great photos and interesting flavors help with inspiration -- I reach for those books when I feel like I'm in a rut with what I'm making for dinner. Finally, you can tell the successful cookbooks in any home -- it's the one that you tried to steal from your mother when you left for college (she actually found me my own copy in a junk shop because I needed the same edition she had) and its one that has pages stuck together from actually being used in the kitchen. I think the best -- or most successful -- cookbook you have is the one you use. For years, my wife and I had recipes handwritten on index cards from our grandmothers (and one great-grandmother), newspaper clippings with Mom's annotations, and plain notebook paper with recipes hand-copied from god-knows-where -- all held inside the cover of an old Betty Crocker hardcover with a couple of rubberbands. It just got to be overwhelming with the eventual addition printouts from the internet. For the past year I've been typing all of these 'family' recipes -- as well as new ones that we have in our regular weeknight menu rotations -- for our kids. One of them is heading off to college in the fall, and is expecting to take a printed copy with him. The nice thing is that I can explain why and how we used certain ingredients or techniques, and it's targeted directly at the readers: family members. Of course, new