I love this time of the year!

As holiday shopping looms on the horizon, the big chain bookstores start sending out coupons to their loyal buyers. Since I now have "memberships" with the big chain bookstore and the next biggest chain bookstore, I'm getting lots of coupons...and I feel obligated to use every one of them!

With the same holiday buying in mind, the publishers put out oodles of great cookbooks in the fall months...and I feel obligated to buy as many of them as I can. This is a sampling of recent buys:

Taste of Home: Cookies is truly wonderful. I've been scouring my baking books looking for cookie recipes for my Christmas open house (I try not to repeat cookies because there are so many new recipes I want to try). I brought a pan of the almond truffle brownies to work today--an almond-tinged brownie base with a chocolate/cream cheese layer followed by chocolate icing and a sprinkling of almonds. Yummy.

Pillsbury's Best of the Bake-off Cookbook: recipes from America's favorite cooking contest includes some old favorites and some soon-to-become favorites, like the Chocolate Buttersweets, a sugar cookie with a coconut topping and chocolate frosting. These have made the final list for my open house!

Southern Living Complete Quick & Easy Cookbook is gorgeous! I'm in a rut with my meals so I've been looking for speedy recipes that will be edible over a few days (not too many single-serving recipes out there which is why so many single people live on packaged food). SL's cookbooks are full of beautifully photographed food...very inspiring.

Taste of Home: Dinner on a Dime: 403 budget-friendly family recipes. See above with the advantage of using more every-day ingredients. Also full of great photographs.

Colorado Classique is put out by the Junior League of Chicago. It is their 4th or 5th book, all of them fabulous. Gorgeous photographs of the Rocky Mountains are interspersed with glorious pictures of the food. Great reading when snuggled up with a blanket and a mug of marshmallow-topped hot chocolate.

I saw Good Housekeeping Best-loved Desserts: more than 250 scrumptious recipes at the library and coveted it immediately. I looked in bookstores but never found it. Sigh.... A week ago, it showed up on the remainder tables at biggest chain bookstore and it was the fastest sale they had that day! I can't wait to try almost every recipe in the book!

There are more new books on my cookbook shelves but, to make room, I did a huge weed and donated those books to the winter reading program for adults at my library--they will all go to a good home where they are wanted and used!

I love this time of year!

Christmas is wonderful (as attested to by the three Christmas trees decorating my little condo!) but the best thing about the end of the year is the bonanza of cookbooks available to real addicts like yours truly!

In the last few months, my well-loved and well-thumbed cookbook library has grown. Thanks to the frequent extra 15% off coupons I get from B&N, I have been a cookbook-buying fiend. What better way to spend a cold winter's evening than wrapped in a Rudolph blanket with my nose in a cookbook?

I subscribe to Cook's Country magazine, a less intimidating, more realistic version of the America's Test Kitchen magazine. This year, The Cook's Country cookbook: regional and heirloom favorites tested and reimagined for today's home cooks came out. The only recipe I've tried is Blueberry Boy Bait (a buttery cake with blueberry topping) and it is a keeper, though I still haven't caught a boy....

Nick Malgieri (a chef who looks like he actually eats and enjoys what he prepares) is one of my culinary heroes. This year's book is The modern baker: time-saving techniques for breads, tarts, pies, cakes and cookies, a beautifully illustrated volume with background information on each and every recipe--great reading. I haven't tried anything from this cookbook yet but I will forever be in Nick's debt because of the cornmeal cake which is dense and chewy and heavenly with raspberries!

America's Test Kitchen family baking book brought Caramel cashew Rice Krispy bars into my life--who knew you could improve the perfection of a Rice Krispy bar? There are also Macademia and white chocolate Rice Krispy bars and Almond Joy Rice Krispy bars yet to try!

Southern Living homestyle cookbook (the 2008 edition) provided Cardamom Crunch snack mix which is to be devoured by the handful. Being a proud Swede, I love cardamom (especially in cinnamon bread) and grind my own when needed for a recipe. Yum-o (to quote Rachael Ray).

I've been a follower of Taste of Home magazine since the beginning and have a huge collection of their cookbooks. This year's selection was Taste of Home Christmas Cookies & Candy, full of recipes from real cooks--I've never had a failure with any recipe I've ever tried. I made the coconut macaroons for my Christmas open house and they were delicious. Instead of the usual egg whites (a no-no for a dear friend of mine who loves coconut), these are made with sweetened condensed milk. Chewy and delicious and easy to make, next time I'm going to add a little chocolate to the recipe.

My most recent purchase was Heirloom cooking with the Brass Sisters: recipes you remember and love by Marilynn and Sheila Brass. The Brass Sisters are antique dealers who often found handwritten recipes in the wares they were selling and grew ever more fascinated by what they were finding. Another career was born--they have two cookbooks out and do a PBS cooking show. Their books are fabulous for snuggling under a blanket and reading, with a steaming mug of hot chocolate near at hand. The lemon chicken recipe in this book is really tempting....

Go out and buy a cookbook for someone you love (or for yourself)--they make great presents!