My friend April knows more than a little about books and food and the ways they intersect in real life. So while I’m meeting a deadline, here’s her latest book review.

America’s Test Kitchen Improves My Love Relationship

It would be fair to say we like to cook, Fella and I. And we’re the kind of cooks who like recipes. So I recently bought Fella The Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook: 2,000 Recipes from 20 Years of America’s Most Trusted Cooking Magazine cookbook as a gift. We also subscribe to the magazine, Cook’s Illustrated (or did until recently). Both are published under the America’s Test Kitchen brand.

If you have not had the pleasure of watching America’s Test Kitchen on PBS, do. Christopher Kimball, the show’s host, is slightly knobbish but the exhaustive care the show affords its innumerable cooking projects matches his strange, neurotic egotism. It is a real joy.

Disclaimer: this cookbook and cooking show are probably not for kitchen novices. If you aren’t a competent, or at least conversant, cook, it’s probably safer to cook through Better Homes & Gardens’s classic manual first. The recipes are not as unilaterally delicious and without flaw, but they’re loads easier, and require mostly pretty basic ingredients. BH & G will give you a sense of how to proceed, and build a basic vocabulary for kitchen-related hijinks.

Fella and I both dig food and cooking and while he’s probably wilder for fussy recipes than I am, I still deeply appreciate a remarkable finished product. And it’s not fair to classify all the Cooks’s/ATK recipes as fussy. Some of them aren’t. Some of them are designed for weeknights (but are still more work than grabbing a Bertoli’s bagged dinner out of the freezer or browning some ground beef for Hamburger Helper).

But here’s the thing about the ATK culture: they marry cooking and science. Their chefs are food scientists who understand how, for example, gluten reacts on a cellular level with other ingredients.

I learned from ATK that a great way to get that battered-fries effect in oven-baked potatoes is to parboil (or partially boil) them with a teaspoon of baking soda—because the baking soda loosens up the starch particles—before you toss them with a bit of oil or butter (way, way less than they’d absorb in a deep fat fryer), then bake them. The yield is a crunchy, tasty, much-less-damaging-to-the-waistline fried effect.

And ATK holds your hand. Their recipes explain every step of every process, and tell you why you should bother. We’ve tried casseroles, roasts, grilled feasts, side dishes, breads, and desserts from the ATK recipes, and without exception, the result is remarkable.

Actually, it wouldn’t be going too far to say this book improves my love relationship. No, really. A fast way to my heart is through my fairly adventurous stomach. Early in our love relationship, Fella cooked me all kinds of delicious things.

He still does. Most recently, it was “Nut-Crusted Chicken” from the 2000 recipes/20 years tome mentioned above. The result was a perfectly cooked (not dry) chicken breast coated in a fabulously crunchy (but baked!) nut crust with hints of orange. He served it with snow peas that had been stir fried in some (likely tedious) combination of vinegars and spices.

So it improves my love relationship by making me love my partner more when he cooks me delicious food. But there’s more. When we’re long on time, we go through the cookbook or editions of the magazine and plan menus for the week. Then we discuss the shopping list. Then sometimes we cook together. Cooking together is an occasion for kitchen dancing and banter and laughs and occasionally fights. (When we’re short on time, we select things from other cookbooks, since you usually have to start at least two hours ahead to do Cook’s/ATK recipes justice. Sometimes you have to start 24 hours ahead.)

These things are good for my love relationship because they are teamwork. I didn’t get it right away. I was sort of vexed when Fella wanted to start planning menus. It struck me as a huge pile of toil for almost no payoff.

But he persisted (he is a persistent man, which is why he’s mine at all), and now I think that menu planning is a great idea. I can’t imagine going back to not planning it. We have less chaos at the grocery store; we spend less money, and we almost always have all the things we need to cook what we’ve planned … all of which is way better than how we used to do it.

Also, it’s an activity to do together that’s a) at home—it’s tough to wrangle time away from home when you’ve got a kid whose bedtime is 7:30—and b) not TV.

Some tips for using the Cook’s/ATK cookbook:
• Always read the recipe completely twice before you start cooking.
• Read their recommendations for brands and take them seriously. ATK typically reviews brands that are readily available at grocery stores, even in rural areas, unlike the Food Network cookbooks that ask for obscure, nonsubstitutable stuff like West Mediterranean prawns.
• Follow instructions completely, including cooking and cooling times, even if they seem weird or counterintuitive.
• If it flops, try again. It’s probably you, not ATK.
• Don’t try to pirate their stuff. It’s really hard to get the recipes online unless you subscribe or buy the book, so do: it’s worth it.
• Shop before you cook.
• Use fresh ingredients and full fat creams when ATK says to.

Have fun.

Exercise.

This post is a cross-blog project with writer April Line of www.AprilLineWriting.com. April blogs madly and writes regularly for a number of north central Pennsylvania’s regional publications. She also writes fiction. Her story, “What It Would Be Like to Have a Baby With a Turnip” appeared in Sou’Wester in 2006.

Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”