Who can smell the aroma of baking cookies already?!?
With months of delicious scents upon us, along with the intense colors of the season, it is time to get going in the kitchen. There are multitudes of recipes for main dishes, side dishes, desserts, drinks, and what-have-you’s to be made in celebration of life and the holidays.
Start here, at your dearest ever-reliable Library, with a list of online resources and courses that can help push you in the right direction.
You can find recipes and ideas galore in RBdigital which provides a wide selection of digital magazines. This resource is accessible through our Library’s website, under the Collections / Resources A-Z page or under the Digital Collections page.
For this blog’s theme, most of the relevant content are tucked under the genres labeled Food & Cooking, Health & Fitness, Home & Garden, Lifestyle, and Women. Examples of titles that you can check out are 100 Best Cookies, Food Network Magazine, Bon Appetit, Cook’s Illustrated, Cook’s Country, Eating Well, All Recipes, Saveur, Cooking with Paula Deen, Foodie, Gluten-Free Living, Taste of Home, Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, The Beer Connoisseur, Martha Stewart Living, and Diabetic Living. And that’s just a few of the magazines available through RBdigital!
Flip through these pages via your desktops or mobile devices, and surely you’ll find something appealing to make!
And if you make ’em, they will come. “Om, nom nom nom” cookies for everyone! Who knows? Maybe this time, the eaters of cookies will become interested in joining the makers of cookies, pies and more.
“But how?”, says one who does not have a clue what to do in the baking, cooking, and mixing of it all. To which the kitchen rockstar might respond: “Everybody starts with that question! Then they take lessons.” When this opportunity to learn — or opportunity to teach — comes up with the conversations and activities of the season, you can turn to your resource-full Library.
How about signing up with Universal Class? You can take the online courses, in your own place, at your convenience, at your own pace. The course catalog can be viewed through our Library’s Resources A-Z page, or under the Online Learning page. There are several video-based online courses listed under the Arts, Crafts & Hobbies > Cooking and Baking areas of study.
You can learn these (or you can teach someone with these) by yourself (or with someone else, or with the young and the eager ones). The titles say it all — How to Bake Cookies, Breadbaking 101, Pie Baking 101, Cooking and Baking 101, Italian Cooking 101, Spanish Cooking 101, Tex Mex Cooking 101, and Bartending and Mixology 101.
If you need a bigger screen to project the video lessons for a group, you can borrow a portable projector/screen from the Library. The portable screen can stand on its own, and the screen projector can be connected to other devices via a HDMI cable which is included.
When attention turns away from the lessons or the kitchen (or maybe even to keep them out of the kitchen!), you can connect something else to the screen projector — such as a smartphone, PS3, PS4, Xbox One, or Wii — to bond over photo albums, sports games, video games, movies, or whatever you’d like to have on a bigger screen.
Roku kits, which come with complimentary access to Hulu, are also available for borrowing through our Library’s Library of Things collection. There is an assortment of new activity and technology kits that can be checked out and brought home.
The items do need to be reserved in advance through our Library’s website. The Library of Things collection can be accessed by looking under the Services menu option. Each item in the collection will show the available dates you can choose from. If you need help with the reservations, just give us a call and we’ll be happy to assist you.
You can use all of these resources to keep everyone engaged, while those wonderful aromas waft from baking cookies, simmering dishes, and refreshing drinks from the kitchen. Maybe someday, with the help of these offerings from the Library, the learners can then follow how their favorite eats are being made by their favorite persons in the kitchen!
Happy holidays to all! Happy cookies, pies and more!
— Janea Agbayani, Adult Services Library Specialist
For more information, visit: www.livingstonlibrary.org/resources-az/
For other topics, themes, and resources suggested for lifelong learning pursuits, visit our blog under the tag: Keep On Learning.