Cookbook Club this month was Alton Brown's Everyday Cook. We had a couple of really amazing recipes from the book and a lot of good recipes from the book, but overall people didn't seem to like it. The biggest gripe was that he uses weights instead of cup measurements. I have a food scale, so I didn't care one way or another about that. I made one of the popular recipes, Chocapocalypse Cookies, chocolate cookies made with five different kinds of chocolate: 54% bittersweet (actually 55% because that's the closest I could find), 70% bittersweet, unsweetened, 40% milk chocolate (actually whatever the Lindt bar was), and cocoa nibs. People swooned. (The other recipe everyone loved was lacquered bacon. Amaaaaaazing!)People are strange, you know? There is this woman who comes to Cookbook Club with her husband. He doesn't cook, so she usually makes two recipes. (There was a guy who would do the same when his wife came.) But she only ever makes ONE recipe from the chosen cookbook. The other thing she just chooses from her own repertoire, Cook's Illustrated usually. What's the point? She's better than the cookbook? Why even bother with the second recipe? There is a general feeling that two people--mother and child, husband and wife--can bring one recipe and still both eat; so it's not required that she make a second thing.
But the best story from this month's club was the woman who told us she was having a hard day in the kitchen when she made the blondies. One of the three eggs required (and the only three she had) ended up on the kitchen floor. And she used it anyway. "The yolk was in the shell, and that's all I needed." Um, note to self, do not eat what she makes anymore. I mean, she was willing to tell us she used floor-egg in what she served us. Imagine the shit she's not willing to tell us!
