Random Recipes - my Cook Book Shelves

This is a fun and easy challenge set by Belleau Kitchen who has made the normal monthly challenge of cooking a recipe chosen at random into lets blog about the cook book shelves that you are picking your random recipes from.

I have a quite a few books scattered around and to help with remembering what I have I use both the Librarything website and more recently  Eat Your Books. Librarything is good for tagging where you are actually stored each book(if you have a system). 

We used to live in a 1930's house with high ceilings and loads of storage space. Now we are in a smaller 1960s bungalow with way less wall space and cupboards and the book storage has reached overflow but there are still so many books I want to buy so soon something will have to give.

Apologies for the photo quality, in too many you cannot actually make out what the book titles are but you may recognise them anyway if you have them.

I will start in the kitchen where I keep a small range of books on a shelf that was originally was dedicated to new purchases but that system has gone out the window and it is all a bit random now. The pottery owl is called Morse and he was made by a talented potter in County Durham.

Now moving into the study room (which is also our spare bedroom). I have tried to keep this shelf dedicated to baking and chocolate work. 

The organisation breaks down now but there are pockets of order with Christmas, and Jewish cuisine books on top and India lower down. To the right I store most of my America books.

A zoom in to get more of the titles.

On the other side of the room I share a shelf with my OH who collects stamps and has many of these in highly organized stamp album binders. So in the blurred photo below that shelf of red binders are for stamps.

Just to the right are some more cook books including my collection of Food of the World series.

Now we come to one of the floor stacks, books acquired since the shelf space ran out.

And here is the another floor stack. Just behind the stack in a box with a purple lid are my Gourmet magazines and a couple of recipe ring binders.

These two weighty tomes are hiding under the chair. Both come from charity shops and I have them for historical value more than anything. These would have been books of the trade when I was young and I remember a chef friend buying the Buffets & Receptions book to help with a new job hey had taken, this was a while ago, British cuisine has moved on! 

Now for the small stack.

Moving out of the study/bedroom into the hall we glance up at the loft hatch as I have a few books up there too. These are mainly the 1970's cooking for your freezer and 1980s how to cook in a microwave types. The ones you still see in Charity shops as people like me run out of space and ditch them first.

Now moving into a utility room/cupboard I have a few shelves of books that have little organisation to them but I just about find stuff when I need it

The shelf shown below also has some of my chocolate packaging stuff hence the dangling ribbon.

Still in the utility 'cupboard' a few more cook books with some gardening to keep them company.

And while we mention agrdening I have a few but not many books in the garden shed too.

Hope you have enjoyed the tour! belleaukitchen will be doing a round up very soon and bellau's own contribution to the challenge is here