Wondering what to have for dinner this evening, I went to my cookbooks for inspiration. As I glanced over the titles I realised a couple of things. First, we have a lot of cookbooks. I’m not sure how we accumulated so many, but there they are, filling a bookshelf in the bedroom, because there isn’t enough room for them in the kitchen. Second, I realised that we use many of the cookbooks on the shelf for just one recipe—the one gem in the book. Those books are in pristine condition, though some are well over 20 years old.

Then there is the handful of books we use over and over again. Their spines are cracked, their pages greasy and smeared with chocolate, turmeric, and unidentifiable globs of dough. Joy of Cooking (both the 1975 and the 1997 editions) is one of those well-loved books. We destroyed our first copy of Joy of Cooking in Panama. Of the 50 pounds of stuff we were allowed to take, three were afforded to this indispensable book. By the end of two and a half years in the tropics, the book was completely ruined. We proceeded to purchase and destroy a second copy, but when we went to get a third, we found it was a new edition, and significantly different from the old one. So we bought it, but kept the old one. Now both copies are so well used, I had to write “old” and “new” on the spines so I could tell them apart.

The well-used cookbooks are ones I can recognise by feel in the dark on Sunday morning when I’m planning the weekly cooked breakfast. I’ve memorised the page numbers of my favourite recipes, too. Page 281 in the Mennonite Community Cookbook is the best brownie recipe ever, and the same page in The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking is one of our weeknight staples, green bean and potato charchari. Page 932 of the “new” Joy of Cooking includes Texas chocolate sheet cake, a super easy cake for those times you need baked goods on short notice; and cornbread is found on page 627 in the “old” Joy of Cooking, but I make that enough, I don’t need the recipe any more.

These books are like old friends, each full of inspiration and advice. Though I know I could simply pull up a recipe off the internet, it’s just not the same flipping through a good cookbook.

What’s your favourite cookbook?

I bought agar last week so I could make a vegetarian fondant icing for the upcoming birthday cakes. It’s the first time I’ve thought far enough in advance to have the time to search out agar, and it’s a technique I’ve wanted to try for a long time. Besides, Lia did a school project on seaweed last term, so it was only fitting that we use seaweed in her cake. Once I had the agar in the house, I began to wonder about using it for other things. When I mentioned to the kids that it might be able to be used for marshmallows, their eyes lit up. Sure enough, we found a recipe for vegetarian marshmallows using agar in place of the gelatine, and this morning we tried it out. After an inordinate amount of beating, we finally poured the marshmallow foam into a tray to set. We licked the beaters.

“Blech!”

“Tastes like seaweed.”

“That’s completely inedible.”

“Should we…?”

“Throw it out.”

Looks like seaweed, smells like seaweed, I suppose we should have known it would taste like seaweed. I’m just glad we tried making marshmallows today, rather than discovering (when it was too late) that I’d wrapped the kids’ birthday cakes in the flavour equivalent of sugared sushi.

We’ve discovered some great foods by trying weird things. It’s not often something fails so miserably, but it’s always a risk trying something new. You win some, you lose some. Have you had a memorable kitchen disaster using a new ingredient or trying a new recipe?

“Can you give me your recipe for red beet eggs?” I asked.

“What?” my mother replied. “There really isn’t a recipe.”

I suppose a good Pennsylvania Dutch girl would have been born knowing how to make them, or have learned as a young child by watching by her mother’s side. And I certainly might have, if I hadn’t been out catching frogs instead. But I had to ask as an adult, and I did manage to extract a vague recipe from my mom.

Red beet eggs are an acquired taste, like Chinese tea eggs (for which I can’t seem to acquire a taste). My daughter likes them, my husband humours me, and my son refuses to eat them. For me, though, they all but define summer. Their improbable colour, rubbery texture, and sweet/sour flavours, along with the pickled beets (which I actually prefer to the eggs themselves), always hit the spot on a hot summer day.

And I know they are memorable. My husband’s grandfather apparently spent some time in Pennsylvania as a young child. When I met him in his 90s, he still remembered the red beet eggs. (I almost said he “fondly” remembered them, but I really don’t know if it was a fond memory or not—as I said, they are an acquired taste).

A quick Google search turns up dozens of red beet eggs recipes, all of them different. Some include onion, pickling spices, cinnamon or cloves to add flavour. Some specify cider vinegar, others specify white. Some use white sugar, others brown. I like to believe that what my mother told me is true—there really isn’t a recipe. Red beet eggs are simply a cultural phenomenon—there’s no explaining them, no defining them. You either know how to make them or you don’t.

I painted the living room today. There were lots of other things on my to-do list, but they didn’t happen. After a 40-minute trip to Leeston for a new paint tray, because the roller handle I bought yesterday (to replace the one that broke last week) was the wrong size for our paint trays, and then a 2 ½ hour trip to the city because the white paint I was sold last week wasn’t actually white paint (it was dark base, which looks white in the can, but actually doesn’t cover anything), I finally managed to make some headway on the job. Then I remembered I was supposed to milk my neighbour’s goats, so I dashed around cleaning up, grabbed my milk pot, and headed over…only to discover that it’s NEXT week she needs me to milk for her. At this point, it was 6:30 pm, the living room was still unfinished, and I hadn’t even thought about making dinner yet. I was ready to have beer and pretzels and call that a meal.

“Can I make you a nice meal?”

My marvellous spouse allowed me to continue painting while he grilled vegetables and polenta (and even poured me a glass of wine, never mind how the trim painting gets a little wobbly…).

I cook most weekday evenings, just because I’m the first one home. On weekends, we usually cook together. So it was delightful to have someone cook for me. What a wonderful gift!