Do you know what we really don’t care about but have to pretend, for your sake, like we do? Cookbooks. They are all over the broadsheets in their dozens. Maybe one day we’ll understand why the internet and its zillions of free recipes (and YouTube guides!) are insufficient for our cooking needs, but not today.
• The Printer’s Row Book Fair this weekend will host a whole mess of cookbook-related displays and activities, featuring a roster of Chicago chefs [Tribune]
• Cookbooks for your children, in case you didn’t get enough of the Seinfeld undercover vegetable psy-ops campaign from a couple of months ago [Sun-Times]
• What you should do with all your unused recipes, including getting them bound into a cookbook that you can give away as a gift (no, please don’t!), and also, an exploration of recipe-collection-as-compulsive hoarding [Tribune]
• That article has a million sidebars with suggestions for bored, twitchy suburban moms like “Affix recipes to food-themed papers at craft and stationery stores” [Tribune]
• Also, there’s a cookbook that teaches you how to use tagines, cataplanas, and other unfamiliar cookware from around the globe [Tribune]
Other (old) news not related to cookbooks and recipes:
• Foie gras is back! And being served at various restaurants! [Sun-Times]
• People actually eat octopus, apparently. How barbarous! [Sun-Times]
• Local cake decorating school and company celebrating its 80th birthday; in this case, the oldness is the news [Tribune]
[Photo: baby octopus at Riva, because as we’ve said many times, everything is better in baby form, via hatesscreennames/flickr]
