Amen! Testify, Brother theferrett, tell it like it is!

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You know it, girl.

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We've subscribed to Cook's Illustrated for a couple years now, and the only complaint I have about their recipes is their casual assumption that you've got all day to spend in the kitchen making whatever-it-is. Let's face it, a lot of those yummy meals take a long time to put together.

However, if you spring for their monster 3-ring-binder cookbook, that's where you find the quick-and-easy stuff alongside all those all-day classics, and they've got illustrated instructions and useful information like how long stuff should last before it goes bad. My daughter gave me that cookbook and I was able to get rid of three other cookbooks I'd been keeping around for reference.

Plus, if you watch their "America's Test Kitchens" show on PBS you get to see Christopher Kimball being a goofball, which is as interesting to watch as are all the recipes they show you how to do.

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We picked up the three-ring notebook at CostCo - yeah, we're broke, but recipes help us to eat cheap - and I look forward to reading it. I don't usually read cookbooks, but theirs are worth it.

The show, I don't like as much. It's nice, but it's no Rachael Ray. Can't say why, either (aside from the obvious lack of hotness, which doesn't bother me that much).

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At my culinary school, some of us treat Cooks Illustrated like most people treat Consumer's Digest or American Scientific - good for basic recipes, scientific explinations of food creation and gadget evaluations but short on artistic fallderall. Please note that while I do love artistic fallderall, I want to have the recipe TASTE good before I try to make it LOOK good.

But then, that's just me and a lot of people at my school disagree.

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Their presentation is usually very lacking. But that's irrelevant to me, as a home cook. But yeah, I do make the comparison between CI and Consumer Reports.

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I love that magazine, the chili con carne recipie I use is based on theirs... but what I like even more than their magazine is the television show that they produce.

America's Test Kitchen.

It shows on PBS around here on Saturday afternoons. It's hard to track down sometimes, but, IMO, it's worth doing so.

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Cook's Illustrated I think was the best investment we ever made.

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Indeed it is for us as well. I love their recipes.

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So, how much are they paying you for getting this commercial out to your thousands of readers?

I mean, I know you're making me want to buy them. You should be getting some kind of a kick back for what you're doing for them, right?

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I wish.

They could pay me in books.

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I don't eat red meat anymore, generally. My turkey lasagne and spaghetti have become the stuff of legends. Ok, none of my friends have complained about it. So would you be willing to share this Turkey Meatloaf recipe? Please?

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One of the lovely things about the magazine is the free trial. And I don't mean "this is free - but only for 14 days, and only if you buy a subscription." They're also very good about taking a "No, thanks," and not suddenly sending you forty billion things you're not remotely interested in, unlike Cooking Club of America, which I cannot represent and wish I had never responded to, much less went ahead and paid for 2 years of.

There are plenty of other, non-red meat recipes, too, in most every issue, and every cover features a lovely oil painting of a food item.

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Love the magazine and their cooking show.

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I think I need this magazine. NEED.

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Considering your interest in healthy eating, I'd recommend Cooking Light instead. Also excellent recipes, but an effort made to control calories. Cook's Illustrated does not spare the butter, olive oil, or cheese. And the food is so damned good that you eat way too much - a really rotten 1-2 punch!

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If you appreciate the scientific approach to cooking it may be worth running the name Heston Blumenthal through Google. The bloke does insane things with food, and they work - apparently - I've never eaten at any of his restaurants, but if someone wants to take me there I'd love to sometime.

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Doggone it, Ferrett- a spit-take warning, please!

But I love, love, love the recipes! They had a potsticker recipe to die for earlier this year, and their chicken enchiladas are now on my main rotation. That they are putting Asian stuff into their mag is great! The Cooks Country is an excellent magazine, too- not as scientific as CI, but last issue had a lovely PF Chang style lettuce wrap recipe!

Just got my latest CI today- gonna have to try their Pizza Margherita recipe!

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Funny - we just made the chicken enchiladas this afternoon. Good stuff.

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I used one of their recipes once to make a cheesecake - I actually had to set an alarm to get up in the middle of the night to move it from a locked spare bedroom (cooling out of reach of a dairy-mad cat) into the fridge. All told, I think the recipe took 12 or 13 hours to make if you included cooling time.

But it RAWWWWKKKED!

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Ah, you should try Harold McGee's "On Food And Cooking". It doesn't have the cluckiness, but does have more science, and a drier wit. I cannot cook worth anything (well, maybe jello), but loved reading McGee. Cook's was.. okay, but not as inspiring, somehow.

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Oh, I love On Food and Cooking! I had to buy it for a "History of Food" class I took in college, and I enjoyed it so much that I read it cover-to-cover for fun.

I'm also a fan of Shirly Corriher's Cookwise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed for her explanations of food science.

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their light meatloaf puts my dark meatloaves to shame

Racist.

;-)

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But they are my dark meatloaves. This isn't racism so much as it is ancestral shame.

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becomes a set of limp curls of defeated pasta, sitting like dead maggots in a heap of burnt curdles.

Mmmmmm maggots! What a wonderful way to get me hungry for mac-n-cheese!

::HORK!::

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I just got their The New Best Recipe book. I've only done one recipe from them. It was cheesecake. I have -never- made real cheesecake before, but this turned out awesome. I was amazed. (It was burnt around the edges but that is the fault of the oven which I think runs about 25 degrees hotter than the dial says. Need thermometer.)

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Yeah, their recipes have carried me through some times when I didn't know how to cook. I like a recipe that's better than I am.

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That sounds like my sort of cooking magazine, if I was ever happy using recipes - instead I just do the same thing they do, for myself, starting with mental experimentation to make the first batch decent, then refining the results in subsequent batches. I don't like actual recipes because they always take *so long*, and also require ingredients I don't have on hand and don't want to go out and buy just for the one meal.

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...sitting in the rain nonetheless, getting all nice and toasty in preparation for searing then grill roasting a set of pork chops, per the recipe in the sample issue of Cook's Illustrated that I was sent.

Not my first run through of the recipe, in fact my second, because the first was so yummy (and we buy our meat at the local warehouse club)

My point is that I totally second your comments on Cook's Illustrated, and I find in kind of scary that you post about it on the day we decided to prepare a recipe contained in its pages.

I've ordered a subscription and eagerly await future issues.

P.S. You post about fridge cleaning happened on the day my wife was cleaning the fridge. I think I really need to unfriend you, it's getting a little scary.

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Well, see, it's not unusual for us since we do Cook's Illustrated recipes all the time. But cleaning the fridge? Now that is a coincidence.

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I've had less problems with recipies from Martha Stewart magazines and cookbooks and Fine Cooking than with cooks. Which may be due to the fact that the magazines who people who make the recipies themselves tend to use actual cooks, not a bunch of high-functioning geeks trying to impress other high-functioning geeks.

Years ago Cook's had these horrible recipies for rougalache without sugar in the dough, pizza dough to be made in food processor, and buttercream made without vanilla, and some other horrors. At the very least they should get a few actual cooks and pastry chefs who have had experience in the food industry and business for once before coming out with another issue, or at the very least consult professional books made for professional chefs so they might not have to experiement in thier kitchens like they usually do five-hundred times per recipe.

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Sorry, chief. On the one hand, we have an unknown person - you - telling me that they have "horrible" recipes. On the other hand, we have three years' worth of immaculate recipes personally cooked by me, each one being the gold standard of its kind, and usually requested at parties afterwards.

They may use non-standard techniques, or ingredients you disagree with. But their food works, regardless of what you may think.

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I need to get a copy of that book. See like you I see myself cooking for my girlfriend. And hopefully I will be able to work from home by the time I move in ...so thanks that was an awesome plug.

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Cooks Illustrated is the best cooking magazine.

my dad is obessed with it so much, he was the hard cover books for 2004 and 2005's magazines all put together, even though i'm pretty sure he owns atleast half of the magazines already

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We have a complete library of 'em.

It's verra nice.

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"Squirming abortion"?? Please tell me THEY didn't actually have that in the cookbook?

Ew, Ferrett, eww... And I just had mac n cheese for lunch..

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I have generally been impressed by their recipes (I use them for most of my cookies) but I have to say, their oatmeal cookies SUCK the big hosepipe.

They come out like briquettes.

The absolute best oatmeal cookie recipe is on the reverse side of the Quaker Oatmeal container. Bar none.

But everything else, yes, they're genius.

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They sound like the cooking equivalent of Mad Scientists. In a good way.

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I've been a subscriber for a couple of years and absolutely love this magazine.

And I don't even like to cook.

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