For those of you who have not been to my house this is a closet that we converted into shelves for my cookbook collection. I absolutely love cookbooks!!! I read them like novels and I use them for every meal I cook. I love to buy them, I love to look at them before I go to bed and I use them to prepare any menu, whether its for daily dinners, parties or holidays.

I was raised by a family of chefs, however I don't think I have ever seen one of them hold or read a cookbook. They are what I would call inspiration chefs...they look at food and they have these amazing visions and ideas of what they want to make, the flavors they plan to induce and the experience the food they will create will invoke. For example, my uncle came to visit earlier this year and I took him on a filed trip to Bristol Farms. They don't have those in Eureka and he looked like a kid in a candy store. His eyes glittered, you could see the smoke come out his ears and he started chanting the ingredients for this Italian fantasy meal he was going to create that evening. Then he took off through the store like you see on Top Chef when the chefs go into Whole Foods and they start racing through the store with their shopping carts. I don't know how he knew what he needed or how he knew what would taste amazing together or how it would create this art form on the plate...but it did. He ended up making a beratta mozzarella salad, a shrimp bruschetta appetizer, homemade pasta with marinara sauce made from scratch and cannolis. The meal was to die for!

But the real question is how could I have possibly been raised by these amazing chefs and yet I have a codependency to cookbooks. And when does it exactly become an addiction? I love the idea of looking in the refrigerator and seeing ingredients and creating an amazing meal with them. However, I look in the fridge see amazing ingredients and run to the index in the back of the cookbook and look for inspiration....which usually results in a trip to the grocery store because I am always missing the key ingredient.

****Babe if you are reading this please stop reading now****
We have a deal in my house that I am only allowed to have as many cookbooks as will fit on the shelves (seen above). However, this addiction is so great that I have started to hide cookbooks in odd places...drawers in the kitchen, drawers on the night stand next to the bed, gym bag and in the magazine rack next to the couch. It was so bad that when we first started cohabiting my fiancee could not handle the cookbooks that I kept everywhere. So he came up with this deal in regards to cookbook purchases and storage and hence he decided to turn the office closet into my cookbook racks. And it was so wonderful to come home from work one day to find these beautiful shelves all open and ready to take on my cookbook collection. However, since he did not know the great weight of my cookbook collection when he started to fill his shelves proudly with my books they crumbled and came crashing to the ground. So the poor man had to build them a 2nd time and he had to reinforce the shelves so that they could truly hold my collection.

I do have to say there is such a euphoric feeling when using a cookbook and the meal you create looks exactly like the picture or you put the food in your mouth and its like nothing you ever had before. I try to create recipes that even at first glance sound horribly disgusting with the idea that I may try it and be so completely wowed or pleasantly surprised that I couldn't have lived without this culinary experience...unfortunately some of these experiences have gone horribly wrong. ie. the tofu pudding mentioned in previous blog. Well now that my dirty little secret is out I feel better...thank you to everyone for listening to my confession.

Speaking of which here is the amazing fish taco recipe that I made last week:
http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=2010965