I believe we can all agree that we finally saw a glimpse of spring this past week. It’s been a long, cold winter and now folks are ready to get outside and dig in the garden, take a walk through the parks, or do some grilling.
It’s never too early to try out some recipes for your Memorial Day and summer gatherings, and thankfully, the Delaware County District Library has just the tools to help. Did you know that your library has access to thousands of cookbooks? Just a general search for “cookbooks” in the DCDL catalog brings up more than 6,000 options!
With as particular as diets can be nowadays, the library even has opportunities to narrow your search by diet restrictions for gluten-free cooking, low-calorie recipes, high-protein diets and more.
Beyond a simple search of the catalog, the Delaware Library also wants to help you out and act as a “test kitchen” of sorts through our monthly cookbook clubs. If you’ve never attended one of our cookbook clubs, my first word of advice is to come hungry!
The concept behind cookbook clubs is to take home the selected book of the month, cook as many recipes from it as you’d like, and then prepare one to bring to the club. The evening becomes a potluck of dishes all created from the same cookbook. As participants sample the prepared dishes, they are encouraged to discuss what they liked and didn’t like about the book.
Coming up this week, we’ll have our meeting of the Orange Branch Library Club on Wednesday, May 9, at 7 p.m. They will be cooking from “One Pan Wonders” by America’s Test Kitchen. The Ostrander Branch Library has added a new lunchtime cookbook club meeting time this spring, which will meet on Tuesday, May 22, at 1 p.m. They will sample dishes from “Add a Pinch” by Robyn Stone. The Delaware Main Library club meets on Thursday, May 24, at 7 p.m. to taste recipes from “100 Recipes You’ll Make Forever” by Better Homes & Gardens.
Enjoy some of these upcoming cookbook titles that we’re cooking from this summer and get a head start on trying out the recipes.
• “Simple” by Jean-Francois Mallet. Want a quick answer to “What should I eat?” Simple-with its clean design, large type, straightforward photos, and handy icons-will have you enjoying a meal in minutes.
• “The Mexican Slow Cooker Cookbook” by Marye Audet. Just because you love eating Mexican food doesn’t mean you want to spend hours in the kitchen preparing and cooking ingredients. This slow cooker cookbook brings easy slow cooker meals to your table with the flavors of Mexico—with minimal effort on your part.
• “Salad Days” by Amy Pennington. Amy Pennington will make you crave salads with these 75 recipes that feature not just greens with zesty dressings but also incorporate satisfying proteins, such as fish, chicken, eggs, cheese, and nuts, as well as other toothsome ingredients like grains and noodles, and even fruit.
• “Nutritious Delicious” by America’s Test Kitchen. A simple approach to amping up the nutrition in our cooking, Nutritious Delicious focuses on 50 everyday superfoods among vegetables and fruit, grains, and proteins, and uses them as the basis for building more nutrient-packed versions of the dishes we love for every meal of the day.
• “The Soup Club Cookbook” by Courtney Allison, Tina Carr, Caroline Laskow, & Julie Peacock. Soup is forgiving, versatile, and perfect for sharing; it can be spiced to taste, topped elaborately or not at all, and dressed up or down. It travels well and reheats beautifully. The Soup Club Cookbook also has dozens of tips for cooking in quantity and for tailoring soup to individual tastes and needs.
