America's Test Kitchen

I like to cook. So when we moved here I sought out good food and new recipes. Although I constantly lament the poor food choices available I am happy to say that I have found a good source of American recipes at Cooks Illustrated. They test different food brands and products (much like Choice magazine in Australia) but best of all they support the idea that cooking from scratch is preferable to cooking from a packet (and it usually doesn't take much longer). They have a tv show called America's Test Kitchen which demonstrate some of their recipes. Although they do sometimes cook with corn syrup I have found that on the whole their recipes to be very good (ie lemon layer cake from Andrew's birthday) Generally the process they take is that they determine what they want to cook and then they use different ingredients and cooking techniques until they determine the best way to produce that particular item, often trialling the different recipe variations 100 times. It does mean that the recipes always work unlike some recipes from famous international chef that don't always turn out the way you expect. In any case if you have some free internet browsing time check out their database of free recipes. [Bear in mind though that Australian butter performs differently to American butter due to a different fat content but that is a story for another day]