First cookbook for college kid's first apartment

aibarr
Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:51:20 +0000

Oh my gosh! A Man, a Can, a Plan!! My then-boyfriend (now-husband) and his roommate had that… It’s hysterical. They’ve got thick cardboard pages and simple equations that spell things out with how-many-cans and what-brand-name.

Definitely Joy Of Cooking. If your son is amused by such things, dredge up a copy of the original… You can get it for ten bucks plus S&H on ebay… which has less of the how-to-bake-a-potato-in-the-microwave (which he can just google anyhow) and more diagrams on how to skin a squirrel to feed to your family (plus the more classic recipes and cooking how-tos that have stood the test of time). The comedy value of it all might encourage him to read it cover-to-cover, and he might learn to cook along the way!

If you have access to the Food Network and a Tivo, and if your son is scientifically-minded at all, save some copies of Good Eats with Alton Brown for him to watch when he comes home. Alton is the Bill Nye of cooking. He’s got some books out, but they’re not quite as amazing as his shows. He teaches the “why” of cooking, so that if you’ve seen a few episodes, you start to feel confident about improvising because you know exactly what’s going on when you’re reducing a sauce, and you know what the heck baking soda does.