It may not surprise anyone to hear that Yooper Stewart doesn’t really cook. During our short engagement, he only cooked dinner for me once – Hamburger Helper. I never asked him to cook again. Now I’m not the best cook in the world, but I try. I make as much from scratch as I possibly can, and I try to make sure The Yooper gets three meals a day, complete with fiber, protein, and veggies.

The Yooper’s become accustomed to these meals. They’ve even inspired him. He’s decided that he, too, would like to cook, and once The Yooper decides he wants to do something, he throws himself into it with everything he’s got.

It’s not enough for him to learn how to make a killer mac-n-cheese from scratch (as he’s doing here). He needs to know which cheese is the creamiest, which is the tangiest, and which ones work the best with elbow, curly, and tubular noodles. It’s all about going over-the-top.

To gather this type of information, The Yooper needs resources. I started cooking with the Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book.

That’s not over-the-top enough for The Yooper. It’s not big enough. It can’t possibly hold the recipe to every meal he’s ever eaten, plus each recipe for every meal he might want to eat in the future, should we decide to have suckling pig with a rhubarb glaze served on a bed of ginger-infused wild long grain Ethiopian rice and cumin coated peas. There’s no way you’ll find that recipe in the BH&G, but we might need it.

In an attempt to make sure he can access any recipe when he wants it (without having to log on to his computer), The Yooper started collecting cook books. And magazines. And recipe cards. And fliers. Anything that has a recipe that might possibly interest him has come into my house. Many, many, many of them have gone right back out the door, but dozens (upon dozens) remain.

We have a small collection of cook books in the house, but the real treasures are in the garage.

Here’s The Yooper’s collection of Fine Cooking magazine. As you can see, he has a few. He has an even bigger stack of Cook’s Illustrated. I couldn’t find it, but that’s okay! He also has a few books…

And a few more…

Remember – that’s just the garage. Inside we have my Better Homes & Garden, The Joy of Cooking, Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a Day, Fix-it-and-Forget-it, etc, plus a subscription to Food magazine. We are covered in the cook book department. Please don’t ever feel the need to give us one – we probably already own it…somewhere.

I’m happy that The Yooper has found a hobby to love. I just wish he had more time to practice it, and I’m sure he does, too. Not only is the food always tasty, but so are the breaks.