Cookbooks

Sorry, meant to write Cooks Illustrated. They have a magazine but you can get it online.

Intuition.

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DISH is how we do it.

The Joy of Cooking. My mom gave it to me when I got married. I use it to see how to cook different cuts of meat mostly.

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

I study while I cook.When preparing dinner I usually have two or three books open on the table. I gather inspiration from history and blend it with the contemporary ideas.
My combo lately is.... Larousse Gastronomique, Escoffier, and Plenty More. Joy of Cooking is often thrown into the mix for American flavor profile. I also have the NYtimes magazine at my disposal ...some interesting foodie stuff in there at times.
I am never on the internet/phone at work. Books offer no intrusion .
I just received Food Lab as a gift. After a few seconds just fanning through the pages, I can’t say it sparked anything. I’ll bring it to work and delve into it a bit.

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sometimes

Below I’m referring to anything except baking.

Baking is science, cook in is art.

Basically I see what I have and try to combine it in tasty ways. I follow my intuition and draw on experience.

My guiding principle in cooking is to keep it simple. Use quality ingredients and just avoid fucking them up.

I’m also fearless. That helps.

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Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

I took a cooking class series with a local chef around a dozen years ago. For a long while, I cooked and experimented as often as I could, sometimes going to 3 different farmer's markets a week. There's just not the same amount of time in my schedule right now and the time that's there has been reshuffled into interests that grab more of my passion now, so I'm cooking simpler, on intuition from what I've learned in the past, from winging it with the same types or similar flavors I've had in restaurant dishes (sometimes it sails, sometimes it sinks), will get recipes from foodie friends, and sometimes find a recipe thumbing through one of my wife's lifestyle magazines. But quite often it's online, like Reddit forums or doing a search for a very specific dish I've had somewhere else and want to try making on my own.

I have a really random collection of cook books and I find that helps give me new ideas. How I got there is by hitting used book stores so it's on the cheap and you find some real gems.

Used book stores are incredible. My local Goodwills always have a ton of great books, as does the "friends of the library" bookstore at our central downtown library. It's all hit or miss for what you'll find, but it's still a challenge for me to leave any of the 3 locations without at least a couple of books. I'm (correctly) labeled a book hoarder by Mrs. MWR. She might kill me if I started bringing cookbooks home also, but now it's a thought since there are always a million at Goodwill.

I have a lot of cookbooks. Probably too many.
Other than what is mentioned above, one of my favorites is "Lumiere" by Rob Feenie. He is a classically trained Canadian chef, a student of Daniel Boulud's, I believe. Lumiere was his restaurant, but there was some wonderful political infighting and it is no longer around.
The book is gorgeous. Receipes are great. A interesting combination of classical French, Alsacian and "West Coast" and Japanese. Lots of foundational sauces and stocks that you can tinker with.

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"I keep hoping for you to use your superior intellect to be less insufferable. Sadly, you continue to disappoint." - gofigure

My wife and I have some cookbooks that are fairly new so we'll typically flip through one of them until we find some that looks interesting. We've found good recipes in each of these:
--Indian for Everyone
--The Mixer Bible (not just baking recipes, there are pasta dishes, sausages, soups, etc)
--Date Night In (more involved recipes; there'll be an app, main dish, side dish and desert for different date nights. We've found some phenomenal recipes in here)
--Clean Eating Made Simple

None of these are groundbreaking but depending on what she or I are feeling that night/week we'll flip one of these open, find something interesting and have at it.

I'm in the same boat..I excel at buying books but not so much when it comes to reading them. Having said all that it's been a while since I've hit used book store....

If you start looking at the cookbooks you'll find some amazing stuff. Last one I picked up was an LL Bean wild game one from the late 70s....there is an entire chapter dedicated to cooking squirrels!

The side on the box where it says "Microwave Instructions"

Pretty much the joy of cooking for basic whatever. That said I never follow a recipe fully anymore .

Like other posters, I'm a fan of Joy of Cooking for Western cooking basics. Their hollandaise sauce is as good or better than any I've had in a restaurant.

I inherited my copy from my Grandmother, it's the 1972 or 1973 edition. I believe the more current versions don't have the instructions for snaring and skinning squirrel and rabbit, or how to prepared tinned turtle. It's fun to thumb through.

My other go-to cookbooks are Moosewood Collective ones. I was a vegetarian for five years and these became my standards for cooking. Most of the recipes are easy and very tasty. I learned the basics of Asian and SE Asian spicing and flavouring from them. If you're going to live on beans, they'd better be tasty!

I followed America's Test Kitchen for a while. They had good recipes but all were a bit more than I had time for.

Jacques Pepin’s La Technique - there are updated versions that have similar names

Mark Bittman - How to Cook Everything (the original book and the vegetarian edition)

Lorna sass- cooking under pressure

Last year I read 65 books. Great, right? The problem is that I probably purchased 150 and I have too strong an emotional connection to books to get rid of them, so...

That LL Bean squirrel chapter sounds incredible! We could have used that in the household of my youth. I’m going to be on the hunt for a copy now.

We get Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country.

Cooks Country is a colorful magazine of recipes, has great 30 minute meals in it, plus all sorts of other goodies.

Cook's Illustrated is black and white, details techniques, equipment and different ingredients. Also has amazing recipes that a very well tested.

Both are by the people behind America's test kitchen, so they might not work for you.

Chris who was with America's test kitchen and was the editor for the magazines left and does Milk Street. Has the same look and feel as Cooks Country.

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Pactimo brand ambassador, ask me about promo codes

Howard hillman cooks book is great for dealing with ingredients you are not familiar with. He has some great books on the science of cooking that are really useful.
Mark bittman how to cook almost everything is my substitute for joy. Gives you solid base recipes with some nice variants in the base. Base sauce, now change this, that and the other to do something different. A good inspiration book.

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Jim
"In dog beers, I've only had one"
http://www.shakercolonial.com/
Creating custom made furnishing to your requirements

I downloaded a sample of la Technique last night. I've just started reading it and the food portion appears solid. OTOH the man doesn't know jack about sharpening knives. I almost cried for his Wustoff. Do not press the blade firmly on to the steel, allow it to glide and sing to you.

I can't believe nobody has mentioned 'Run Fast, Eat Slow' yet! It is written by Shalane Flanagan, the winner of the New York Marathon. I have tried about 10 of the recipes so far and they are awesome.