In July, Helen Rosen (@hels), a food writer that I follow on twitter (starting to realize that I love to read about food), wrote an article about the top 10 cookbooks since 2000. One of the books mentioned was ZAHAV by Michael Solomonov, with an honourable mention for the books by Yottam Ottolenghi. I checked the Greater Victoria Public Library site and eagerly put them on hold. Ottolenghi Simple came in first and I devoured it. I read it like a book and quickly made several recipes which I will recap in a later post. When ZAHAV came in I read all the introductions and immediately went out and bought a better quality tahini. I had to return the book before I got a chance to dive in further so I hope to get another chance with that book again soon.

Recently I went to check the books availability again and some of the Ottolenghi books are available as ebooks. There are a lot of different way to view their digital content, so I chose and  downloaded the app for cloudLibrary. I was immediately able to borrow Simple and start rereading it.

At first using cloudLibrary seemed weird because I couldn’t see the entire pages. But once I figured out how to change the text size, it pretty conveniently shifts the spacing across the pages around to make it easy to read at various sizes. The headings can get a little bit messed up when you navigate through the book but overall it’s not too hard to figure out. The tables of contents are clickable so it’s very convenient for navigating through something like a cookbook where you may not read it straight through from the beginning. And the search function is amazing for finding different ingredients being used throughout the book. Not only can you use cloudLibrary to view ebooks, but you can browse the digital catalogue for the GVPL and check books out right there. I do prefer to read most books in hard copy, but for cookbooks, and especially ones that are often unavailable it’s a pretty nice resource.

Yottam Ottolenghi has many cookbooks, so far I like “Simple” because it seems a little more achievable for my life right now. Browsing on cloudLibrary, I also found Zaitoun, a Palestinian cookbook by Yasmin Khan, and I am loving the recipes and reading about different parts of the country. Even though they are ebooks the library only has so many licenses for them, so there are still waits for books that are in demand. But you can make lists of interest and put things on hold the same way you would for a hard copy. Unfortunately there’s no digital version of Zahav yet so I will have to get myself on the hold list again asap.