If I were ever stranded on a deserted island with a fully stocked kitchen...

and I could only bring one cookbook, without hesitation, I would choose Joy of Cooking. In addition to being a fantastic instruction manual for just about every type of food (with helpful illustrations), there are an enormous number of recipes and they're all excellent. With all my other (heavy rotation) cookbooks, I've come across recipes that I wasn't too fond of; but with Joy, each one is a homerun. Heck, each of our all-time favorite recipes come from Joy (Shepard's Pie for me, Chicken and Dumplings for Zeb). On Thursday, I made Brunswick Stew (pg. 596). Although the recipe didn't call for it, I shredded the chicken. It was so good - spicy and flavorful - healthy too with a ton of vegetables and such. Zeb almost ate himself sick! (which I take as high praise indeed) Another great thing about this recipe is that all the ingredients were ones that I usually have on hand so this could easily be a filler meal for those times when I haven't been to the store to get the next week's menus. Somehow I don't think Zeb would mind...