So, it was a total impulse buy when I picked up the March/April issue of “Cook’s Illustrated”:http://cooksillustrated.com/–Anne and I had gotten my sister a subscription for Christmas a few years ago, and our friend Chapman had gotten us a cookbook by the same people a year or two ago, but I’d never really looked hard at the magazine, and, well, the checkout line isn’t the place to do it.
However, we’ve tried two recipes from it–one pasta dish (a spaghetti with cherry tomatoes, olives, capers, and pine nuts is actually “on the web”:http://www.cooksillustrated.com/article.asp?articleid=763&bdc=9156), which was judged excellent by us and the friends we had over, and their take on tortilla soup–and they’ve both been incredibly tasty, and, even more amazing, *easy*. Their tortilla soup recipe is as good as any I’ve ever had–although I’ll admit that I don’t live in, say, Houston–and it’s structured in such a way that if you had three people to work on it simultaneously, you could be done in maybe 30 minutes from start to finish.
They also have a roast chicken recipe that I’m dying to try, but for the moment, we’re going to try one of the other pasta variations. Maybe we’ll do the chicken next week.
Regardless, I highly recommend this. We have a shelf full of cookbooks, and they’re all interesting for one thing or another, but we’ve made as many dishes out of this magazine–admittedly, a $7.95 magazine (no ads, though)–as we have out of all too many of our cookbooks, and they’ve been easy and good. This is hard to overrate, IMNSHO.
