The New Best Christmas Hint

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One little addition to my last Christmas hint post: Cook's Illustrated the New Best Recipe.

Last Thursday the Philadelphia Inquirer Food section reviewed both the New Best Recipe book and Gourmet magazine's the Gourmet Cookbook. Gourmet is everything I don't want, complicated haughty-taughty recipes that take a week to prepare. But Cook's Illustrated are the people behind America's Test Kitchen, perhaps the best show on PBS now that This Old House has become This Old Millionaire's House.

Much like the Food Network's Good Eats, but without Alton Brown's goofiness, ATK goes step-by-step through everyday dishes. It explains the science behind cooking so you can decide when it's safe to alter a recipe and when it's not. It reviews products and kitchen utensils and lets you know when costlier doesn't mean better (did you know that you can substitute imitation vanilla extract for the real stuff at half the price, with no discernable difference?). As I watch each episode I think, I could make that. (I think the same thing watching New Yankee Workshop but deep down I know that I can't really match Norm without my very own Porter-Cable Model 3700L 10" Compound Mitre Saw with Twinlaser, but I'll save that for another wishlist.)

The cookbook that I currently rely on when I need attempt a new recipe or refresh my memory on an old one is my copy of the Joy of Cooking. While Joy was updated a few years back to make it more user-friendly and practical, my copy is eleven years old and is definitely not user-friendly or practical. I pretty much only bring it out for it's french toast recipe and it's measurement conversion chart. There's just way too many recipes in Joy that I'll never use (I don't see me making Mountain Oysters anytime soon).

From the Inky review it sounds like New Best Recipes is just what I want: recipes of food my family actually would want to eat. We are desperate to add some new dishes to our menu. It's probably also full of cookie recipes and I would be willing to attempt every last one of them (just in case the missus made it down this far).

So that's pushes my wishlist to three items and I'm sure I'm not done. But nothing will match my 7-year-old's epic list (cribbed from the list emailed to Santa):

Beyblade and arena
Karaoke machine
a Jakks Pacific Ms. Pac Man game
a Driving Force steering wheel for Lego Racers 2
CD ROM games ( like the Incredibles, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, or whatever you think would be cool)
a remote control car
a Mario Golf Advance Tour (Gameboy)
Yu-Gi-Oh! Destiny board traveler
Nick Tunes Freeze Frame Frenzy
Spongebob Square Pants (Gameboy)
Tony Hawk's Underground 2 (Gameboy)
a rock polishing kit
a frog spoapstone carving kit
a radio controlled car kit
a camping lantern with remote control
a solar car kit
a bubblegum kit
Shrek 2 DVD
a Shrek 2 GBA Game
a seascope
a radio controlled rush plane
EZ balance stilts
Air powered rockets
pulley
baseball cards

And it won't be a merry Christmas unless he gets everything (not that he will).