A NEW COOKBOOK

Here's another transfer from Latelife Recipes. Yes, I'll get to some new recipes one of these days, but not yet. I did check to see and yes there is a 2013 ediion of the Cook's Illustrated Cooking for Two. They just keep rolling out the cookbooks and raking in the dough.

I’m a regular subscriber to Cook’s Illustrated. They don’t have any advertising in the magazine. It’s quite “top of the line” in that way, with sometimes very intricate recipes and the theory and testing that went into them, plus a wealth of handy tips and equipment testings. While they don’t have advertising in the magazine, for which you pay an elegant price, they do inundate you with too many magazine tear-out reply cards and too many emails for their own publications. I tear out the tear-outs and ignore most of the emails, so I suppose that is why I never realized that they put out a cookbook called Cooking for Two.

I did notice today’s email: it touted their 2012 version of the cookbook. I don’t know if you’ll be interested in it, but if you are, you can get it, with the 2011 edition added to the package, by clicking here Cooking for Two. There's also quite a lengthy description of the book.

Just reading part of the blurb - Cooking for Two 2012 offers a wide range of just-for-two meal ideas, from Grilled Steakhouse Steak Tips and Red Potatoes with Sour Cream-Chive Sauce and Parmesan and Basil-Stuffed Chicken Breasts with Roasted Carrots; to pasta and noodle favorites like Hearty Stuffed Shells and Pad Thai– I’m thinking that it still might be too much for senior appetites. That Parmesan and Basil-Stuffed Chicken looks like too much for me.

Besides which, will you happen to have all the necessary ingredients in your senior-style larder? Perhaps. I don’t do much with sour cream, for example, so I’m not sure how I’d use up the rest of it after I made the Sour Cream-Chive Sauce. (Maybe I would just wing it and pour it over my cereal.) I don’t think I’d want to invest in fish sauce, tamarind juice, and the chili peppers and bean sprouts that go into a traditional Pad Thai. That’s one to be eaten “out”. They do say the book was “Written, tested, and edited with cooks like you in mind, the book is a combination of a frugal approach to the culinary arts, a good helping of common sense, and the test kitchen's fanatical approach to testing our way to the very best recipe.” Could be, could very well be. (Note that word: fanatical. They said it, I didn’t.)

I am starting to feel a bit of “overkill”as far as Cook’s Illustrated and all their many productions – public TV’s Cook’s Country and America’s Test Kitchen, the magazine and their many cookbooks - are concerned. I know they test and research, but their way is not the only way to do things, and Christopher Kimball’s attempts at wit and wisdom can get a bit trying, a bit Smugly Smuggerson. (That last bit is a description I picked up at Backwards in High Heels, one of my favorite blogs.)

But one never knows –so I thought I’d bring the book to your attention.