2015 Cookbook Challenge: April (in Paris)

Another month, another three cookbooks. I didn’t fully delve into all three of my March picks, partly because of a crazy evening schedule, partly because I was so enamored with Recipes for Health. I did squeak in under the wire by making a curried cauliflower soup out of Moosewood Restaurant Simple Suppers and an Asian marinade for chicken out of Spices of Life. 

I actually thought I might cull Spices of Life from the herd, but it is a lovely book and there truly are enough recipes that I can envision making. While I love having 200-odd cookbooks, I also see the folly of holding onto books that don’t inspire me to cook from them. The good news is that while choosing my April picks, I found two books to let go.

It was easy choosing a theme for this month’s picks. Since I’m headed to Paris at the end of the month, I decided to pick French cookbooks. The difficulty comes from the fact that I have several French cookbooks…each of them excellent contenders! I ruled out Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I and Volume 2, because those are classic books and I already have cooked enough from them to know they are fabulous.

My first pick was easy: David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen: Recipes and Stories. I borrowed the book from the library right after I returned home from Paris last year, fell in love with it, and put it on my Christmas list (and a big thank you to Santa my mother-in-law). We actually had a chance to go to one of his book signings while we were in Paris, but it was our last evening in Paris and we’d spent the day in Versailles. We were wicked tired.

Anyway, one book down, two to go. It really wasn’t hard to choose Clotilde Dusoulier’s Chocolate and Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen, because, well, Paris. That and I’ve been perusing her blog since forever.

I really wavered on pick number 3. Would it be Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table, or Patricia Wells’ Bistro Cooking. Dorie’s book is big and beautiful, with gorgeous photos. And I have long been an admirer of her other works (under her own “headline” and as a writer of books for other chefs). On the other hand, I remember drooling over Bistro Cooking a few decades ago in a bookstore somewhere, and only acquired my own copy a few years ago. What to do? Well, I decided to go with Dorie (I think the photos won me over).