Even though recipes are in abundance these days, with printed cookbooks about any food you can think of, television cooking shows with celebrity chefs, and internet recipe web sites where recipes are just a few clicks away, you’ll want to add this cookbook of tried-and-true recipes to your collection.
Here is how this contest works. Tell us the name of the cookbook that was most helpful to you when you learned to cook. If you didn’t use a cookbook then how did you learn to cook? If you have any interesting stories about your cooking successes or mishaps include those in your answer. We want to hear it all – the good, the bad, and the ugly! Enter your answer in the comments section below between now and August 30.
Then, on August 31, come back to In the Kitchen and we will post the winner. The prize is a Watkins Vanilla Classics Recipes Cookbook and a bottle of award-winning Watkins Double-Strength Vanilla. This illustrated cookbook includes brunch delights, best-loved cakes, fabulous pie and tarts, irresistible cookies and bars, and extraordinary desserts.
So, post your most useful cook book and cooking story below as a comment, and come back on August 31 to see if you are the winner!
Eleisia Whitney is a Watkins Independent Associate who cooks healthy meals using Watkins extracts, herbs, spices and other gourmet ingredients. She lives in northern California with her family. She works with other associates on her team to build profitable home-based businesses.
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This is truly the best vanilla ever!!
My mom was the person that taught me to cook. Since I was seven years old I followed her around the kitchen every day, watching and learning. I’ve had many mishaps over the years but the funniest to this day was just several years ago making split pea soup in the crock pot. I was working two jobs and managed to leave it on for days and it turned into a huge green glob!
I learned to cook from watching my dad. He’s 100% Sicilian and really knows how to cook! We never used recipes. It was always “a pinch of this” and “a little of that”.
The cookbook that helped me the most is a scrapbook/cookbook my mom put together for all the my sister, me and all our cousins. It has the favorite recipes of my grandparents and each of their 6 kids including my mom’s. Whenever I am down I get out that book and make my mom’s German Potato soap and things are good again : )
I left home knowing very little about cooking. I would call mom and ask how to make chili and she would say add this, add that, add chili powder. “How much chili powder, Mom?” “Until it looks good.”, she’d reply.
Once when making a simple macaroni and cheese dinner I boiled the macaroni until the water evaporated, cheesy mush anyone?
For my first Christmas on my own Mom bought me the Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook http://www.amazon.com/Good-Housekeeping-Illustrated-Cookbook-Coulson/dp/0878510370/ref=pd_sim_b_img/002-9009972-1345665
It was the most helpful cookbook I had.
The Five Roses Cookbook was a source of great mystery to me. My grandmother used it to cook, and so too did my mother. On nights when Mom was undecided, she’d pull it out and flip through the pages as though it were a food magazine. Her favorites were well stained and creased, and my grandmother occasionally had to call my mother as her copy was missing many pages. I learned the basics of cooking from that book and have never seen its like since (I now own my mother’s very used copy).
When I moved away for the first time, cooking went from being an occasional luxury to a necessity. I was living with 4 other students, and on my night to cook I found myself recreating the recipes I learned from the Five Roses Cookbook. I called my Mother many times during that first year; sometimes to chat under the guise of talking about how long to cook a potato, and sometimes to clarify just how much garlic a casserole required.
That Christmas my mother gave me a soft-bound copy of the Joy of Cooking. Within a month I found myself sitting at the kitchen table, perusing the Joy as if it were a magazine — trying to figure out what I could cook with what I had on-hand. My copy of the Joy is now heavily held together by duct tape. The pages that have fallen out are carefully taped in place.
These are the books from which I learned to cook. Although I moved on to other books (like How to Cook Everything, numerous diet cookbooks, cooking light magazines, and now websites and blogs), I still go back to the Joy and Five Roses to recapture warm memories and the simple recipes that I grew up on.
When I left home at seventeen, I knew very little about cooking. Since I am blind and a braille reader, my choice of cookbooks was limited; but the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbooks came to my rescue. Several of them were available in braille, and I used the one for meats and the one for desserts until they fell apart.
My mother taught me how to cook, as a little girl she would sit me on the counter and let me help measure and add the ingredients. As I grew older she made sure I knew not only how to cook and bake desserts, but how to make jams & jellies and homemade bread. The one cookbook that we both used the most (and still is) is “Better Homes & Garden”. I liked it so much that I bought my own when I was still a teenager.
Oh how fun, thanks for letting me know about your contest. I learned and am still learning how to cook through the whole collection of the different Taste of Home magazines. They are just fantastic!
Laura
Oh I would LOVE to try the vanilla and as for cookbooks, I’m a cookbook fanatic so this would be perfect
Thanks for doing this contest
I’d love to try the watkins vanilla.As for the cookbook that helped first cook/bake it would have to be hands down the Better Homes and Garden Cookbook.It’s now so dog eared..