Lindsey Nair

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Recipes

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Today's recipe: Shrimp and grits

Boy, the area foodies really came out of the pantry after last week's plea for help.

Blacksburg resident Jim Armstrong had asked for advice on cookbooks and magazines. Newly retired, he envisioned having dinner all ready and waiting when his wife came home from work but needed help pulling it off.

By 10 a.m. last Wednesday, my in-box was already full of ideas for him. Cooks love sharing recipes as much as they enjoy feeding people.

Especially when it's for such a noble cause. As one reader noted, "Got to hand it to anyone who wants to make life easier for the working woman!"

The query sent Roanoke's Jeff Fletcher perusing the cookbooks of his favorite food writer, A.D. Livingston, whose treatises on grilling, cast-iron skillet-frying and cooking with venison and sausage caused Fletcher to drool happily down the memory lane of meats he has known and loved.

Of an oyster-venison jambalaya inspired by a recipe in Livingston's "Sausage," Fletcher recalled: "The meal would have been outstanding even if the moon and stars had not been in proper alignment and the beer had not been as icy as it was one Saturday night in October several years back."

Several readers recommended that old wedding gift standby, Irma Rombauer's "The Joy of Cooking," for everything from roasting a turkey to making soup from a snapping turtle.

They all cautioned, though: The old edition of "Joy" out-cooks the new edition any day. (Go to bookfinder.com if you're having trouble finding the original.)

Penny Finn said she's used it to figure out substitutions -- what to use when you're elbow-deep in flour and just realized you're out of baking powder. "You can learn why you knead bread to make it fine-grained and tender, but why over-stirring biscuits makes them tough," she wrote.

Whereas "Joy" used to be her wedding gift of choice, now Maxine Fraade gives Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" to newly marrieds. "I swear by it ... as the best all-around book to learn how to cook for the novice."

A co-worker had just Xeroxed a killer-looking recipe for cranberry-pecan pie from Taste of Home magazine for me when Gerry Minter of Daleville wrote to recommend that publication, along with Quick Cooking magazine -- both of which Minter described as good-but-not-necessarily-gourmet.

Other reader-submitted magazines and Web sites:

Fine Cooking (Taunton Press), especially its multiple-choice feature: "Use two or three of these seasonings in the broth," for instance.

The magazine Cuisine at home, especially its section on reader-submitted tips and techniques. Debbie Franco passes every issue around to her co-workers.

Former innkeeper Trudy Randolph included Cook's Illustrated on her list of must-haves. Mary Ann Sullivan of Salem likewise praised it, adding: "I've been cooking for years and thought I knew everything, but this actually has new information and tips in it."

Mary Asma buys Gourmet, Bon Appetit and Saveur at a discount price through Mag4cheap.com. She also recommended virtualcities.com/ons/recipe.htm for recipes from restaurants and bed and breakfasts.

And Mike Snyder recommended "Julia's Kitchen Wisdom, Essential Techniques and Recipes from a Lifetime of Cooking," by Julia Child.

Snyder ended his note with the perfect sentiment: "From another husband who does all the cooking, bon appetit!"

"Crap" was the word my friend Dotsy used to describe a recipe I ran recently for a coffee cake called blueberry kuchen. Another reader wrote to suggest that it was a perfect waste of 2 cups of blueberries.

Them's fighting words, was my first reaction. But truth be told, that was the first reader-offered recipe that I hadn't tasted before publishing -- and I apologize for the lapse. Bells should've gone off when I noticed the recipe called for vegetable oil instead of butter.

You'll find butter aplenty in the above recipe, which I cobbled together after tasting the best shrimp and grits of my life at the outdoor ground-breaking celebration for the new Art Museum of Western Virginia, cooked by the fine chefs at Alexander's.

Afterward, I sent my husband to Capt'n Paul's Seafood and I went home to my copy of "The Gift of Southern Cooking," by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock.

What resulted was a twist on that book's Shrimp Paste and Old-Fashioned Creamy Grits recipes -- and a supper that garnered thumbs-ups all around.