Watermelon Salad with Goat Cheese
A few months ago, while we paying our bill at Art Restaurant, the host told us about the Celebrated Chefs program. There didn’t seem to be much of a downside. You register your credit card with them, get a cookbook, and whenever you dine at one of the participating restaurants and use that credit card, 5% of your purchase price is donated to charity. We spent a couple of minutes looking through the cookbook and it sounded good enough. Local chefs from the participating restaurants contributed some of their signature recipes. The photos were lovely and the recipes we perused were well written. Five minutes later we walked out with a cookbook and plans to cook from it very soon.
But, alas, as often happens, the cookbook came home with us and immediately got shelved and forgotten about. I pulled it out a few times, and discovered a fatal flaw (at least for cookbooks). There’s no index. Little known fact about me: in a previous life, I wrote four technical books. I know that an indexer is expensive, and so a missing index in a charity cookbook doesn’t totally surprise me, but it does make the cookbook a little difficult to use. You can’t just pick up the cookbook and see if there are any tomato recipes in it. You need to page through the entire thing to see what recipes use tomatoes. So although the recipes in the cookbook are fabulous, the cookbook is just a bit hard to use.
Oh, and Celebrated Chefs… if you’re listening, I’ll happily index your next cookbook in exchange for a couple of meals at participating restaurants. 
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