h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sometimes I wonder if I"m the only person in the world who uses cook books to, er, cook from. I know people who buy them and keep them on the shelf, people who buy them and look at them, but I don't know many people whose cookbooks are creased stained, and stuck together with flour like mine are.

I like cooking, and I like new things, I like cooking new recipes. I don't like cooking the same thing twice unless it's really good. So nearly every day I cook something new from a cookbook. Then when I've finished a cook book I usually buy a new one. Currently I'm working my way through two Soup books, one has 365 recipes in and the other has about 50.

There are some really good ones that I've made more than once, there are some that are 'just ok', and some are really good.

A lot of people use recipes on the internet, but I don't. The problem is that you never know what you are getting, some of them are so bad that I don't think anyone has every cooked them ever.

Sometimes I will follow a recipe from a cookbook, but mostly I use them as a source of ideas and an indicator of what goes with what. Then I go completely mad with ingredients and come up with something of my own devising.

Elizabeth David's books are a special case; they're so well-written that they're books which happen to have recipes in them rather than just being cookbooks. I read them a lot for the wit and personality that comes through.

I use cookbooks - the Student's cookbook because I can't cook, have no idea how to cook and hate doing it. But sometimes I get fed up with the few things I do know how to cook and need something new.

My hatred of cooking has got a lot worse since living in this kitchen, and having a son who won't try new food and was on Ritalin (wrongly) for 3/4 years, but I didn't like it before that either.

The most important tool in our cuisine is the loose-leaf A5 folder within which recipes are written, commented upon, and refined. Often its plastic sleeves can hold several different recipes for the same dish, copied down from the internet, books, or torn from magazines, so that we can get a better feeling for whether, say, 250g flour is unusually little for that amount of eggs; or see what sorts of ranges of temperatures are suggested for baking cookies (from gas mark 3 to gas mark 6!). There are so many vague terms used in printed recipes, and while it might make little difference as to how much potato you plonk onto a Shepherd's pie, it can make all the difference to know how much egg yolk you need in cheese straws.

I was reading a couple of cookbooks in bed this morning! Ones with recipes for lowering cholesterol, and for a healthy heart. I tend to use them for ideas, and then adapt to suit myself. So on the menu plan over the next week will be wasabi mash, (I have a tube of wasabi paset at the back of the cupboard waiting for a suitable use), cod fillet in a couscous crumb (Dai doesn't like couscous cos its cold, so maybe this will encourage him to eat it), red snapper in orange/lemon/lime sauce (if I can find red snapper - but I'm happy to pick an alternative fish from whats available at the market).

I do write comments in my books, and some of the pages are stuck together

But I find a lot of actual recipe books disappointing - I gave away my Nigellas after becoming disillusioned with the end results I was getting.

My mother does that "collection of single hand-written sheets in a folder" approach. It's frustrating trying to cook with her, as she's consulting 2 or 3 different recipes at once, and then dithering about which one to go with!

Cook books aren't for cooking from. The best ones give you ideas of what to cook. They convey a style, an ethos. But never follow a recipe.

(Well - OK. The odd bit from Elizabeth David who's definitive on things like cooking times.)

@Ivan:

Elizabeth David has changed my whole approach to omelettes.

Yes, omelettes will never be the same again.

And quiche. She's scathing about what's termed 'quiche' in the English-speaking world.

I'd like to recommend two cooking blogs, partly because of the recipes and partly because both bloggers describe the cooking process in detail illustrated with pretty good photos. I find them both to be very inspiring:

http://www.kayotic.nl/blog/category/recipes

And the blog where I found a link to the above:

http://www.cookincanuck.com/

Oh, indeed - quiches!

'English Bread and Yeast Cooking' is my favourite. A whole chapter on salt!

The UK's first branch of Whole Foods outwith London has just opened five minutes away from me. It will cast me into penury. In their cafe they have blackboards with Top Tens...Top 10 Songs That Mention Food...and Top Ten Food Writers.

I use my cookbooks, just not as often as I would like.

I recently found a website where you input the ingredients you have handy and it will find a bunch of recipes from various online places with those ingredients. Now ~that~ is practical!

I'm more of an instinctive cook. This is not meant as a boast. Surely most people get to be when they've been doing it long enough? So I usually just throw stuff together and out pops food. I don't follow recipes. If I'm missing an ingredient - I adapt. Use something different. Cook something else entirely. My food has been known to change genres during the actual cooking.

But recipes are Inspirations. I think it was in a Grauniad feature that I first came across the idea - not recipe - for a Moroccan salad:
- Oranges, peeled and sliced.
- Handful of black olives
- Lemon juice
- Crushed, dried chilli
- Ground cumin
- Salt

Genius! I can honestly saw I would never have thought of combining those ingredients. A perfect balance of sweet, sour, bitter, salty and (the essential food group) chilli.

But give me some tomatoes and onions - well - if the tomatoes are good and they're red or white onions - just slice salt the onions and leave a while, slice the tomatoes and sprinkle with red vinegar. And serve separately Or combine the lot together. Or leave out the onions and add mozzarella and basil. Italian, basically.

Or move westwards to Spain and throw in some garlic, vinegar and old bread, toasted and torn up. Maybe some olives.

Or go east. Chop the onions and tomatoes and mix with lots of chopped, flat-leaf parsley. Maybe add some mint and coriander, Or a handful of toasted, soaked bulghur and some lemon. Or some old pitta bread rubbed with garlic and olive oil and toasted, then broken up. Basically, Lebanese.

Or go further east and add green chilli and coriander, Preferably leave an hour so so to meld (it's one of those 'greater than the sum of its parts' dishes.

But basically it's the same dish, Tomatoes. Onions. No recipes - just different Ideas. Just follow your hands around the kitchen. I've doubtless learned *some* of them from cookbooks, but usually it's a matter of glancing at a book or something on a table in front of me and thinking 'Now there's an idea to squirrel away for the future.'

I use cookbooks for inspiration, sometimes I follow the recipes, sometimes I improvise..that is one of the things I love about cooking, it can take you on adventures, without leaving home

I have very few cookbooks, all well-thumbed, and a folder I add recipes too. I did buy a fantastic baking book recently but that's the only one I've bought for years. Sometimes I get cookery books out of the library, copy out the one or two recipes I think I might use, and take it back. I do cook the roughly same things week-in, week-out, because we're a busy family and Osh is still young enough to prefer fairly plain food (although he's starting to develop tastebuds). Experiments are generally for weekends.

I love the idea of working through a 365-recipe book. But I know I never would do it myself - I'd miss the meals I particularly enjoy, and the happy sound of my family munching a favourite dish

Mol

I've never used a cook book and I don't think I'll ever need to.

I have a wife.