James Beard Award Winners!

Pulitzer, shmulitzer. The announcement of the James Beard Award winners is a day I look forward to with eager anticipation. They and the IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals) awards are like the National Book Critics Circle Awards and National Book Awards of the culinary world.

So kudos to the Lee Brothers for their Cookbook of the Year and Food of the Americas awards for The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook! It was a good year for them as they won IACP awards in the American Cooking and First Book categories as well. Usually we don't do a big business in cookbooks that focus on Southern cooking (not a lot of requests for Edna Lewis here, more's the pity), but we did sell a handful over the holidays.

Congrats to the folks at W. W. Norton, as they published both the Lee Bros. and James Oseland's Cradle of Flavor which also won awards from both the James Beard Foundation and IACP. Norton doesn't do a lot of cookbooks, but the ones they do are, indeed, excellent.

Lorna Sass won the Healthy Focus award for Whole Grains, Every Day, Every Way which disappointed me as I was rooting for EatingWell Serves Two by Jim Romanoff and the EatingWell folks. It's been my favorite thing in our cooking section for a while (well, one of my favorite things--you can't make me pick one). I make sure to keep that title well-stocked and people have been responding really well to it. It's always so gratifying when your customers agree with you about what's good (even if the James Beard Foundation folks don't).

And a double yippee to Mollie Katzen for her Moosewood Cookbook making the Cookbook Hall of Fame, which is very well deserved. Lesser known of hers, but one of my all-time favorite cookbooks, is Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Cafe, a book full of breakfast and brunch recipes. I am such a sucker for brunch.

All this talk about cookbooks, combined with the fact that I've almost finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is making me super-eager for the farmer's markets to begin. I think my body is sick of the chocolate lunches I've been feeding it lately.