I found this cookbook at my mother’s in her piles of food magazines and cookbooks (including The Dump Cake Cookbook, The Cake Mix Cookie Book, the Cookies and Bars Cookbook and the Taste of Home [ugh] Cookie Book and several other cookbooks that relate to cake mixes and/or cookies). She has about 60 boxes of cake mixes in her pantry that one day I will be throwing out since there is no possibility that my mother will ever use any of them. I don’t know where they all come from. The irony here is that in my entire childhood she never made a damn cookie. We never, or I should say rarely, even had them in the house and if we did they were purchased, the dreadful Pecan Sandies, that my father called “dust cookies,” fig newtons, another ugh, and occasionally Twilight Desserts which I presume were cheap cookies that sorta resembled Oreos in a visual but not delicious way.
Anyway, I asked her if I could borrow this cookbook and she was very iffy about it, there was, she thought, a recipe that looked interesting. Well, it’s Cook’s Complicated, er, Illustrated. (America’s Test Kitchen, Cook’s Country, Cook’s Illustrated, it’s all Christopher Kimball). They’re all interesting but there is no recipe in this cookbook that isn’t mind numbingly complex. It may look interesting but it will be even more interesting to attempt to make. And by interesting I mean frightening. My mother’s idea of cooking these days is a baked apple in the toaster oven. Furthermore, there are no recipes in it that involve cake mixes.
Included in this cookbook are all the recipes from last year’s America’s Test Kitchen. I don’t know why it says 2015 since every single recipe in the damn thing is from 2014. Be that as it may, I have seen every single episode, some of them 2 and 3 times, and know every single recipe in this book. Many of them are scribbled in my cooking notebook(see below). I follow My Year with Chris a website devoted to making all of Christopher Kimball’s recipes.
When I opened the book it was like coming home. It was then that I realized that I had a problem. It’s not a collection of cookie cookbooks yet, but I am trending.
