The Year of Cookbooks

I can barely contain my excitement!  I have the best "Mother Christmas" in my life and every year she pretty much gives me exactly what I have on my wishlist for Christmas.  Maris, my step mother in law, does everything in her power to spoil me and my family on Christmas, she is the best.  This year I asked for cookbooks and she had me order them online to make life easy.  I spent about 2 days perusing Chapters website, Amazon.com and various blogs to narrow down my selection, which I had to whittle down from about 20 books.  It was an overwhelming process and I hope I did ok, some I chose on intuition, some on rave reviews and others because I follow their blog.

Here's the list:

Eat, Drink & be Vegan by Dreena Burton.
I believe this is Dreena's 3rd vegan cookbook and she has a 4th one coming out soon.  She lives in the lower mainland and is very active in the online community, I have been following her blog for a while as well I am facebook "friends" with her.  She has a very approachable persona and I can't wait to try the cookbook, it's been at the top of my list ever since I came across it.

Get It Ripe by Jai Steele
Another Canadian Chick, if I remember correctly she resides in Toronto.  Her book also received great reviews.  She is a RHN and uses that to her advantage in the cookbook.  I have been to her website and blog but don't follow it.  I'm hoping to sign up for the RHN course in September so I was interested to see the cookbook of someone who is one and possibly how the training has influenced her lifestyle.

The Conscious Cook by Tal Ronnen
Tal Ronnen is a professionally trained chef who used his training to create delicious meatless dishes.  This cookbook is for rich and fatty cooking, not healthy!  I bought is specifically for this purpose, as a foodie I do enjoy a decadent meal once in a while and I'm prepared to put the work into it as long as the results deliver.

The Urban Vegan by Dynise Belcavage
This one I went out on a limb.  As the full title suggests, The Urban Vegan: 250 Simple, Sumptuous Recipes From Streetcar Favourites to Haute Cuisine, I feel like I can't go wrong as it's got 250 recipes.  I did check out her blog and some of the recipes looked good and she also has another cookbook deal in the works to come out next year.

Vegan Yum Yum by Lauren Ulm
This young lady is quite impressive, you gotta admit.  She's been on Martha Stewart, I've seen the clip but I have to say that I wasn't impressed with Martha's inattentive attitude toward Lolo (as she nicknames herself) regardless I thought Lolo did a great job in her 3 min spot to portray her "knitted marzipan".  Her cookbook received some conflicting reviews and it seems like she may or may not have a bad reputation in the vegan cookbook author's community.  Irregardless after reading the table of contents I was ready to order the book.  Fingers crossed!

100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes by Kris Holechek
This in another "went out on a limb" book.  I'm a sucker for great photographs of sugary treats, what can I say I'm a sugar addict through and through.  The book also got better reviews then The Joy of Vegan Baking so we'll see.

Kids Can Cook: Vegetarian Recipes
There aren't that many kids vegetarian cookbooks out there so it wasn't hard to decide which one.

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (not a cookbook)
This one is a National Bestseller and it just looks like an interesting read.  I like that it's called "part memoir, part investigative report".  Memoirs are one of my favourite genres to read!

And that's all she wrote!  Now you can see why I'm so excited, I don't think I've ever gotten so many books at one time, other then school books.  I am so grateful and my tummy will be grateful too.

The Most Fab & Elite Book Club

     There are 4 of us in The Most Fab & Elite Book Club.  It's not that we're elitists but we like things the way we like them and in order to do that we decided to keep our club small and the rules loose and relaxed.  We started our little book club maybe 2.5-3 years ago as a way to get together with friends and stay connected and the books were a good reason to do it.  We are very relaxed about the rules as I said above and if one of us doesn't finish reading their book we're ok with it.  At meetings we sometimes don't even discuss the books!  Which means it's probably a good idea that we don't have other people in our book club because they'd quickly get frustrated and I'm guessing want to kick us out of our own club.  So why do we have a book club?  Well, it's been 2 years since our last meeting (I know: shocking!).  I thought it was about time we got together.  I got the ball rolling, sent messages to everyone via facebook and we set up a meeting for tonight, we're going out for dinner to The Cactus Club.  We all got busy going in our own direction with our lives and families, life just has a way of working out that way.  The original intention of the book club was as an outlet for us to get together and hangout, it was more important to meet then it was to discuss the books so that why we were so relaxed on the rules, we didn't want any pressure.  I am so grateful to have these ladies in my life and can't wait to hang with them whether these books get discussed or not.