Yesterday the weather was so beautiful, and I saw the first butterfly of spring. It's hard to believe, but today was even nicer! I have decided today's the day to tell everybody the long story involved in how I came to accumulate hundreds of cookbooks. About two years ago, a family friend's mother died, so she decided to clean her gigantic house up. I'm not kidding about the gigantic house. Our friend has, I think, ten siblings that grew up in the house (along with her, her mother and her father). Over the years, after she moved back to care for her mother, she accumulated cookbooks, and arts & craft how-tos, and various other good stuff that she thought she would use. Well, she never used anything. (Do you see where this is going?) Anyway, after her mother died, she was getting rid of all the wonderful things that she had never used. She thought of us and the rest is history! We got loads and loads and loads and loads of stuff. After the third trip to her house and back, my dad started to get a little annoyed. Hehe. Most of the cookbooks were meat or meat containing ones, but I have them put away for now so at a later date I can go back and veganize the recipes. Not all of them were meat ones though. There were actually quite a few vegetarian ones. She had Indian (vegetarian) cookbooks, Polish cookbooks (she's polish), Creole cookbooks, Martha Stewart cookbooks, Jewish cookbooks, slow-cooker cookbooks (she gave us a crockpot!), Weight Watcher cookbooks, and so many more that I can't even remember. She also gave me (well, our whole family, but I started cooking for everybody) The Passionate Vegetarian by Crescent Dragonwagon and Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison. For more info on the last two books, click here and scroll down a bit. Besides the hundreds of cookbooks she gave to us, we also got (new or almost new) baking sheets, springform pans, the aforementioned slow-cooker, rolling pins, casserole dishes, muffin pans, bundt pans (mini-bundt pans too), dishes, there was even (I'll try my best to describe this) a mini-cake pan type thing that's in the shape of easter eggs. Hmmm, I'll just have to take a picture and post it IF I EVER FIGURE OUT HOW! I just know I'm forgetting some things. Besides all that, we also got Martha Stewart decorating kits for different holidays, as many different shaped cookie cutters as you can imagine, decorator's icing, sprinkles, candied flowers, so many things! Another thing that came our way was a bundle of Martha Stewart Living magazines.
She was EXTREMELY generous. Thank you very much, Camille.


That was the long story! Is everybody still with it? LOL.

In yesterday's blog I forgot two other cookbooks that I have. Here they are:

The Convenient Vegetarian by Virginia Messina and Kate Shumann
This is a good book. There's lots of quick, convenient recipes (hence the name of the book). We especially like the baked five-spice tofu. (In fact, that's what we had for dinner last night. Scroll down a little.)

Simple Treats by Ellen Abraham
A wheat-free and dairy-free (and egg-free) cookbook for desserts.
I haven't used this yet but it looks great! All the desserts are free of refined sugar.



For dinner yesterday, we had fusion saute (I made this up myself, so I'll post the recipe soon), baked five-spice tofu (from The Convenient Vegetarian), and coconut basmati rice. See here for the recipe. I used water in place of the apple juice.

Gotta go make tonight's dinner. (Miso soup with various veggies.)