One cookbook too many...

I like cookbooks; they're entertainment for me. For example, Gordon Nelson's Lowbush Moose (And Other Alaskan Recipes) is a wonderful collection of stories of places and people in Alaska, and the recipes that bring them to mind. The Rocky Mountain Wild Foods Cookbook neatly avoids the problem of so many other edible plant guides by providing ways to make what you find into a tasty dinner, not just a handful of munchies on a hike or survival "Eugh! This is why we domesticated all the alkalines out of our salad greens!" rations.

Hank Shaw's Buck Buck Moose is an excellent collection of recipes to make hooved wild game delicious (and I like supporting him, after all the years he's put into more stories, ruminations, explanations, philosophies and recipes on his website.)

And then there's the cookbooks I go to often for recipes. The first is Prof Noakes' Real Meal Revolution, which is the fruit of two South African ultramarathoners taking on ketogenic lifestyle and cooking. The recipes are a healthy version of the food my darling man loves, and tasty enough it's worth the trouble of translating grams, Celcius, and courgettes into American english. Then there's Dana Carpender's 1000 low-carb recipes. (Best one-star review ever on Amazon: "This is just a compilation of all the best of her prior cookbooks!" Yeah, that sold me!) And Stephanie O'Dea's More Make It Fast, Cook It Slow.

Unfortunately, I just got another cookbook... and when I went to put it on the shelf, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. The poor thing collapsed, and wiped out the next shelf down, flooding cookbooks and reference books everywhere across the floor. Just because it's going on 20 years old, and has been disassembled and reassembled across at least 4 moves...

Off to to our itty bitty town hardware store for some brackets, and busting out the cordless drill! (Itty Bitty Town's hardware store is staffed by a couple old guys who are masters of jerry-rigging, and a couple high school kids whose farm boy origins mean they're pretty possessing of clue despite their age. They can't compete with Big Box Store in the nearby city on price or selection, but they're masters at suggesting which duct tape and how to rig the bailing wire, and completely unflappable when someone comes in with pajama bottoms, bathrobe, and urgent need for some plumbing bit.) I cleaned them out of their inch and a half brackets, and couldn't resist a magnetic retrieval tool on the way out. (Vision of where a screw might end up with feline assistance were dancing in my brain.)

By the time my darling man and I were finished, both shelves aren't going to move until the entire structure gives way. And the cats only got a little stepped on. And... I reluctantly thinned out a stack of books I'm not going to re-read, and cookbooks I'm not going to use again because I've gotten the one or two good recipes I use memorized. (They're lovely books, but too high-carb for us, now.)

I shouldn't be eyeing the empty space and contemplating my next cookbook... but Hank Shaw's Duck Duck Goose is calling my name...