Serious Eats New York - newyork.seriouseats.com

Heidi Swanson's Super Natural Cooking - always inspires me to cook healthy and delicious meals!

it's out of print, but Mark Strausman's THE CAMPAGNA TABLE got me cooking without recipes for the first time. I used to recommend it to everybody when they could actually find it.

I always end up going back to Joy of Cooking...

Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann's The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook - a must for anyone who loves rice in all forms!

Madhur Jaffrey's memoir, Climbing the Mango Trees. Reading it makes me hungry and then the recipes in the back are divine, clear, easy to follow (although hardly simple) and produce delicious results... not to mention they leave you with a perfumed kitchen!

the first cookbook i got (i only started cooking recently, about 2 yrs ago when i finished school) was barefoot in paris. ok, not the BEST cookbook but i like it a lot and i've made most of the recipes from there, more than once. plus it was my first one! my mom even me to get her the book :)

Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman. I used to read it on the subway.

Roast Chicken and Other Stories by Simon Hopkinson

How to Cook a Wolf - MFK Fisher!

Joy of Cooking!

The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook encouraged me to start with the basics and develop. In true Ina fashion, I began by serving a 4th of July raspberry trifle to my Hamptons guests, and gradually built up to pink peppercorn rack of lamb. She bestows so much of her personality and enthusiasm for food in the pages of her cookbooks, motivating and inspiring readers.

It all started with "I'm Just Here for the Food by" Alton Brown! ... now, I'm going to the French Culinary Institute... dang you, Alton!!! :-D

"Food You Want to Eat" by Ted Allen (of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy fame)! It's exactly what it says on the cover, filled with great photos and helpful hints for people who usually don't cook (like I was when I first got the book)

Fast Food by Gordon Ramsay

Although by now it's more of a history book than a working blueprint for recipes, La bonne cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange is *the* French cuisine cookbook. Even Julia herself thought so!

Quick & Easy Indian Cooking

The Break Baker's Apprentice - I just bought the book recently, but I've never been so excited about a new cookbook before!

Dorie Greenspan's Baking From My Home to Yours. It's hard to improve on Dorie, but her book gave me the confidence to have fun with my own adaptations and tweaks. Every recipe I've tried has been a hit!

My mom, over the years, have written down her recipes of Chinese family dishes. I've never seen any other book or restaurant with this type of food. I treasure that book!

While I may receive significant flack for this, I really don't care. The first cookbook I ever truly was fascinated by and found myself reading from cover to cover was Amanda Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latte. Her column in the Times Magazine is what introduced me to being engaged and interested in food. Before her, I never knew it could be glamorous, or interesting, or even exotic. It excited me to the point where I decided to explore others, and was later led to Marion Cunningham, Jacques Pepin, Mark Bittman, Molly Wizenberg, Holly Swanson, and yes, even Julia Child. But it all started with Amanda - and that book with the cute pink cover and kitschy line drawings. Without it, I wouldn't even be reading this blog.

the silver palate cookbook! it was always a staple in my house growing up and I would spend hours pouring over the desserts section, begging my mom to buy ingredients so I could make this and that. I still make those brownies. The best!

Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone - Deborah Madison....it certainly inspired me to eat better and cook for myself through college!

This year, it has been Mollie Katzen's The Vegetables I Can't Live Without. I am consistently excited by vegetables now, and am cooking more often and more healthily than ever before. It's the perfect accompaniment to my first CSA share purchase. So far, I've made 16 of the recipes (I've got another one planned for tonight's dinner), and only one has fallen short of spectacular. Even better, my experience cooking from it has encouraged and inspired me to new heights of flavor in other recipes and off-the-cuff cooking. Hooray!

My mother's composition notebooks. Lots of ideas and inspiration in those pages.

The Moosewood Cookbook was the first cookbook I ever used. It helped me gain confidence in trying new things once my kitchen was my own. But my mother's and grandmother's index card recipes, handwritten or typed, are the ones that make me weep remembering such delicious food made time and time again by loving hands.

Harumi's Japanese Cooking by Harumi Kurihara. She makes Japanese home cooking approachable and easy!

I love the America's Test Kitchen cookbooks; they try several versions of each recipe so that the result is the best recipe. They also explain all sorts of "basic" things that I wouldn't know otherwise

I know it's a cliche by now, but Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything - though he doesn't know it, Mark taught me how to cook a vegetable, the best way to roast a chicken, and most importantly, that you don't have to be afraid of fish. And his apple pie recipe is still the only one that suits my palate, and I make it every year for Rosh Hashana.

The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Chocolate by Christine McFadden & Christine France. I saw it in the store when I was a kid and couldn't stop looking at the pictures. My mom bought it for me and I haven't stopped baking since.

Real Simple Cookbook. Seriously good food, and ridiculously easy. Complicated recipes rarely inspire me to cook- they inspire me to screw cooking dinner and order a pizza.

How to Be a Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson. It makes food sound so yummy, homey and not that difficult.

The Gourmet Cookbook has got me cooking more things than any other book I own.

How it All Vegan by Tanya Barnard and Sarah Kramer. Though I am not vegan, just vegetarian this book showed me great, delicious, east recipes that will please veggies and meat eaters alike.

molto italiano and the babbo cookbook by batali. i love making the pasta dishes in there.

a lot of his stuff takes better if you make it one day and serve it the next - like sauces and caponatas - so the flavors have time to come together.

i definitely always end up back at my first cookbook, jamie's kitchen.

The Betty Crocker Cookbook knows what's up.

I grew up cooking out of my mother's Moosewood cookbooks, particularly Sundays at Moosewood.

Right out of college I relied heavily on Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone -- it was great for basic techniques and there's something about her tone that is really appealing.

How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman! Gives you the nuts and bolts of basic cooking and ingredients as well as more advanced recipes.

How to Cook Everything

Also, How to Cook Everything by Bittman. Simple, straightforward and useful.

The Moosewood cookbooks, the Silver Palate cookbooks, Joy of Cooking, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone and Joy of Cooking.

Betty Crocker's Cookbook-- the ultimate classic!

A Taste of India,by Madhur Jaffrey...when I was a freelance artist,and had time on my hands,I did cook my way through this book,learning a lot about ingredients that were totally new to me,and about regional foods from home cooks of all strata.A charming book,now falling apart,and there wasn't a dish that wasn't at least fairly delicious.

charlie trotter cookbooks

How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. It's detailed, informative and has inspired me to really learn the basics of cooking so that I can cook for myself instead of just getting take-out every night (as is all too easy to do in NYC).

Butterfingers, a small cookbook from the families in my grandmother's synagogue. Great, old-time Jewish food that is simple and delicious every time :)

Marcella Hazan, the doyenne of Italian cooking, esp. Marcella's Italian Kitchen

Red White and Green by Faith Willinger

Charcuterie by Ruhlman. Just made the best bacon I've ever had. I may turn our extra bedroom into a temperature controlled room to hang/dry/cure meats.

cooking with Delia...her things are so yummy....not for the non- cooker

The Frugal Gourmet cooks with our Immigrant Ancestors. It's not a culinary masterpiece but as a child's introduction to varied world cuisines it's a great simple introduction. It touched me, and not in the way the Frugal got in trouble for touching children.

Joy of Cooking

Better Homes and Garden Cookbook, my first cookbook.

My first cookbook was a Unicef Cookbook for children with recipes from around the world. I tried most of them (to varying results) but it was so fun!

A Homemade Life. Molly Wizenberg's stories remind me of how food is meant to be enjoyed with others. The recipes are simple, fun and delicious. I like to share Molly's stories with my friends before we start eating, knowing the details behind the recipe always make the food taste just that much better.

BAKED! gotta love my sweets! :)

simple to spectacular

Cook with Jamie by Jamie Oliver! His exotic combination of flavors for simple everyday dishes has transformed our family's meals!

An honoray mention is A Homemade Life (&the Orangette food blog) by Molly Wizenberg. Her weaving of true life stories and meals brings food to another level!

culinary art: recipes from great chicago restaurants by thomas fredrickson. the book is out of print and so are some of the restaurants where the recipes are from... but the recipes are timeless... since 1995 i have been preparing these dishes...

bread bakers apprentice
you can survive on bread alone

Nigella Lawson - Nigella Bites

The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen by Grace Young
For its authentic recipes and techniques, as well as demystifying certain ingredients

My grandmother's cookbook, which is a collection of her own recipes as well as others she's cooked and tweaked to make her own throughout the years

Better Homes & Gardens New Cook Book, my mom used hers all the time and now that I'm away from home I use the one she bought for me! just the classics : )

The James Beard Cookbook ~ my very first cookbook from which I learned that there was more to cooking than my mother's standard operating procedure of putting a hunk of meat under the broiler, plopping frozen vegies into pots of boiling water, and pitching potatoes into the oven to bake.

The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen by Grace Young. The dishes really tastes like the ones I had growing up.

An autographed copy of Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook. One evening after a school dance, friends descended on my parent’s home and one of them piped up, “Where’s the eggs benedict?” I popped into the kitchen and shortly produced something resembling poached eggs with Hollandaise. (One egg never made it past the side of the stove.) From that first effort, I prepared several other winning recipes like Knockwurst in beer. Fast forward 15 years and dozens of other cookbooks and I am co-author of Passport to New York Restaurants and auction correspondent for Wine Spectator.

Urban Italian: Simple Recipes and True Stories from a Life in Food, by Andrew Carmellini. I'm a vegetarian, but there are still plenty of recipes for me to try. I repeatedly take it out of the library. Please, someone buy me this book for Christmas!

The French Chef, of course! When we were married 38 years ago, my husband-to-be's next door neighbor gave us a Swing Way can opener and a copy of The French Chef. I have been using both all these years, but the French Chef has many more miles on it. I was 19, had never cooked and knew back then, in a very un-feminist way, that the way to a man's heart was through his stomach. It worked! I love this book and always will.

For years I went to Martha's Vineyard in August and entertained
using a cookbook I bought at a local bakery--Scottish Bakehouse
Cookbook by Isabella White. I used it until the pages came unglued
and put a rubberband around it. Julia inspired me to just use a
cookbook as a starting point and create your own style. Thanks, Elaine