Every year I put a bunch of cooking stuff in my Xmas list - and this year Santa (aka my friends/family) have obliged.

My friend Lola got me a copy of the Bouchon cookbook - which I've wanted for a long time. I've never been to Bouchon (one of the restaurants of acclaimed chef Thomas Keller), but I've been to the The French Laundry, albeit many years ago, and that was definitely the culinary experience of my lifetime. My friend Regina got me The French Laundry Cookbook a few years ago, but the recipes there were impossible to make for the home chef. I didn't even try.

I am looking forward to cooking from this book, though. At first glance, the recipes seem approachable; Bouchon is a bistro and thus it serves bistro food, which (to a limited extent) I know how to cook. The book, however, suffers from the disability of being *big* and *heavy*. According to Amazon, its dimensions are over 11" x 11" (closed) and it weights over 5lbs. It's also beautiful, which may make me think twice before using it in the kitchen. But, I do have one of those multi-use printer/fax/scanner thingies, so I may just photocopy the recipe I want to use and leave the book on the coffee table :-)

I got three other culinary gifts.

My brother got me a set of beautiful serving-size wooden bowls. They are very pretty and serviceable - and I'm aghast that my brother actually has such good taste.

My sister Kathy got me a Knife Sharpener (Farberware Platinum), which I asked for because last year I got a couple of nice knives, which have not been sharpened since. Mike, meanwhile, got me a J.A. Henckels International Classic 10-Inch Sharpening Steel. As far as I can tell, a knife sharpener /sharpens/ knives, while a sharpening steel keeps them sharpened, so it's useful to have both things. We'll see how they work out.

And I think that's it.

A good Xmas loot, all in all - now I have to clean my kitchen from Xmas Eve dinner/Xmas breakfast so I can actually start using the stuff I got :-)