I am entranced by books that give me ideas for every day. (Oh, you'd noticed?) So I immediately ordered Williams-Sonoma's Salad of the Day: 365 Recipes for Every Day of the Year and Soup of the Day, and am considering their One-Pot-of-the-Day matching volume.
Weekly is good too. I am really enjoying the Italian-meal-a-week cookbook by Lisa Caponigri (called for some weird reason Whatever Happened to Sunday Dinner, because I may very well use it another day). It includes an an appetizer, a pasta or soup or grain course, a main course with a side, and then a dessert -- and they all look very manageable because she's not afraid of having some stuff premade and otherwise making things easy. Very nice! And if you don't happen to have a big family or much company over, you'll end up with lovely leftovers for other days of your week.
Another weekly: The Meat-Free Monday Cookbook, done by the McCartneys and some others. It gives generous ideas for every meal of the day, even including both a normal lunch and a packed lunch, and a dessert, and a side or a snack and sometimes both. It's nicely organized by season, and I'm working through each season as they come up.
Lastly, sometimes I like being told what to do minute-to-minute so I get a break from planning! By the (short) time I work through one of Jamie Oliver's amazing menus in his miraculous Jamie's 30-Minute Meals, I have a remarkable meal with no stress.
These cookbooks are finally reteaching me something I'd barely remembered because of my ridiculous number of years in a country with no reliable food supply: One can actually make grocery lists and expect to find most of the stuff! That happened like twice where I used to live. America is a wonderful country! Thank you, grocers and farmers and cookbook writers! You make it possible for me to plan and enjoy wonderful meals.
from a movie I can barely wait to see -- the hobbit-kitchen set of The Hobbit -- with the brilliant director Peter Jackson:
