For some in our community, a cookbook is a treat, a pleasure, an amusement to be flipped through like most of us do a coffee-table tome.
Ah, to be a professional chef. No poring over every instruction, no double-checking your ingredient list, no concerns about whether you’ve sifted the flour properly or browned the meat enough.
“I look for pictures,” said Jason Blankenship, owner of Olio Restaurant and Wine Bar in Mancos. “For all the cookbooks I have, I almost never use the recipes.”
Instead, he ganders at the full-color photographs so prevalent in modern cookbooks to see how the chef is presenting the ingredients, what fillip he or she might use to distinguish a dish.
He particularly likes the cookbooks put out by famed Chicago restaurateur Charlie Trotter.
“I love those because they were impossible for anyone to work out of but beautiful to look at,” he said. “They help me see things in a different way.”
