I Heart Christopher Kimball

After kickboxing, scrubbing out the Booda Dome and sacking up the dead willow along with the yard clippings the fine recyclables collectors failed to pick up last week, I decided to bake some peanut butter oatmeal cookies from a recipe I found in a recent email from Cooking.com. (The recipe's actually from Light & Tasty, but who's counting?) Since I followed some very sage (and pretty darn obvious) advice Christopher Kimball put practically on page one of his The Kitchen Detective (another find from the south Austin Half-Price Books), I first checked if I had enough quick oats, doubting I had the required three cups. Sure enough, I didn't. And since I needed a few other items to make up another batch of Emeril's barbecue pizza sauce for Greg, I thought, Why not just hike down to HEB, swing by Half-Price Books and make a morning out of it since Jackie's not teaching Spin?

So that's what I did. And boy did I find some fun stuff!

Greg should request a restraining order barring me from close proximity to any Half-Price Books (except for maybe the one in San Marcos that was rather disappointing) unsupervised. I walked out with not one but two cooking books. Note that I wrote cooking books, not cook books because one is not a cook book. The Best Kitchen Quick Tips is yet another title from the editors of Cook's Illustrated and is chocked full of the tips for cooking, baking, storing, organizing a kitchen and what have ya that appear in Cook's Illustrated, the various recipe books and, I'm sure, Cook's Country. I truly did buy it with the intention of giving it to Mum or Erin or Melissa (although she probably knows most of this stuff already), but...well, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Anywho, while sucking down the last of my mid-morning protein shake, I was thumbing through this little book (which I still intend to gift upon a foodie/faudie relative) and came across this "Why the hell didn't I think of that!" tip for preparing fluffy rice:

"Once the rice is tender, remove the pan from the heat, place a clean kitchen towel folded in half over the saucepan, replace the lid, and set aside for 10 minutes. Residual heat continues to steam the rice and improves its texture, while the towel absorbs excess moisture that would otherwise condense on the lid and eventually fall back into the rice and make is mushy."

I am a victim of mushy rice. Happened to me just this past Friday while making easy Spanish rice to accompany our fish tacos. Greg usually doesn't have this problem when making the lime-cilantro jasmine rice on Burrito Night, but all my Spanish rice attempts have turned out mushy because of the darn condensation. And now, thanks to Christopher Kimball and his crew in America's Test Kitchen, I have a way to make Spanish rice that won't be mushy. Hooray! And for that reason...

I Heart Christopher Kimball!

(The other book I bought is Laxmi's Vegetarian Kitchen. Yes, I know I need another Indian cookbook like I need a hole in my head, but...but...it has a baked carrot halwa recipe! [I know you're reading this shaking your head in disgust, and yes, I admit I have a carrot halwa obsession.] And a tomato-onion raita that I suspect will yield something closer to the onion chutney from Madras Pavillion than other recipes I've tried or merged and butchered! So how could I resist?)