Lately I’m finding myself more and more interested in cooking. I’m more of an exact amounts kind of guy, so I started with baking. That’s going well…except for the waistlines of everyone around us. I realized one day as I obsessed over the thought of making a cream cheese pound cake, that my baking skills (while enjoyable) weren’t super useful. It was time to learn to cook actual meals…and with no schools teaching fundamentals of cooking (I’m at a super basic level) in Singapore, I had to turn to books.

After scouring the internet I narrowed the search down to two books. Both are massively thick and chock full of information. Just look at the thickness of the Stewart book compared to my iPhone.

How To Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food by Mark Bittman
How to Cook Everything is a simple cookbook. There are no pictures…just 2,000 recipes. There’s basic info for each of the foods, meats, and others presented and they cover just about everything you can imagine…from very simple dishes to very complex foods. It’s a great book for sure, but for someone like me who is coming from absolute zero….well I need the pictures. The words scoring, blanching, julienne, etc might be common to most people, but I have no idea what the outcome might be.

So to compliment this wonderful encyclopedia of cooking I also optioned for:

Martha Stewart’s Cooking School: Lessons and Recipes for the Home Cook
Martha Stewart’s book is big and beautiful. The photographs are amazing…detailed step by step pictures that show various cuts, techniques, etc. The book covers everything from kitchen utensils to veggies to meats to desserts…but in typical Martha fashion some get a little precious/ambitious. Often the recipes call for some very specific herb or flavor I’m not gonna find in Southeast Asia or the multi-hundred dollar Cuisinart (250 in the US, 700 SGD in Singapore). Nothing wrong with giving you a recipe to aspire too, but sometimes you don’t have the time or ingredients necessary to produce these works of art and just want a meal.

So I find both of these books the perfect compliment to each other. Using both side by side I can get an idea of what, I think, they’re talking about. If you know anyone getting started in cooking, need a wedding gift, etc I’d recommend either of these cookbooks highly, but I’d recommend them even more highly together

As the site grows and readers join us, we realized a need to grow our culinary vocabulary. We felt reading more than just other food blogs would help increase our vocabulary and give us an insight into other foods, trends, chefs, locations, etc. So Joanna picked up a couple older books we’ve heard a lot about over the years on her last trip to Bangkok. Both of these aren’t quite cutting edge, but are proven favorites in the culinary world.

The first book I sought out was Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything. I chose this one due to his status in the food world. For those of you who don’t know the name he’s the food writer for Vogue magazine. His background is as a lawyer, though, and this comes through in the book… he studies and researches and builds cases for different types of foods, histories of foods, and examines fad French diets.

The most useful chapter (in my opinion) comes early on when he writes of his own personal food biases and how he overcame most of them. According to Jeff (let’s pretend I’m on a shortened first name basis with the guy), our tastes are conditioned into us by culture and exposure and with enough tries of anything we can begin to learn and appreciate the appeal. For him it was Kimchi…for me lately it’s been Sea Urchin and large amounts of Lemon…. Joanna is struggling with Sushi, lamb, and blue cheeses (a shared distate with Jeff).

The book was slightly disappointing as I hoped it would contain a mixture of essays and reviews… it is a food essay book through and through. His writing style is very approachable throughout and helps any food lover love food more however.

In a nice contrast to the book above is Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. This book isn’t the slighty obsessed pursuit of a foodie, it’s more of an insight into what the chef’s are going through to produce the plates picked over by fussy foodies.

The book is an easy read…well I should say enjoyable read as many of the chapters could very well spoil Sunday brunch or other meals for you…but his writing is fast and funny. Joanna read it ahead of me and even knowing that I would soon be reading the book as well, couldn’t help sharing funny bits or particularly interesting passages (seemingly 1 or 2 a chapter).

I worked two years in the restaurant world and grew up with my Uncle managing restaurants so most of the info here wasn’t as much revelatory as fun. It’s great to see that the guys who slave away, usually in 12-14 hour days, preparing everything from pub grub to fine dining do it out of a sense of pride and passion…sacrificing normal lives, pursuits, family life, etc in the name of a great meal (and of course money, sex, and drugs ).