"The New Cook", Halfprice Books

I had a minute this afternoon in between fetching the car out of the shop (oil change before the road) and fetching a bit of groceries (some green onions and such to top off that very nifty Bun Bun Noodle recipe out of the Morning Food cookbook). I just can't help myself, that peeking in at Goodwill. I don't think that the gods were kind to me placing that big, bright second hand store right there along the way to buying groceries and burgers and such. But there it is, off to the side of Mile Hill Road. My weakness and my pleasure all wrapped up in one bright white and blue electric sign. Ten minutes is all it takes and I can bust the budget for the week.
When I get ready for road trips like the one I have coming up this weekend I like to load up on new music. Never mind that I have boxes and boxes of cassettes upstairs and down. It's just the idea that I may find something new and exciting that will imprint an old stretch of highway with a new piece of unheard of before music. At ten or twenty five cents a throw. Not a bad bit of spending. So today was more of that same bad behaviour. Forty used tapes of new music for a thousand miles of what could be bad road. Rainy weather out there, need lots of musical stimulation. Muddy Waters, reggae, Norteno. Cuban, Spike Jones, reedy jazz, tons of New Wave and strange rock and old blues. Good finds for upcoming good times.

But man cannot live on music alone. I also found a couple cookbooks that I needed to have, one which was new to me (Larouse Country Cooking) and an old one which I already had, Donna Hay's The New Cook.

New cook, indeed. But why buy the same old title again?

Let's just say that in the end it's not for me.

Amassing cookbooks was far from my mind when I first found that title on a rainy February night a few years ago. We had a few hours to kill, M and I, and we found ourselves filled with desire for used books and pho, both easily handled in the same little strip mall out by Ikea. We had a mission there, too, that required her to hard eye ball a cabinet for her homeschool curriculum to be housed in, but that could wait until our stomaches and literary souls were satiated.

It was in Half Price Books that I came across The New Cook for the first time. I was already pretty well versed with Ina Garten and had just discovered Donna Hay but didn't own any of their works. M had already fired up in me that whole recipe thing, and anything new and bright and flashy was something I wanted to pour through, let alone own. So that night I came across three titles in the stacks and of the three that one was the most reasonably priced. We walked away with music and books and then walked next door and filled ourselves up with steaming bowls of pho. It rained hard that night, and we killed time as we always did on those weeknight Ikea runs by slowing down the shopping, finding time to eat pie and sip coffee at Marie Calendar's, and talking about things that we couldn't ever possibly hope to accomplish as we meandered our way home slowly to Kitsap County on side and back roads.

I pull out that book every once in a while when I need a new recipe inspiration. Donna Hay is good for that. But more I tend to pull out that particular title whenever I'm inclined to want to look back on a night that was fresh and stormy and powerful. In the end we secured that bookshelf for your homeschooling needs (which stayed in the box for days before being assembled), we figured out what we would call each other if we could have our way with life, but more than anything we found recipes and such in that book for other days that we never got around to making, for those "other days" never arrived.

So, what in the end arrives on time these days, anyway, besides Japanese trains? I bought a second copy of that book to give you, M. Now it's your turn to plow through it and make notes in it so you'll be ready to say to me someday, "this is what I want to make for breakfast".

Besitos, mi amor.

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