As I prepare this post it becomes obvious that it is time to introduce my family.  My wife is Nora, who works at Colorado State University like I do.  She works for the VP Student Affairs office, so between the both of us, we have both ends of the university pretty well covered.  Holding down the fort at home are Sophie, the grey cat, Hania the brindle fat cat, Romy the black rescue mutt with the corkscrew tail, and the newest addition, Wilson, the grey tuxedo kitten.  

Today we tried to go down to campus to see Barack Obama who was rallying the troops in Northern Colorado.  By the time we got to the end of the line we were at least a mile and a half from the gate where you got into to where the rally was being held.  From what we could hear on the car radio on the way home, lots of people must have not gotten in, because of the length of the line.  A quick look at the local paper's website says that 50,000 were in attendance, a number that doesn't seem farfetched to me based on the line that I saw.  Listening to the speech on the radio after we got back to the car, it seemed to be a pretty standard stump speech, nothing that I hadn't heard before, but it would have been nice to see him in person seeing as how it looks like he might be our next president.

Bad luck on the way home.  We had parked at the north end of town and ridden our bikes on in to campus.  Riding home, Nora approached the train tracks at too sharp an angle and took a pretty nasty spill.  Not as bad as this summer when she chipped her elbow and broke a rib, but bad enough.  

Looking over the list in the previous post and then my book shelves, I think I have to add one more to the list, Clifford Wright's Mediterranean Feast. I think it is one of the best cookbooks to read as well as cook out of. There are quite a few cookbooks that are fun to read, but I'm not sure about cooking out of them. One of my favorites is Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices, by George and Berthe Herter. The Herters ran a Minnesota sporting goods store and mail-order business in the 50s, 60s and 70s. They never lacked for an opinion about anything. The book is a delight to dip into and in a future post, I'll put up a nugget or two from it so you can get an idea of its tenor.

The new Art of Eating came yesterday and the lead article was about what cookbooks Edward Behr would keep if he were forced to reduce his stash to seven or so. That got me to thinking about the same question - which seven or ten or so would I keep if were up to me to weed out. I don't have as many cookbooks as people might imagine, my having been to culinary school and been a chef and a teacher for all these years. I have more than even I might want since I am unable to give up the autographed ones like my three Alice Waters autographed cookbooks and my autographed Paul Prudhomme and a few others. But beyond that I'm not sure what I would keep. Cookbooks are like so much else, they are subject to fashion and over the course of the three decades that I have been cooking professionally, I have seen so much stuff come and go. When I quit the restaurant to go to graduate school, I loaded up nearly all the cookbooks I had at the time (5 or 6 wine boxes full) and sold them to my successor for about $100. It wasn't a great sum even then (the early 1990s), but I was happy to part with them and move on. The only one from that era that I probably should have kept was the Freddy Girardet.

I get quite a few culinary texts at work and I think I have two of them on the shelves there. Otherwise, I have an Eastern European cookbook* and a baking text or two and a Native American cookbook**, Healey's Art of the Cake, [these are three I really like though I don't dip into them very often] and a few other odds and ends on my shelves at work. But as to what I would keep if I had to really pare down:

Mastering the Art of French Pastry by Bruce Healey

some kind of real general American cookbook like a Better Homes and Gardens (a smidge better than Betty Crocker I think. I have a 1975 Joy of Cooking, but use it less and less as time goes by. I can't throw it out because it has a recipe for whale meat in it.)

The Saucier's Apprentice by Sokolov

La Repertoire de Cuisine by Saulnier

Preserving by Oded Schwartz

The Heritage of Southern Cooking by Camille Glenn

How to Bake by Nick Malgieri

Martha Stewart's Hors d'ouevres Handbook.

I've got some others I like, but I really could live without them. I have a number of Diana Kennedy Mexican cookbooks, but I cook Mexican at home about never. I have Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking 1 & 2, but haven't cracked them in years, maybe a decade. There are a few charcuterie titles I'd likely keep, mostly as a reference, but I think that's it.

As I look at the short list of keepers, I see two are baking, two are sauce, one is various preserving techniques and the last is an old southern favorite. The baking books are important because baking is precise. I always tell people it is a science first and an art second. At home I mostly cook without recipes, so don't really delve into cookbooks much. I keep selected recipes that I have accumulated over the years in a binder at home, and consult it more than any cookbook. There are some things where I want the consistency of the product, like the short ribs mentioned in the previous post, and my hummus recipe where I want it to taste the same every time, but other wise I cook with what I have, what is fresh at the market, or what needs to be eaten up. (As my sister says, 'we're Millers, we don't eat things, we eat things up.")

I know I'll get some grief for listing a Martha Stewart title, but pretty, flavorful, and not super-complicated finger food recipes are harder than you would imagine to come by. Plus she has great presentation ideas.

*East European Cookbook edited by Carolyn Ball

** Native American Cooking by Lois Ellen Frank

Welcome to the KansasCornDodger blog. This blog will mostly be about food, but I'm sure music and things I'm reading will creep in. Politics will likely creep in from time to time, especially if McCain and Palin manage to somehow steal this election.

Right now I'm enjoying cooking foods with fall flavors like the braised short ribs and oven roasted potatoes I made for dinner last night. Most of the periodicals I read relate to food. Right now I subscribe to the Art of Eating, Saveur, Gastronomica, and the Journal of Food, Culture and Society. Outside of food writing, I read the New Yorker and have been a subscriber for many years. I catch the NY Times on line and try and get the Wednesday food section pretty thoroughly read every week. I am also a wine fan, though not a cork dork anymore and drink pretty much all over the wine spectrum. This summer I drank quite a bit of un-oaked Sauvignon Blanc, but red wine season is just around the corner.

I usually listen to music as I write, mostly jazz and classical, but other things creep in. Jazz piano trio is my favorite, but I like solo jazz piano and combo work like the Modern Jazz Quartet. Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson are favorites as are Keith Jarrett and Paul Bley. I also like classical music ranging from Mozart, Bach and Telemann to Arvo Part and John Adams. I am also currently listening to a lot of New Orleans music in the Preservation Hall and Dirty Dozen Brass Band veins. Chet Baker is playing as I type this.

Mysteries are my main form of fun with fiction and currently I am reading lots of Scandinavian writers like Henning Mankell and Arnuldur Indriosan. Ken Bruen and Ian Rankin are also favorites of mine. I usually have a non-fiction going too, right now I'm reading a book on the immediate post-Russian Revolution era in Europe, The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism and A History of Venice by Norwich.

I'll try and keep you up to date with what I'm doing and post some pictures as I become more adept.