Ok, I admit it- I am slow to adapt to change. I am probably the only person I know who complained when we got new appliances because “I don’t know how to organize anything in this French door fridge”, “I know the dishwasher is quieter, but everything loads differently”, and “Why does the convection feature always burn the edges of my pizza?” So, while it took me awhile to adjust, I finally have and even appreciate the fact that we can now run our dishwasher and watch TV at the same time, on the same floor.
So, you can only imagine how I adjust to new technology. I am still a few weeks away from upgrading my talk-and-text-only mobile to an actual smart phone (you know, the kind where you can surf the web right there on your screen), I still use my iPad primarily for listening to music and playing solitaire and I am completely comfortable with Office 2007 (once I got used to the fancy new tab toolbar, that is).
And while I am gradually learning to embrace iBooks , having recently downloaded a popular trilogy on my iPad, I still prefer to read old-fashioned, have-to-manually-turn-the-page-versus-swiping- your -finger across-a- screen books. This is most apparent in my love affair with cookbooks. There is just something so traditional, so comforting, so grown-up about opening a beautiful, classic cookbook containing great recipes and gorgeous accompanying photographs that show you what your dish should look like when all is said and done.
Yes, I have bookmarked, downloaded and printed countless recipes from the internet as well (Allrecipes, Epicurious and Pinterest are my top go-to sites) and I have even converted a photo album into a recipe book (an easy, inexpensive way to organized printed recipes and find them without thumbing through a recipe box), I still find myself picking up cookbooks that catch my eye.
So, while I certainly appreciate technology and its rightful place in our new digital world, in some cases, at least for me, technology cannot replace the real thing. And besides, my newly-acquired copy of Cook’s Bible looks a whole lot prettier sitting in my wrought-iron fleur de lis recipe holder than my iPad does. And isn’t that what’s important?
