My friends and family give me cookbooks – for birthdays, anniversaries and Christmases; I’m very happy about that, no complaints at all and by now I have an interesting collection that I like to browse, read or get inspiration from. I still remember the very first cookbook I ever bought, when I was sixteen and had just returned home from some time spent as an exchange student at The George School in Newtown, near Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. While I was there I had developed a serious liking for sweet things like brownies, pancakes and chocolate chip cookies and once home I fully intended to keep eating them, which meant making them myself and since I had no idea about cooking or baking (which wasn’t on the top of my to-do list at that time), I needed a cookbook when buying cookbooks was still uncool and knowledge of american cuisine virtually nonexistent. The book I bought, by the way, is about as tall as my hand is high and about as thick as my index finger and it doesn’t sport a single picture. But it did the trick, anyway. You might say, you can blame it all on the brownies….