Meal Plan Monday: Cookbooks!

Last week's menu was a two-weeker, so you might think I have nothing to say today. But you'd be wrong!

I have quite the little cookbook collection. I'm not a terribly creative chef and prefer to use a recipe, but I also find I get bored doing the same thing over and over again. So I like to mix things up.

When I plan my menu, I like to grab two or three cookbooks to work from over the next two weeks. This, coupled with my handy dandy monthly notebook that I fill with magazine clippings and print outs of seasonal ideas I want to try, usually gets me through two weeks of planning.

These are the cookbooks I used for the first two weeks of February.
The big brown book is The Parenting Cookbook by Kathy Gunst and the editors of Parenting Magazine. I first browsed this cookbook at a friend's house, and was impressed with the recipes. It has a great combination of kid-friendly recipes and healthy ingredients. We made the molasses cookies today for afternoon snack and they were a big hit!

Next we have A Continual Feast by Evelyn Birge Vitz. I love this book for seasonal recipes to celebrate the church year. The recipes for Lent and Easter are especially good. You can find recipes for the liturgical year as well as the major feasts and festivals of the Christian year as well as recipes specific to various saints' days.

Finally this week I have been cooking from a vintage cookbook, The New Parents' Magazine Family Cookbook. While I deeply despise Parents Magazine, this 1970s cookbook fascinates me. Some of the recipes are quirky and the have some odd ideas about what children will eat and a disturbing propensity to use shortening in unexpected places. Still, there are some gems to be found.

I'd love to hear what you're cooking from this week!