<p>Great suggestions, as always. Thanks so much.</p>
<p>The old folks (aunts and uncles) put together a compilation of family favorite recipes for the young folks (cousins) as they are all in or on their way to college. I doubt that DS will undertake roast pork with red cabbage and German potato salad anytime soon, but I hope the cookbook will be a resource in years to come. </p>
<p>DS is a master of the tortilla pizza (flour tortilla, pizza sauce and cheese in a hot oven), smoothies and sandwiches. He cooks eggs. I did attempt to involve him in cooking, even assigned him one night a week to make the family dinner, which he fulfilled; now back to the old, high-school favorites. For the sake of his health, I hope he branches out a bit in the coming years.</p>
<p>Oh well. I didn’t really get into cooking until my mid twenties.</p>
<p>I’ll second any of Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals cookbooks. Needs no fancy equipment - the most would be a food processor, which you can easily do without, and a grill pan. I’m not a very quick cook, and even with my chopping skills, I can do the meals in about 45 minutes.</p>
<p>What’s also nice is that she sets recipes up as a meal - two to three dishes on one page, and often will tell you in what order to do what among the three dishes so that they all come out at the same time.</p>
<p>The Art of Simple Food, by Alice Waters. Some of the chapters are kinds of food (four essential sauces, salads, soup, bread, pasta, etc.) and some are cooking techniques (simmering, slowcooking, frying/sauteeing, grilling). Each chapter has some core recipes and variations. I think it would be a great way to learn to cook. Like some of the other basic books, it tells how to boil (or fry or scramble) an egg.</p>
<p>Help! My Apartment Has a Kitchen: 100+ Great Recipes with Foolproof Instructions by Kevin Mills
Help! My Apartment Has a Dining Room: How to Have People Over Without Stressing Out by Kevin Mills</p>
<p>Definitely the Good Houskeeping Cookbook- in the large paperback format (not the looseleaf style- too big and I can imagine pages tearing out at the holes). Joy of Cooking may be too intimidating. I use my GH cookbook when I want to know basics- like how long to cook corn on the cob… Nice color illustrations of all sorts of foods. Plus mom’s modifications of many recipes (I use every shortcut possible and microwave whenever I can). I’m thinking of also making a list of brands of various goods I use. It is nice to have a complete reference, not just recipes.</p>
<p>I believe in teaching without cookbooks…teach then some very basics and the rest will flow.
But, I do think that there are some wonderful cooking shows on the foodnetwork
Giada comes to ming…simple common sense use of food and herbs. Put together , a masterpiece .
Better to invest in a couple of good saute pans and some olive oil. Just about any food can be cooked this way</p>
<p>Hard to learn when the teacher is hundreds of miles away- sons don’t typically want to learn at home. The cooking shows don’t cover the ethnic cooking we do or the basics. The good basic cookbooks give a recipe with variations listed after it. It’s nice that son will be be able to learn a lot that I don’t know via books and pick up dishes from next year’s apartment mates (He’s home for spring break and I learned they plan to have one meal together each week, that’s being the cook every 5 weeks for him).</p>
<p>We received Sunset’s Easy Basics as a gift more than 20 years ago and still use some of the recipes. Despite its seemingly narrow focus, Thanksgiving 101 has a great selection of all American recipes.</p>
<p>For researching trivia (and settling kitchen disputes), we rely on Harold McGee’s On food and cooking.</p>
<p>I’ll second Help My Apartment Has a Kitchen. I used it as my first basic reference, then I branched out and passed it along to a friend who was only able to make spaghetti. It helped him branch out, and hopefully he passed it along to someone else who could use it. It’s not exactly gourmet, but it does the trick for simple cooking. I’m going to be looking for cookbooks again when I move into an apartment this summer though since I’ve become a vegetarian since I last cooked for myself. Fortunately it is difficult to do too much damage to vegetables and with the exception of eggs, anything I don’t feel like cooking I can eat raw.</p>
<p>Cooking bores me, so I stick to the basics. I rarely use cookbooks, but when I do, I prefer to use old cookbooks with simple recipes. I have found most of the few cookbooks I own (including the first three listed below) at thrift shops and yard sales. I recommend the following: </p>
<p>*Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book<a href=“1941”>/i</a> This is the spiral-bound cookbook with the red plaid cover found in many American households from 1941 onward. It has been reprinted and revised many times. I recommend the older (pre-1960) editions, which provide information about cooking basics, and are loaded with easy-to-use recipes. Indexed. </p>
<p>The James Beard Cookbook by James Beard with Isabel E. Callvert (1959) No, this is not a “gourmet” cookbook; this is actually an “introduction to cooking” book. (Beard teaches readers how to boil an egg!) Beard first defines basic cooking terms, and then explains how to efficiently (and affordably) stock and equip a kitchen. He provides about 500 pages of basic recipes (and simple variations on those recipes) for major food categories. Beard also describes foods, and explains how to recognize and select the best quality foods when grocery shopping. Indexed. </p>
<p>Cooking with 5 Ingredients or Less by Susan Kosoff and Teresa Kennedy (1984) This book contains hundreds of simple recipes for everything from appetizers to desserts. Every recipe uses five or fewer easy-to-find ingredients. There is a special section entitled “Cooking for One or Two,” and a concluding chapter with basic cooking tips. Indexed. </p>
<p>*Eat Dangerously: The "Blow Health Out Your **!!!" Cookbook by Benjamin Lewis and Rodrigo Velloso; edited by Stacy Schulist (1999) This book is very politically incorrect, and is also hilarious. Lewis and Velloso thumb their noses at “health food” and urge readers to “Dig In!” Recipes are a step up from basic with regard to preparation, but most use relatively easy-to-find ingredients. The authors’ website (eatdangerously.com) is a wealth of food and recipe information, and it includes a portal to an online version of larger-than-life English journalist George Augustus Henry Sala’s The Thorough Good Cook, first published in 1896, a year after Sala’s death.</p>
<p>“… roast pork with red cabbage and German potato salad…” I’m drooling, mafool.</p>
<p>“even assigned him one night a week to make the family dinner, which he fulfilled”</p>
<p>I have mine (14 y.o.) cooking dinner once a month right now. I’ve told him he has to know how to make five dinners he can share with friends before he goes off to college. Also three-five dishes he can take to a potluck meal, a layer cake, cookies, and brownies. (So he can celebrate someone’s birthday with a traditional birthday cake, and bake cookies and/or brownies for fundraisers, study sessions, etc.)</p>
<p>Too bad I taught him how to make a meatloaf; he came back from camp last summer a vegetarian! </p>
<p>My first cookbook, which I still have lo, these many years later, was Good Housekeeping. I still use it.</p>
<p>I gave both kids the 1964 edition of Joy of Cooling, which I prefer to the more modern editions, as it emphasizes the process of cooking from the beginning–breaking down whole foods, etc. It’s also available quite cheaply, used, from [AbeBooks:</a> New & Used Books, Textbooks, Rare & Out of Print Books](<a href=“http://www.abebooks.com%5DAbeBooks:”>http://www.abebooks.com) , which is where I buy most cookbooks. And it jibes with Michael Pollan’s advice: eat food your grandmother would recognize.</p>
<p>As weird as it seems, my daughter really uses her cookies-only cookbook. She enjoys making cookies for her friends.</p>
<p>This is a great thread. I’ve never heard of some of the “college” cook books, although I still have and use the Joy of Cooking I received 25 years ago, and I have that James Beard book too.</p>
<p>Here’s an idea for anyone with a teen/college student who’s summer job is located at a place with a lunch room that includes a fridge and a microwave. Last summer D2 had a research job with such a lunchroom and the student lab workers had a lunch co-op where each person got a day of the week to bring lunch for the group. The idea was to cook something that was easy to store and/or warm up, including dessert. Once a week we taught D how to cook a different one dish meal and she usually baked cookies for the dessert. She had a lot of fun learning and also tasting what the other kids made. They exchanged recipes, which extended the learning, and it made eating that summer cheaper for everyone.</p>
<p>I love, love, love cookbooks. For a basic introduction, I’d recommend:
The Joy of Cooking (prefer the older editions to the new one) and Mark Bitmann’s How to Cook Everything. Bittman writes for the dining/food section of the NY Times. Someone mentioned Cook’s Illustrated–those cookbooks, are good too. I got my daughter a subscription to the magazine when she got her first apartment.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>Definitely</em> 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!</p>
<p>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.</p>