you can find a recipe for just about any ingredient you would want to use. This book is also available on Amazon:http://www.amazon.com/Cook-Everything-Completely-Revised-Anniversary/dp/0764578650/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326844032&sr=1-1. I also follow Mark Bittman on Facebook, where he also posts some recipes, along with other articles he writes:https://www.facebook.com/MarkBittman

Those are the two main cookbooks I use, but I also use a magazine to get recipes and ideas. We have been subscribing to Bon Appetit for years, and I have gotten lots of good recipes from them. Of course, the pictures they have look a lot nicer than what I have been able to turn out, but this magazine has dozens of recipes every month and also gives great tips for shopping, on particular techniques, wines and spirits to buy, and also where some of the best places to eat are in many different cities all over. You don’t have to subscribe to the magazine; you could also visit their website, http://www.bonappetit.com/, where they have quite a cache of recipes and articles for you to look through.

There are two other websites that I frequent to get recipes from. One is http://www.williams-sonoma.com/. I love to shop at the store and online, even if some of their prices are high. They have some great recipes on their website, but you have to keep in mind that this is also their retail website, so they include items that you can but directly from them to use in the recipes they list, They also have some recipes that are very specific to ingredients that they sell, so you have to keep an out when scanning through the recipes to make sure they aren’t using something you won’t have around. The other website I use a lot is http://www.foodnetwork.com/. They also have a very large cache of recipes from all their shows and from other sources. You can just type an item into their search box and it will pull up recipes for that item. You can then sort them based on what show they came from, how other users have rated the recipes, the method used, and even watch videos of the recipe. It’s a fantastic source of recipes. I personally use several recipes used by Ina Garten, Anne Burrell, Giada De Laurentiis and Tyler Florence. You can pretty much find a recipe for anything you want, and then read reviews of it by other everyday users to see how they liked the recipe, what worked and what didn’t. I find it a very useful website.

Do you have any particular books or websites that you like to use often? I would love to hear about them. I am always looking for new ideas and new sources of information. Please pass them along so we can all check them out.

That’s about all I have for today. It will be back to cooking tomorrow night and tomorrow night was my choice, so we are making seafood for dinner. We’ll be having sea scallops, rice, and roasted vegetables so check in tomorrow to see the recipes. Enjoy your evening!