Boxes of books

I’m waiting very patiently for an important phone call so today is a stay at home day….that’s if they phone today. The lovely people told me yesterday that they will call back within 2 days…please be today!! Not that it is a hardship having to stay at home, I have plenty to do to keep me occupied…cleaning, washing, cooking, blogging…but primarily I have another 7 boxes of cookbooks to go through that are sitting in the garage, yes you read right, 7! Now that might not seem like that much but I have already worked my way through 18, and with an average of 35 books per box, well you can do the maths! I have A LOT of cookbooks. The other problem is that my shelves are full…completely 100% crammed packed, sagging due to the weight full, which means that I have the agony of looking at all these lovely books then labelling the boxes and for the time being, relegating them down to the crawl space. Every box has a few books that I HAVE to have out and it pains me to send the rest away, but until I get a bigger house (or at least persuade Mr. Vanilla to let me fill every room with shelves), it is under the house they go. Torture.

The books that have made it to the newly bought shelves have formed the start of my personal cookbook library, which is definitely my favourite room of the house (well perhaps with the exception of my kitchen!). I have tried counting (several times) and have given up (several times), but I would guess there are roughly 500 books (give or take) sitting very proudly in my cookbook room (yes I have a cookbook room! If truth be told, when needed it is a spare bedroom, but mainly it is my cookbook room!!) To most people 500 books seems like an insane amount of cookbooks to own, and I will admit it is a lot, however that is only about half of what I own….the other 500 are downstairs waiting for the bigger house. So what I am really saying is that I am the proud owner of roughly 1000 cookbooks! Now I haven’t bought all of these books myself, in fact probably only about 100 or so have been bought by me, the rest I have inherited from the most wonderful and generous lady who has the same obsession with cookbooks as I do. I have every kind of cookbook imaginable from the 1940’s (and perhaps earlier – I really should check and see what is my oldest book) to the most recent publication, fresh off the printer!

And so on the basis that I have so many books (a lot of which I have still to read as I just received them in Canada not that long ago) I’ve decided that it makes sense to do a book review in my blog. I have a very bad habit of reading cookbooks like novels, marking recipes I like the sound of with post-its then putting them on the shelves, only to be forgotten about! I use them as inspiration rather than actually following the recipe, no matter how much I love the sound of it and so it is time to put a stop to that! From now on I will try and write a book review as often as I can. I was going to suggest every Friday, however I don’t want to make any promises that I can’t keep so I will err on the side of caution, although keep an eye out for the first one this Friday! Now I just have to decide what book to start with!! And on that note I should at least go and finish unpacking the rest….wish me luck!