The Way I Like to Cook

     Tonight I will have fish stacks for dinner—three corn tortillas layered with Alaska cod (sautéed with onions, tomatoes, lemon juice, and oregano) and feta cheese, baked for ten minutes, and topped with  yogurt with a smidgeon more oregano. Yum.

    How do I know it's yummy? 

    Because I had it last night. And I'll probably have it again tomorrow night.  

    I like to cook by recipe, and, since recipes generally come proportioned for four (or more), I cook a dish for four and don't have to cook again for four days. Sometimes I halve the recipe. Sometimes I stagger two recipes. Sometimes I freeze dinners. I like to cook one-dish meals—I don't do a slab of meat and sides. My usual dessert is yogurt with tahini and honey.

    I have 32 cookbooks and four years' worth of Bon Appétit magazines, a great source of recipes. Some cookbooks are so well used they're falling apart.

Others, like the two-volume Horizon Cookbook and Illustrated History of Eating and Drinking through the Ages, I have never actually cooked from, but I'm always thinking I will. Some, like Great Recipes from around the World, Paul Pépin's Art of the Chicken, and the Heritage of America Cookbook, are just simply beautiful books. I have some old standbys, like the Joy of Cooking and the Moosewood Cookbook, and some specialty cookbooks, like the Cake Bible. I have a box of well-worn, fifty-year-old handwritten recipes and another, neater box of cut-out-and-pasted-on recipes.

I have a couple of collections of family recipes. One is called Quick and Easy and Sometimes Good. One of my cookbooks, "The Prize-winning Recipes from the Pyrofax Gas Teen-age Baking Contest," has a recipe from me in it.

    When my mother gave me a small specialty cookbook entitled The Twelve Days of Christmas Cookbook, with a wassail recipe I still use, she inscribed it not "To Diana, who loves to cook," but "To Diana, who loves cookbooks."