Day 4: Black Bean Chilaquile

I was too tired to type when I got home from work last night, so here is last night's entry.

I am a book person. I love them, and I have a lot of them. I have a bookshelf full of children's books in the guest bedroom even though my kids are grown. I have a full set of the "classics" given to me by a favorite aunt and uncle, all the books from my french literature class at college, two shelves of books on Jewish topics, and lots of paperbacks (including the full Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovitch).  I have forty-seven cookbooks on a little blue bookshelf in my kitchen, a dozen more on the top shelf of one of the cabinets and six or seven more that I never use (but can't seem to part with) on a shelf upstairs (in the guest bedroom with the children's books).

Everyone tells me that books are obsolete. I know I could put more books on one of the new electronic readers than I have on every bookshelf in my house. I know I can find just about every recipe in every cookbook I own somewhere on the web, but I like books. I can't part with the books I read to my son and my daughter in the rocking chair, I really do re-read the books I love every once and a while (have I mentioned my notoriously bad memory? Sometimes it's like reading them again for the first time).  I love to read the inscription that tells about the typeface, I love the way a new book smells, I love the way a book feels in my hands.

I have a lovely wrought-iron cookbook stand and when I cook from a recipe I prop the book up on the stand. My kids bring their laptops into the kitchen, put the recipe up on the screen, play some music from their i-tunes library, and look up the definitions for cooking terms they're not familiar with. I'm not there yet. I'm stubbornly old fashioned, yes, and I don't have laptop. Instead, I have two college educated children and four cars. Maybe by the time I can afford to buy the laptop, I will be ready to give up the cookbook on the pretty wrought iron stand...maybe I'll get a Kindle too.

The long awaited point here is that I followed a recipe for last night's dinner. I made Black Bean Chilaquile from the MooseWood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites cookbook. Of course the recipe is available on the web (http://www.food.com/recipe/black-bean-chilaquile-43471 - here's one place, I'm sure you can find more). I used spinach from this week's CSA share, CSA corn I froze in August, Garden of Eatin' baked tortilla chips and low-fat instead of fat free cheddar. I used store-bought salsa. I took the chilaquile out of the oven just as I was leaving for work; took my portion with me and re-heated it in the microwave a couple of hours later, it was a little jumbled together but tasty. The family verdict was that I should make it again sometime - and I can do that - because I pretty much followed the recipe for once.