Big Little Recipes Cookbook, by Emma Laperruque

Perfect for sopping up the last bite

Today: Tom takes a long, hard look at his stack of cookbooks. I used to read a lot of cookbooks. Not in the literary sense; no, I simply read them for the recipes and then tossed them back onto the stack. I feel guilty about this past -- whenever I read a novel I usually skip all the preliminary stuff too. No preface, no foreword, no nothing. I go right to chapter one, or in the case of a cookbook, the first recipe. When one of the first novels I remember reading gave away the story in the first few pages of the foreword, I distinctly remember thinking, "I won't do that again." So it has become habit to just skip to chapter one.

Do you use the Hotline? If you haven't been lately, you're missing out -- between discussions about porcini mushrooms and wild yeast levain, questions about FOOD52 recipes, and suggestions for making a super chicken-y roast chicken pan gravy, it's a lively place. Here are our top 5 Hotline questions of the week.