Debi Morris - Bio
My love affair with cookbooks started when, as a young girl, I discovered my older sister’s copy of Betty Crocker’s Cook Book for Boys and Girls. I went through it page by page countless times, mesmerized by words like sift, blend, chop and mince. I fell in love with the pictures of Pigs in Blankets, Painted Cookies, and Raggedy Ann Salad.
What child wouldn’t fall in love with these?
As a teenager, I looked through cookbooks while my friends browsed through fashion magazines. I could hardly wait for my mother to finish reading her monthly copies of The Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping so I could look through the recipe sections. It was a regular ritual of mine to go through my mother’s recipe box, old notebooks from early in her marriage where she had pasted recipes from magazines, and cookbooks. Before I left home I meticulously copied every recipe from her box onto 3 x 5” index cards for my own recipe box.
As an adult, I started collecting cookbooks. When I became a bookseller for an independent chain of bookstores in the Chicago area in the early ‘90s, my collection started growing at an alarming rate. For the past five years or so, I have made it my project to try at least one recipe from every cookbook I own (no small task at over 200 and counting). I started posting my results on what started as a knitting blog (my other passion) but has gradually been taken over by food. Reviewing cookbooks for Foodbound seems like the perfect next step for me.
