I've been pleased with all the Paula Deen books. However, it's not stuff you should be eating every day. hahahaha.

My mom has a bunch of books from Taste of Home that are surprisingly useful on a daily basis. (I know Mom has the Light & Tasty cookbook that's in their shop and it has some really good stirfry recipes. She also has the diabetic cookbook - which also has some surprisingly tasty things in it.)

Oh yeah, you should check out allrecipes.com as well.

And it might help if you could give us an idea what type of cooking you want to do.

Crap. I forgot to mention this...used bookstores are a great place to get cookbooks. You can also sometimes find good books in the bargain bins in Borders and Barnes and Noble.

Healthy-ish. That's about the only requirement. Well I always find it hard to eat enough protein (I try to eat 1g per pound of lean bodyweight per day so that's a bunch) without eating insane amounts of red meat and chicken, so good fish recipes (and other protein-rich foods be it plant or animal) are all good.

Actually it is fairly easy to eat enough protein but let's just say I am sick of drinking four whey protein shakes every damn day.

I think you might like the Alton Brown books, and the Cook's Illustrated ones. And public libraries are an amazingly great source for cookbooks.

The New Best Recipe (one of the cook's illustrated books box mentions) is the single best all-around cookbook I've read. And I read a lot of cookbooks. Their methodology in recipe development is painstaking, and they document a lot of it as well, telling exactly what they tried and why they tried it, before letting you know the "best" version.

As box mentioned, you can't go wrong with any of the books in this series (Light Recipe; Quick Recipe; Cover and Bake; Soups and Stews; etc.), but if you get only one cookbook, it should really be the Best Recipe. More so even than, say Joy of Cooking.

I'm also partial to Cheryl and Bill Jamison's books, such as American Home Cooking and the Border Cookbook for regional American recipes that work really well.

Surprisingly enough, Giada DiLaurentiis' Everyday Italian, despite containing more pictures of her than of her food, has some simple, healthy, quick recipes that actually work.

Yeah, Giada actually has some really good food happening if you can get past her big annoying head.

Uh, her head. Yeah. That's what I was looking at, I swear...


I know someone who worked on the show, and she apparently used to sometimes have to tell Giada to "put the girls away" when they were shooting.

Yeah, her rack is always on display. But her head is far more distracting to me. Possibly because I have my own boobies.

(um, I have a head too.)

I just hope it's not as big and annoying as Giada's.

Fluffy battle kitten already named my favorite two spots - "Taste of Home" and allrecipes.com. You can find anything on allrecipes, and I've tried several recipes from "Taste of Home" that were easy and big hits with the family.

This is my favorite cookbook.
Other than that I highly recommend the magazine Cooking Light, which is really pretty awesome usually. And allrecipes and the foodie search engine, which I use all the time.

When I fisrt moved out, the first thing my mom did was buy me a big red Betty Crocker cookbook. She used to have one and her mom used to have one and... You get the idea. This new-fangled one is even in a binder so you can take out the pages you're working with and save counter space. Each recipe has nutritional information. There are also bunches of conversion charts and meat cut charts. I love this cookbook more than any other I've purchased.

Well, I write a column for gapersblock.com called One Good Meal and one of the series that I've started and hope to continue once a month for the rest of the year, is taking convenience foods and remaking them for less money in the same amount of time or less and with actual ingredients instead of preservative and AND having them taste good. Here is one column and here is the other. So if that is normally how you've been eating, give these a gander and see if they help.

Cook's Illustrated line is great for lots of recipes and learning techniques and the "why" that causes dishes to work. Alton Brown's "I'm Just Here for the Food" focuses on how to cook very, very basic dishes for you to expand on as you get more comfortable with the basics. The Joy of Cooking was my first real cookbook and the spine broken, the pages are falling out, and there are thumbprints on almost every page. And Rouxbe has a lot of promise for teaching techniques using video so you can pause it as you go.

This is a great book, but may not be optimal for feeding one person.

Weretable, listen up. :-)I am going to show you how to have a home cooked meal every night. It may not be foodie or fancy, but it's nutritious and simple. You will save a ton of money. Don't bog yourself down with a lot of complicated recipes at first.

1. Make a menu plan. On this menu plan you will have a protein for just about every night of the week.

Example:

Sunday - Fish or Shrimp
Monday - Pork Chops
Tuesday - Chicken
Wednesday - Spaghetti
Thursday - Fish
Friday - Steak
Saturday - Chicken

2. Buy a bag of high quality flash frozen boneless, skinless chicken breasts, of fresh chicken breasts, a tray of pork chops, a bag of frozen shrimp, and a bag or two of frozen fish. I usually buy these items from SamsClub. I love their frozen salmon, orange roughy, and jumbo shrimp. The salmon is individually wrapped and so delicious.

3. When you get home divide the chicken breasts individually into small Ziploc baggies. Squirt a little balsamic salad dressing into each one, or any dressing or marinade of you choice. Squeeze out the air and place these baggies into a larger Ziploc bag and freeze. Do the same thing with pork chops and steak, but leave out the marinade, unless you want it.

3. Each morning or the night before thaw out your individual protein item, whether it be a piece of fish, a portion of shrimp, a steak, whatever.

4. Only buy enough fresh vegetables for 3 nights per week. The rest should be frozen. I usually will buy 3 bagged salads, a few bell peppers to saute, and an onion or two. You can always stop midweek if you want fresh broccoli or something. And of course, buy enough fresh fruit to snack on, but not too much. You may only want to buy two bags of salad. That will last you at least 4 or 5 days. Throw in a head of fresh garlic and a couple of lemons.

5. Stock up on frozen vegetables like broccoli, peas, brussel sprouts, etc.

6. Beans instead of rice or potatoes. I love canned beans -- Great Northern, Navy, Pinto, Chili, etc. Just heat and serve.

7. Do you have a George Foreman grill? A porkchop or a piece of fish sprinkled with a little seasoning and frilled on the Foreman is easy peasy.

I find that this simple menu plan gets dinner on the table each night. Your plate will have beans, veg, protein, and a big side salad. You can mix it up and do chicken fajitas one night, fish kabobs another, etc., but the core menu is there. It prevents pizza delivery. Good luck.

Jacques Pepin's Table. Lighter, healthier versions of classic French dishes and various other goodies. Most are fairly simple, too, although I've yet to attempt the ballotined chicken.

Maybe my all-time favorite cookbook/foody-read is Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, by the late, great Laurie Colwin. It's warm, cozy, witty, loving, funny, soothing - the comfort food of cookbooks. And the recipes are not complicated or demanding of obscure ingredients or special tools. In fact, a bunch of them recall her time in a tiny one-room NYC flat cooking on a single-burner hotplate with nothing more than, iirc, one soup pot and one frying pan.

And I've never tried a recipe from that book that I didn't like or love. In fact... I'm searching for it right now in my stacks of books. It's time for me to dip into it again and pick out something to make this week...

by the late, great Laurie Colwin

Taz, I forgot that Colwin wrote this book. Goodbye Without Leaving is one of my favorites.

I'm trying really hard to get back into the cooking habit too.

My favorite cookbook is Real Fast Food by Nigel Slater. It's a cheap paperback full of great ideas that can be cooked in less than thirty minutes.

Another great thing about this book is that there are plenty of recipes where the ingredients can be bought from the local convenience store.

Recently I tried the, uh, umm, I've forgotten the name of it. But basically it was thick sliced toms, covered in cornmeal, fried in olive oil and then laid out between two halves of a baguette slathered with mayo (with some pesto mixed in). Absolutely delicious and very filling.

Late as usual, but I've found Anna Thomas' The Vegetarian Epicure very useful over the years. She's inordinately fussy sometimes, but you can take or leave some of the fussier steps and the recipes are all delicious. The incomparable Madhur Jaffrey's Eastern Vegetarian Cooking is an excellent resource, with hundreds of recipes from the middle to the far east. Actually, anything by Madhur Jaffrey is an asset to your library. My copies of both of these books are yellowed and food-stained, with the spines starting to crack, so you can guess how much use they've seen.