As I may have mentioned before, I generally receive a several cookbooks for major gift-giving occasions.
This isn't surprising; after all, I have a known cookbook problem, and I have several cookbooks on my Amazon wishlist.
I'm fairly familiar with the major cookbooks that are released, what the buzz is, and what the classics are.
But this Christmas my aunt (who is a fantastic cook) gave me a book I had never heard of -- the Auberge of the Flowering Hearth, by Roy Andries De Groot.
"It's the book that inspired Alice Waters," she told me.
I thanked her politely and added the book to my already crowded shelf of food and cookbooks. A month or so later, I had finished my book club book for that month and w...

I have a little bit of a cookbook problem.
You see, when we moved to our current home, we dedicated a reasonable sized bookcase to the cookbooks.
It had four shelves, was about two and a half feet wide, and seemed perfectly fine.
Until I started putting my cookbooks on it.
There was a little overflow, a few cookbooks I put on another shelf, some books that I recategorized as "travel books."
But the problem only got worse.
It's not that I buy a ton of cookbooks -- I mean, I do buy a few, sometimes to cook with, sometimes as a souvenir when I'm traveling, sometimes because I really can't resist a used book sale.
But I also receive cookbooks as gifts.
And cookbooks have a way of finding their way into my house in other ways too.
As a res...