Not only am I an unrepentant foodie I'm a pretty decent cook as well. There is no one answer to the question "what is my favorite cookbook" because the answer to that is contextual and very dependent on my mood and goals.

If you want to define "favorite cookbook" by the number of torn, dog eared, and stained pages hands down it would be the first cookbook I ever got on the subject of Cajun/Creole cooking. The book is so worn I don't even remember what the cover (long lost) looks like any more and it has been in my collection for at least twenty five years.

A close second is the hand-written cookbook of family recipes my mother gave my wife when we were married in 1977 which has lots of different splashes of whatever on its pages, some of the pages are falling out. In terms of emotional attachment (after all my now departed mom wrote it out by hand) this cookbook beats all the others in my collection by furlongs

There was a season in my life where I did a lot of cooking for my church where I'd be feeding about 150 people at a time. I was constantly looking for great recipes that made vast quantities, were inexpensive and crowd pleasing. Yes, you can get all three in one recipe. I went from printing recipes I found on the Internet and putting them in three ring binders to more recently using Evernote and Everclip to collect recipes in a series of searchable notebooks. This is by far my favorite method.

More recently I found Ziplist which allows me to clip a recipe from Evernote and then generate a shopping list from that. If I remember correctly Ziplist will also scale a recipe from say "serves 8" to "serves 150 of your closest friends."

I still have a vast collection of cooking magazines that I peruse through in hard copy. If some of the magazines I subscribe to change over to digital format I'll be a very happy guy.

In addition to the magazines I have a vast collection of hard copy cookbooks which emphasize various culinary traditions ranging from good old US country cooking (New England, Deep South, Southwest, etc.) as well as vegetarian cookery and other specialties. My wife has been campaigning to have me get rid of most of them since I more and more go to digital means to find recipes. I still like the tactile feel of a book in my hands so I don't think that is going to happen any time soon.

Hmm.... I took sausage out of the freezer this morning... time to check out Google...