Books and Chocolate Chip Cookies

Found myself making a trip to the library last night. I ended up borrowing so many heavy books that I could barely even carry them back to the car. I needed a luggage or shopping trolley to cart them back! With the library closing at 9pm, I really didn't have much time to slowly deliberate, so randomly grabbed piles of books from different sections. The top ones are romance novels by Jude Deveraux, one of my favourite authors along with James Patterson. James Herbert is probably a better writer but I didn't see any of Herbert's books. The Ten Trillion Dollar Gamble is a book about the downfall of Wall Street and hypothesising about America's future. The Barefoot Investor is rather popular in Australia so I thought I'd have a read to see what the fuss is all about. Find It, Buy It, Fix It is a real estate book about renovating because I'll probably be doing some renovations in the near future. Female Entrepreneurs sounded interesting. Grow Herbs...well I've always loved gardening and am always looking to learn more about everything. Sunday Roast, The Country Table and The Food and Cooking of Vietnam and Cambodia are cookbooks.

With a name like mine, there's no disguising my Asian background. Although I've never mentioned it before, I'm an Australian Cambodian. My family migrated to Australia as refugees. Maybe someday soon I'll write about that part and how we can to be Australian citizens instead of French citizens. That's why I was excited to finally see a Cambodian cookbook that has pictures of food that my beautiful mum cooks. It was only earlier in the week that I stumbled across an American Cambodian blogger, blogging about Khmer/Cambodian food recipes.

Much as I love finance/accounting/economics, I also love food, cooking, gardening, outdoorsy stuff, snowboarding and plenty of other stuff and can only blog regularly if I make blogging detours. Anyhoo, whilst on the subjects of books and cooking, this is the cookbook section of the cupboard:

Recipes from friends, newspaper or magazines are filed into the ring binder folders in plastic sleeves as Entrees, Mains, Desserts and Favourites. With the books and magazines, I tag the recipes I plan to try so that I don't have to keep flicking through all the time. It's more inspiring to pick one up and see which one was on your to-try-cooking-wish-list.

Last weekend, I baked Salted Chocolate Chip Cookies from Stonesoup's recipe. I failed to salt them haha ..but they still tasted wickedly, deliciously good even without the salt. Good quality dark chocolate is KEY. I used 50% cocoa Lindt dark chocolate. The higher the cocoa content, the bitterer the chocolate. My baking efforts yielded GINORMOUS cookies about 9cm in diameter ;p~~