I have never really liked meat. The idea of a bloody (or even well-done) steak with neatly criss-crossed grill marks on my plate has never been appealing to me, and I have basically limited my carnivorous intake to the occasional chicken breast. My boyfriend is a vegetarian, and I can go for long stretches of time without eating any meat at all. So why am I not a vegetarian, too, already?

Here are the reasons I’ve come up with (while sitting over a bowl of my mom’s famous beef stew):

- It still doesn’t seem to be quite accepted. If you’re invited to dinner at someone’s house or invited to a wedding or some other bash, it’s assumed that you eat meat. If you don’t, you either have to make everyone feel bad by arranging for a special plate or you have to forage for roots and berries among the side dishes.

- Some of my favorite dishes from childhood have meat in them. Sure, I don’t eat them now, but when I go home and my mom makes them, it’s sweet (and they’re still delicious). Knowing I couldn’t eat those anymore would kind of depress me. Wait, who am I kidding? It would totally depress me.

- One of my goals is to travel around the world, and I don’t want to have to limit myself in any way when I do that. Especially when it comes to eating local fare that may or may not come from an animal.

- BACON. Need I say more? Read More »

I have posted what seems like a million small-batch recipes here at CC, and I’ve adapted the vast majority of them from this book. If you live by yourself or with only one other person, you like good food, you don’t mind cooking, and you can only have one cookbook, buy this one. You will NOT regret it.

There’s absolutely everything in here, from general small-batch advice to a lowdown on ingredients to winning recipes of all kinds. And every recipe in here is truly excellent. I can’t stand fat cookbooks full of thousands of recipes that obviously were never tested, meaning you have to dig through the whole book to handpick the recipes that may have the potential to be edible.

Not so with Cooking for Two. The authors, Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough, have really tweaked every recipe, and it’s obvious. The ingredient amounts are right on, and you can expect fantastic taste with everything you make from here.

I can’t say anything specific about the seafood section since I don’t eat seafood, but the casserole and poultry sections really shine. Also, many of the recipes can be adapted for slow cookers to make them even easier! Read More »