Bookish Gifts For the Cook

Buy your culinary friend something special to repay them for all the yummy food they make you.

1. Canadian Living Vegetarian Collection This collection of vegetarian recipes is great for anyone, even if they're not a vegetarian (or a Canadian.) From Goodreads: "Cooks across Canada are trying to eat well, incorporate more healthful foods into their menus and accommodate the dietary choices of family members. Canadian Living's new collection of vegetarian recipes caters to this trend with nourishing dishes that work every time - whether you're cooking for vegetarians, flexitarians or vegans, or just want a little something meat-free and delicious. The book is packed with helpful information on different types of vegetarian diets, advice on shopping for and preparing new and interesting ingredients, and tips that ensure success in the kitchen."

2. Kitchen Sticky Notes Perfect for marking recipes in your favourite cook books. Not exactly necessary, but a cute stocking stuffer. You can also find stick-on page flaps to identify recipes here.

3. Collapsable Book Stand I received this as a gift last Christmas and it’s perfect for cookbooks!

4. My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud'Homme In this memoir, Julia Child recounts her life, beginning when she moved to France in 1948. Julia Child helped revolutionize the way Americans look at food, but she was once a middle aged woman who had never cooked anything in her life. This book shows how she found her true calling and fell in love with food and France. From her days at Cordon Bleu, to the formation of her cooking school with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, Julia soon found she had a natural flare for all things culinary. The three collaborated to write a cookbook on French cooking for Americans. When her book was finally published, it changed everything and kickstarted Child's career. 

5. Any of Jamie Oliver's Cookbooks My dad is a Jamie Oliver fanboy, so I have to recommend one of his books. They’re all amazing: I’m partial to Jamie’s America and Jamie at Home. 


6. Collected Recipes Album A cute way to keep all of one's recipes and food photographs together.  My roommate got me something similar to this one year, except it was a scrapbook recipe binder! Best present ever.

 

7. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer The writer of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything is Illuminated discusses his struggle with whether or not it's immoral to eat meat. From Goodreads: "Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between carnivore and vegetarian. As he became a husband and a father, he kept returning to two questions: Why do we eat animals? And would we eat them if we knew how they got on our dinner plates?Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, and his own undercover detective work, Eating Animals explores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits-from folklore to pop culture to family traditions and national myth-and how such tales justify a brutal ignorance. Marked by Foer's profound moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the vibrant style and creativity that made his previous books, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, huge bestsellers, Eating Animals is a celebration and a reckoning, a story about the stories we've told--and the stories we now need to tell."