cookbooksMy younger son turns 1 on Friday so we are having a birthday party for him this weekend.  It’s prime cookout season here in Wisconsin so my husband and I wanted to make something on the grill besides the traditional brats and hamburgers.  A few years ago I made a wonderful Mediterranean-style turkey burger with Kalamata olives and Feta cheese, so tonight I pulled out a few of my cookbooks to see if I could find the recipe.  After flipping through just one cookbook I got frustrated (have I mentioned that I have no patience whatsoever?!) and pulled out my laptop instead.  With one quick Google search I found the recipe — so fast and easy!  And that got me thinking to cookbooks and their demise with the rise of the internet.  The Food Network, for example, has a wonderful feature where you simply input what ingredients you have on hand or want to use and they generate recipe ideas for you.  I used to love buying cookbooks and while my collection is pretty small, I know there are plenty of people out there who have stacks upon stacks of cookbooks.  Even with the ability to search recipes online, I’m sure there are those people out there (my parents included) who have a tendency to pull out a cookbook when looking for something different.  Will cookbooks ever cease to be printed or will there continue to be a demand for them?  Or will we someday find a recipe online that we like, generate a grocery shopping list that is sent to our favorite/closest grocery store and will those groceries be bagged up and ready to go when we pull up to the store (having paid for them online)?  Food for thought……and yes, that pun was intended.