Today’s cookbook is a yearly series, of which I own three. My older sister bought me my first subscription to Cooking Light magazine several years ago as a gift, and I just keep renewing it. The magazine is wonderful, full of articles on fitness and travel, and of course, food. They have lots and lots of recipes using interesting ingredients, complete with the nutritional breakdown. And, as the magazine name implies, all recipes are designed with healthly living in mind. If you think it’s all dry salads and crunchy granola, you’re dead wrong. Cakes, pies, breads, rich meats. They do everything. But, they try to make the ingredient lists sensible, and they offer reasonable portion sizes, and advice on how to choose ingredients.

The Cooking Light yearly cookbooks are a collection of every recipe from every issue of the magazine during the whole year. It typically comes out around late November, about the same time as the December issue of the magazine. Their indexes are great, by recipe or ingredient. They compile a years worth of menu suggestions into one section, which makes planning easy. While they don’t include the articles on exercise techniques or beauty, they do include some of the cooking features.

I have three of these now, 2007, 2008, and 2009 which just arrived a week ago (they’re numbered a year ahead…2009 has recipes from the 2008 magazines). Yes, it’s doubling-up as I also have all of the magazine issues for the year, but the books are a bit more compact than 12 magazines, and made to last. Last night, we had a chicken pot pie out of the 2007 book, and I have the ingredients for a turkey sausage pasta bake to make in the next couple of days.