Confession of a Recipe Collector

I have a confession to make; I have a weakness for cookbooks. I always have. My collection goes way back to my pre-marriage times. In fact my first cookbook I ordered from the grade school book club and was titled “The Peanuts Cookbook”, as in Charlie Brown. I still have it along with the several church cookbooks from my bridal shower.   Apparently I’m not alone in my fetish for recipes. The famous Pendleton Roundup in Oregon has put together a centennial cookbook which includes 100 years of recipes. The team of volunteers who put the cookbook together was pleasantly surprised by the overwhelming response to their request for recipes from 1910 to 2010. With nearly 800 recipes to sort through and taste test the job of organizing the cookbook was no small feat indeed. To top it all off they even managed to have recipes submitted by a celebrity or two and a foreword written by the irrepressible Reba McEntire. Sure makes my “Charlie Brown” cookbook pale in comparison. Still, they should look just fine together on my kitchen shelf.