New Cookbooks and the Feast Day Recipe Binder

I mentioned that during my Lenten seclusion I began to compile all the recipes I use most from the cookbooks I own and the Pinterest page I have into one easy reference manual. I’m in my 40s now and cannot remember all these different recipes, or where to find them, anymore...I’m lucky if I can remember the feast day itself between the children and all their activities. For example last year when I finally got around to doing something special for St. Joan of Arc’s Day I went through Mr. W’s Glorious French Food by James Peterson and discovered a recipe of sorts for a St. Joan salad. So that goes in my binder.

After exhausting all of our cookbooks for recipes I decided to fill in some days, and cuisines, with books com the library. T-Bone, my future movie maker, is the assistant director for the school play and on rehearsal days I keep the other two occupied with trips to the library. ‘Catholic cookbooks’ doesn’t yield much in a card catalog search, but I was able to find a couple that were available at the branch. Oaxaca al Gusto by Diana Kennedy has a few recipes specifically for Lent, Corpus Christi, etc., but the bulk of it is more of a documentation of ancient recipes and obscure ingredients lest the become lost to history. The other available book was Secrets of the Red Lantern by Pauline Nguyen. I’d like to start honoring Our Lady of La Bang and thought this might be a good starting point. From a quick perusal I could tell it had family stories intermixed with recipes which I love! It turns out the family is actually Buddhist rather than Catholic so while there are no recipes that are tied specifically to any saint or holiday I am loving the narrative within about the family’s escape from Vietnam and the journey to rebuild in Australia.

One of the books that wasn’t available at the branch was Celebraciones Mexicanos by Andrea Lawson and Adriana Almazán Lahl. For years I have been looking for a cookbook of Mexican cuisine that is similar to my go to cookbook Italian Holiday Cooking by Michele Scicolone and this  book looked like it might finally be the one. So I took a risk and bought a copy rather than waiting for a library copy to become available. It recently arrived and I am so happy with it! It is exactly what I was hoping it would be. The recipes are even arranged according to the liturgical calendar starting with Our Lady of Guadalupe! How perfect is that?!