Free Weekly Gourmet Cooking Lessons

image: America's Test Kitchen

I’ve been spending Saturday mornings with Christopher Kimball of Cook’s Magazine, along with Bridget, Julia, and other chefs, in the kitchen of a 200-year old New England farmhouse. You can join us, too! (So truth be told, they’re in their test-kitchen farmhouse on the East Coast, and I’m in my living room in the West, watching them on my TV, but you probably already figured that out).

Keeping with authentic frugal living, we do not have cable television. This means I miss out on many of the fun cooking shows on the Food Network and various other cable channels. However, I recently discovered America’s Test Kitchen on PBS. Every week, the cast prepares a recipe hundreds of ways and shows viewers what worked (and tasted) the best. They delve into scientific explanations of why certain steps, like searing a roast before cooking it or hard-boiling an egg before adding it to sugar cookie dough, are important to the end result. They also test appliances to demonstrate what works the best (it’s not always the most expensive). Call me a food geek, but I love it!

To find out when America’s Test Kitchen is on in your area (if you’re in the United States), you can go here, and enter your zip code. If you're not in the States and interested in the show, you can order the DVD’s of the latest season, which comes with a comprehensive cookbook of every recipe they’ve featured in the past ten years! (This is not a paid endorsement, just a personal one!)