re: What does your cookbook collection look like?

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AKA I kindof want to show off my kitchen

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I've already shown off my kitchen in a couple of threads dedicated to the remodel. This was pretty much too lazy to take another pic and upload. Oh, and dust and straighten the shelves before taking a pic. (Original pic was before things had been really lived in.)

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Good cookbooks are worth their weight in gold: the good ones are much more than recipes. With a quality cookbook, you get an author's point of view, some decent narrative content, and a broader view than just googling "Recipe for X ingredient". Plus, with physical books, you can open three or four or five simultaneously and compare very quickly the variations on a theme....try that with an iPad, you'll go blind flipping back and forth. I do buy electronic cookbook: often, they're dupes of books I own in paper format and want to have when I travel. Pretty much the only physical books I still buy and keep are cookbooks, though. (Fiction & casual nonfiction are most often e-books.)

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I don't disagree with any of that. I'm just relating what I currently do most of the time.

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Could you pick a favorite of yours (or 2)?

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That’s way too general. Is this for someone who is trying to learn to cook? Try The Food Lab by Kenji Lopez Alt, old-school Joy of Cooking, the CIA’s Professional Chef.
Are you looking for best south LA/Cajun? Donald Link’s Real Cajun, Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen, Talk About Good I and II, the Prudhomme Family cookbook,
Best NOLA? (There’s a separate thread on that right now)
Best sweets baking/non bread: Greenspan’s Baking from My Kitchen to Yours, the King Arthur Flour books, Malgieri’s How to Bake
Best breadbaking? Reinhart’s Bread Baker’s Apprentice, Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast, Robertson’s Tartine Bread, Field’s The Italian Baker, Hensperger’s The Bread Bible....
Best pizza? I could go on all night, I have a whole shelf of just pizza.

Buying used makes a cookbook habit somewhat affordable. Besides, you’re gonna use them in the kitchen, so they won’t stay shiny and new for very long (if you’re doing it right).

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Sorry my question was vague--I was just curious about your personal favorite(s)--the one or two you couldn't live without.

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The most worn out of my collection is Reinhart’s Bread Baker’s Apprentice, though I rarely have to open it anymore as some of the bread formula are permanently in my head. Second most used is likely Greenspan’s Baking, as I bake her french yogurt cake all the damn time and can’t ever remember the ratios of ingredients.

I tend to look at savory cookbooks for inspiration, rather than closely following recipes.

Your kitchen is immaculate. Wow. Can you come organize mine?

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Your kitchen is immaculate. Wow. Can you come organize mine?

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Thanks, but picture was taken right after remodel and before becoming much more lived in looking! Some of it is well organized simply because we were able to plan a more functional kitchen.

i need to take a pic. i only have about a dozen 'go tos' but there's a local Pioneers (Telco) cookbook, FBC Monroe cookbook, Jack Hayes cookbook (its all my peeps i grew up with so those recipes are delish), virgie denham (all in her handwriting ), 'talk about good', 'better homes and gardens' from the 1960s..hmm now i'm drawing a blank but they're almost all LA cookbooks.

oh at the TD FB collection

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Jack Hayes cookbook

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Not sure how I missed out on that. I only have yearbooks.

I have hardcover copies of "On Food and Cooking", "River Road Recipes", "Cook it my Way" or something like that, and two boxes of recipe cards filled with recipes my mom cooked for me that I like. She gave those to me as a going away gift when I moved out.

For daily use, I use the Paprika App. It syncs across devices, so I can decide what I want to eat at work, set up the grocery list on my computer, sync to the cloud so the list is on my phone to go to the store, then pick up the tablet when I get home and use it while cooking.