February 2014 cookbook review

I have a large variety of cookbooks.  I collect all kinds.  I have a few by famous chefs, a few by celebrity chefs, a few that are more off beat, some serious, some educational, some new, some 'antique', some with sentimental value because they belonged to my grandmother, some themed cookbooks. 

The cookbook that I am reviewing today is  a cookbook that around here is known as a 'church cookbook'.  I have quite a few of this type of cookbook.  They are all pretty similar in that they almost always have a paperback cover and a spiral type binding holding the pages together.  They rarely have pictures of any of the foods, no glossy pages with foods artfully arranged by food stylists.  These cookbooks are always a collection of recipes contributed by a group.  The group might be the ladies of a congregation, hence the nickname 'church cookbook'.  But they could also be some other group.  I have cookbooks published by an elementary school and a nursing home.  Sometimes they are a group raising funds for a cause.  I have a cookbook published by a Relay For Life chapter and an Eastern Star chapter and I recently contributed some of my recipes to a cookbook being put together to benefit ALS.  And sometimes they promote a region.  My mom knows that I love cookbooks and between us we have purchased three copies of the Wall Drug cookbook.  One more trip to Rapid City South Dakota and I will have enough copies for myself and each of my children.

The cookbook that I am reviewing today is one of those regional cookbooks.  My younger daughter spent her college years at Kansas State.  Go Cats! And adjacent to the campus is a six square block business district known as Aggieville.   It is the oldest shopping district in Kansas.  It is a great collection of bars, restaurants and shops.  Before K State was the Wildcats it was the Aggies and the name stuck.  You can read about Aggieville on Wikipedia and a quick Google search finds 82,000+ hits.  While on one of our visits to campus I purchased a cookbook published with recipes contributed by the merchants of Aggieville. 

Aggieville Appetites has on its cover a photo of Varneys bookstore in Aggieville.  The cover is edged in Wildcat purple and it has 250 pages of recipes.  There is a nice recipe index at the back of the book and the dividers between the chapter contain black and white photos of Aggieville. 

I have perused the cookbook and have a list of great looking recipes to try.  I look forward to sharing them over the next year.