gasp!

I haven't read any actual books lately (no rest for the relocating), but I did receive a great cookbook the other day, so let's talk about that.

To explain, I'm signed up for The Good Cook book club, mostly because I'm drawn to the siren call of cheap pretty cookbooks, and their opening offer was a good one. (And I can never bring myself to pay full price in an actual bookstore, but I'm okay with paying the slightly lower club price by mail. Strangeness.) They have, of course, their little cards that you get each month and have to return or they automatically ship you their selection of the month. Apparently they never received my card last month, and they shipped me Patrick O'Connell's Refined American Cuisine. I was going to just return it, but I looked up a few reviews, and it sounded like something I might like. So I decided to keep it.

Yesterday I looked through it, marking the recipes I wanted to try, and damn, I love this book. Chef Patrick O'Connell co-created The Inn at Little Washington, a place I will probably never be able to visit but can still appreciate. The recipes are almost all slightly glamourous but still accessible (they actually seem do-able), and the pictures are gorgeous. The best part is that O'Connell is a great writer, throwing little anecdotes in and not being too Important Chef serious, so the book ends up being fairly light-hearted and fun to read. There are pictures of my beloved Virginia here and there (The Inn's located near the Blue Ridge Mountains), which of course makes me love the book more because I'm a horrible biased reviewer.

I'm afraid I'm not that great at reviewing cookbooks. Here: this is a splendid cookbook. It has beautiful recipes that are easy to follow. I've marked about a quarter of the pages with my "to try" bookmarks. I was so excited about it that I talked to my husband for ten minutes about the thing, even as his eyes rolled into the back of his head. And, bonus, it's not snobby. The end.