If you have been following my blog for awhile, you will know that we love to go out for lunch or dinner. But in the long run, this can be quite expensive! At the beginning of the blog, I often wrote about the restaurants, the food, and restaurant-quality experiences.

After many restaurant visits, also with lots of friends, especially after many cooking events at home with friends, we asked ourselves: „Does this really have to be? Can’t we just save money and cook ourselves?“

Restaurants like this „GREASY SPOON“ are everywhere, isn’t it better to cook yourself?

According to the motto:

Swing the cooking spoon yourself!

The ingredients you need are certainly not always cheap (depending on what you want to cook), but they are always cheaper than going out to eat.
Make an event out of it! Invite friends to cook together, cook for your family or just for yourself! And planning, shopping, preparing should be fun and an adventure then.

Great fun making pizza together – this big vegetarian one went on an Aussie-bbq-plate.

In our years in Australia, we had a small club of friends (6 couples), meeting every 2 to 3 weeks for a meal and drink together. Sometimes we had fancy meals, sometimes just some snacks, but always fun, never a big showoff from somebody.

     Sometimes fancy, halloumi prawns with grilled vegetables, sometimes simple, homemade bread with tuna salad and freshly picked capers – delicious I’ll tell you.   Click on pics to get your mouth watered.

The invitation went around and everyone cooked for the others what he/she considered to be his/her specialty. The guests brought a bottle of wine under the
Motto „Wine tasting – you absolutely have to test this one“. Before the meal was ready we had enough time to enjoy good wine and to sniff through many cookbooks together (often also exchanging cookbooks is good fun) and to get new ideas and appetite. The conversations about life, lifestyle, menus, and cooking adventures were unforgettable.

         Having the wine ready for tasting, of course, the „best one“ first, while we cooked German Rouladen with red cabbage for our Aussie friends. They never had it before and loved it. A 5-meter bar around the kitchen promotes, of course, the fun of cooking together.

Mostly we cooked together, at least everybody was welcome in the kitchen or at the stove. And so we spent most of the afternoon and evening tasting wine, cooking, chatting, drinking, eating and laughing a lot. Similar dinner party’s we organized in Panama – great.

One of my specialties, Thai-cooking, this time 10 dishes for 8 people. Like in Thailand we had that evening almost 40 degrees Celsius and 90% humidity – the food was absolutely appropriate for such a hot evening. But to celebrate good Thai food one needs a good Thai cookbook, to get the right ideas and combinations and learn what it means to celebrate a Thai-table.

In many cases the recipes in cookbooks are compiled by people who are otherwise connected to each other, for example, a countrywomen’s association or a football club or even a collection of recipes on a certain topic such as spices, fish, a country or just a children’s book like    Winnie-The-Pooh. Down here first edition from 1969, and the famous Honey Chocolate Pie recipe.

Selection of Cooking Books.

Cooking together with friends or family (as mentioned above) requires most time ideas from cookbooks, that’s why we like to stumble through them. The following selection will show you Recipe Collections in cookbooks that not everyone knows or has in their own kitchen. If you like to view a picture larger and better, click on it.

The Big Coffee Cook Book.

      
Not everyone will cook with coffee, its quite unusual to make meatballs with coffee. My favorite is a turkey recipe with coffee-rub, absolutely delicious.

From Our Pot and Pan.

A lovely North German collection of recipes, written in the local dialect, and a lot of satiric comments and pictures added.

    This is fun to read and being inspired to cook.

The Western Cookbook.

This is a pocketbook from 1972. Since then I am always back to it for a good inspiration and tip of BBQ-ing and outdoor cooking. My absolute favorite is a Western BBQ sauce.

                     
A special cookbook for Palmin use, one of the cooking fat used mainly in the ’50s and ’60s. Palmin is a vegetable-based cooking fat that can be used similar to lard and used for everything, fish, veggies, meat, baking and more.

Countrywomen festivals and customs.

The booklet describes a whole year of festivals and customs with descriptions of the origin and meaning of traditions, combined with lots of recipes used during those events. Printed in 1994 from the „Kreislandfrauenverband Ludwigsburg“, Baden-Wuerttemberg

Why we celebrate „Dreikoenigstag“, or what happens during the „Walpurgisnacht“, or what does „Siebenschlaefer“ means, or how to celebrate a „Richtfest“ ??? Questions over questions and they are all answered in this fantastic book with the associated recipes.

Culinary Round Table.

This collection of personal „curriculum vitae’s“ of the 9 best chefs and restaurant, as well as hotel owners of South-West Germany, is a rarity in itself. They made a book together which includes all 9 original signatures – a rare personal gift handed to me in 1988.

This fantastic book shows all 9 chefs in a photo, in a personal resume, with details of their hobbies, business, and each with 3 of their best fish dishes. A gourmet delight to read. In case you are interested in any recipe, just click on the pics to size up for better reading.

Down here are 3 of the famous chefs shown in the midst of their hobby, cooking is not everything. Everyone has a life and for sure more than one capability.

And finally down here some of the mouthwatering dishes these chefs create in their restaurants. Worth to visit every single one of them. Click on all the pics to size up.

        Superbowl Champions – Chicago Bears.

Super Bowl XX was an American football game between the National Football Conference (NFC) champion Chicago Bears and the American Football Conference (AFC) champion New England Patriots to decide the National Football League (NFL) champion for the 1985 season. The Bears defeated the Patriots by the score of 46–10, capturing their first NFL championship since 1963, three years prior to the birth of the Super Bowl. Super Bowl XX was played on January 26, 1986, at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans

North Lawndale is an impoverished neighborhood on Chicago’s west side. 39 % of the population is below the age of 14 and the high school dropout rate is over 60%. Gang violence is an everyday occurrence, which suffers from one of Chicago’s highest crime rates. A gym is being built to provide an alternative to the gangs through sports. After their first and only win in Super Bowl History, the club decided to bring out a recipe collection through this cookbook to benefit the Lawndale Community Gym.

The book is meantime a very rare collector item. It contains over 60 recipes from Staff and players of this era of time 35 years ago. All pages are filled with pictures like the ones above. Walter Payton on the right is even a member of the Football Hall of Fame.

Ladies of the „Centre for the Elderly“ in Bebra, Germany.

The old ladies of this center put on 112 pages a lot of unusual and often forgotten recipes together, to teach their descendants about old-style baking. Enjoyable handwritten pages.

The Black Forest Cookbook.

A very readable book with about 20 pages of Black Forest History at the beginning and then many more pages (in total 134) of recipes. Of course, the famous „Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte“ is included.

Found in another old cookbook.

This booklet contains about 40 handwritten recipes from the 1890s. Astonishingly the title reads „Gesangbuch für Herrn Julius Wunderlich“ (songbook for Mr. J.Wunderlich).

My own Recipe Collection.

During my over 40 years of traveling through many many first-class hotels in the world, I had the opportunity to collect (most in handwriting on Telefon note pads from the hotels) recipes that I picked up in their restaurants. Now it’s a full office folder with far over 400 international recipes. They led in the end to my interest in cooking and they are always a source for our private cooking and dinners like you can see down here from our time in Australia, Panama, and Uruguay. Click on pics to supersize.

Most unusual – Tropical Cooking.

If you like to roast a Racoon, skin and grill a Snake, or may be like to braise an Alligator, this will be the right book.

Till now I haven’t cooked Chayote, Monkey, Parrot, Tapir, or Shark yet, but I would love to. Sadly our supermarkets won’t sell these ingredients. But I had this cookbook dozens of times in my hands to read trough the adventures cooking experiences. Have a look down here by yourself. This book has 130 pages and almost 1000 cooking ideas – monstrous !

James Rizzi.

James Rizzi (October 5, 1950 – December 26, 2011) was an American pop artist who was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Without question, he had a special relationship with Germany. He loved Germany and the Germans loved him and his art. His greatest successes as an artist he celebrated in Germany.

Rizzi was most famous for his 3D artwork, „especially the large, elaborate prints and teeming anthropomorphic cityscapes. His merry maximalism and delight in delirious detail and elaborate minutiae created a true art brand, a trademark style as recognizable as any in the world.“

See also my post about James Rizzi:

Collecting Art 1 – James Rizzi

Rizzi produced several cookbooks which are massive illustrated with his kind of art. The two best ones are the  Christmas Cookbook (as above) with an inlaid CD contains beautiful Christmas Songs. The second book is  Rizzi’s New York Cookbook (as below), a wonderful collection of Rizzi’s art and the recipes from the well-known chef Peter Bührer.

               

„Yummy Yummy Yummy – I got Love in my Tummy !“ It’s a short Rizzi Song.

My Crazy Teddybear Eat Book.

This is for sure the craziest cookbook I have – it’s crazy because I made it myself, it’s crazy because I called it EAT-book and not COOK-book, it’s crazy because it’s handwritten and hand-drawn, it’s crazy because its started as a Teddybear-Teddybook and ended as a Teddybear-Recipebook and its crazy because it never was sold, just given away. It was made for my grandsons, but in truth, I made it for myself. The book is in full color, contains over 60 recipes on 70 pages and it is completely out of stock.

Here are a few pages to give you an idea, just click on pictures to size up.

Culinary Trip through Germany, from Hannelore Kohl.

This book is written by Hannelore Kohl, the beloved wife of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. I had the honor to meet her once and she was happy to sign her book for me.

It shows the finest overview of typical German dishes out of all 16 German Federal States. This cookbook contains hundreds of recipes and cooking ideas which are German Specials, many of them forgotten in time. Above left the Pfälzer Saumagen, the favorite dish of Helmut Kohl, with which many international guests of the state were spoiled in Germany.

The Prinzregententorte above already points to part 4 of the cookbook series.

A small, but exclusive Cookbook Collection.
Have a look at Part 4.

Yes, folks, we will have a part 4. Sorry, but it is so much to write about, and the 4th part will have in addition some tips for collecting cookbooks. That was a requirement of some friends who like to go on with their cookbook collection, which I fulfill gladly. Please stay tuned to the 4th part and enjoy reading as I enjoy researching and writing.