This is Highly Recommend, a column dedicated to what people in the food industry are obsessed with eating, drinking, and buying right now.
While this funny-looking novelty item seems like something you might have bought at Barnes and Noble circa 2003 while you were waiting all night for the latest Harry Potter release, I swear it is AMAZING.
It’s a book weight. It looks like a bookmark with two egg-shaped weights on each end. It has love handles. The leather is a classy touch. I got this as a gift from my great-aunt who likes to read while she eats, which I hope you realize has been an option all along, and it’s fantastic for that. If you’re trying to read more this year, get a book weight, any thriller by Keigo Higashino, and start reading with breakfast and work your way through dinner. Talking to other people is overrated!
But my favorite way to use it is with cookbooks. I’ve been cooking out of Rebekah Peppler’s À Table nonstop (buy it for the mayo roast chicken alone, please, and for the cheesy gruyere snack cake second) and the book weight keeps the hardcover open so I don’t have to find my page again with mayo-smothered fingers. And if I get mayo on the leather book weight—it’s wipeable.
If you’re thinking, “This is irrelevant to me, I don’t cook out of cookbooks,” let me tell you, you’re missing out. Do you know how many recipes aren’t on the internet? MANY. At least three. Give your eyeballs a rest and crack open a cookbook, change things up. You can get cookbooks at the public library! What you can’t get at the library, though, is a book weight. Which brings me back to where I started. This thing’s the best. Buy five, like I know my auntie did, so you can give them out as presents. It’s a good one.
