Those Delicious Book Clubs

I was extremely nervous when I was cooking my dish for the first Cooking Book Club at Words Bookstore Café back in June 2014. The chef who created this recipe was going to taste my version of it, and it had to taste good. I literary jumped out of joy when chef Suzanne Husseini, the author of When Suzanne Cooks, said: “Who cooked the Citrus Cauliflower? It’s perfect!”

You can sense the cooking joy when you see the faces of the participants walking in carrying their dishes. Only those who cook would understand the happy feeling you get when you share your food with others, discuss your cooking experience, the difficulty in finding certain ingredients and the challenges you went through while cooking. The amount of information that flows between beginners like me and mature cooks is tremendous. We walk out with great tips, like how to know that the dough is ready to be baked and where to find some uncommon ingredients like nutritional yeast! And after attending two Cooking Book Clubs with Words, I now feel more confident and comfortable when it comes to cooking.

The unique idea behind this Book Club is that Words selects a cookbook and opens the door for registration for a certain number of participants. Each participant has to select a recipe from that book and announces it to the group ahead of time to avoid repetition. The dishes will then be presented at the book club night and participants will enjoy that delicious meal while having a warm discussion about each dish and cooking in general.

It was a pleasure to meet chef Suzanne Husseini, the author of the book that was selected for the first book club. Her passion was felt and seen in the way she was enjoying that experience and interacting with each and every participant while having fun.

True Food by Andrew Weil was selected for the second book club. It was quite challenging as the recipes were healthy and some of the ingredients were not available in the market. That helped in broadening our knowledge since we had to do some research on substitute ingredients and experiment with different substitutes. It was indeed a very cozy evening.

The next book club is in two weeks and I can’t wait to pick a recipe from Make It Ahead: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. I am certain that it’s going to be as enjoyable as the previous two and will be a major highlight in my 2014 diary.

A big thanks goes to Words for providing us with this opportunity and being more than a bookstore or a café. We are proud and lucky to have such a place that is far from being commercial. It is a place where we network, share talents and create memories.

Second Book Club, October 2014