Food Hacks

Among all of the other stuff I do, food and cooking still strike their way into the core of my life. This is due in large part to the fact that, unlike other hobbies, activities and concerns, food isn't something you can leave idle for 2 weeks. Skip eating for a day or 2 and your body will protest extremely.

As such, I'm interested in lots of food topics and food hacks combine my love for a clever solution with my love of food. I grew up cooking, but mostly just doing what had been shown to me. Only in the last few years have I sought out learning the actual "how's" and "why's" of food and cooking.

However, the industry around food (the magazines, restaurants, TV, books, etc.) are heavily dominated by a serious level of pretention. Personally, I don't like wine or caviar, etc. I don't get terribly excited about much "high cuisine". However, really good, balanced hearty food triggers something deep inside my head and I get a serious case of Pavlovian drooling. My favorite restaurant wraps their utinsils in terry cloth towels and my favorite meal there is a brick of pepper jack cheese, doused in Tequila, lit on fire to melt, drizzled with lime juice and eaten with tortilla chips followed by a fantastic steak cooked straight on coals and a S'more's desert of layered graham cracker and chocolate with marshmallow sauce. That's making me drool already, but I've had several "foodies" express their disdain for meals like this. I couldn't care less about the ambience or the prestige of a restaurant if my tastebuds are happy.

The TV show Good Eats really started my journey into treating the kitchen as both a chemistry lab and artist's studio and served as my introduction to practical cooking and good food without the Martha Stewart attitude. Fortunately, this has been catching on and more of this stuff has been bubbling up to the surface, filling in the gap between recipes that look like:

1 bag tater tots
1 can cream mushroom soup
1 can corn
1 pound hamburger

and recipes that contain exotic ingredients like $50/pound mushrooms, tools that cost hundreds and techniques that no one with a real life can pull off. If you just want to make good food and really understand the food and processes in your kitchen, here are a few resources worth checking out.

TV
Good Eats - really brought kitchen as playground and laboratory to the forefront. On cable/satellite.
America's Test Kitchen - Older show that methodically tests every recipe to figure out the "best" way to make a dish. On PBS broadcast.

Books
I'm Just Here For The Food - Covers the "meal" cooking: roasting, grilling, frying, etc. By focusing on methods rather than dishes, you understand what your toolkit is when working with food and when to pull out which tool.
I'm Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking - This one is his baking book. Useful if you like cakes, muffins, bread, etc. However, not as universally useful as his first.
Cookwise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Cooking - If you've watched Good Eats, this book is by Shirley, who gives Alton science advice. Turns out that Shirley actually gives that advice to a LOT of people and is sort of a behind the scenes food "Einstein". This is a fantastic book for really understanding what's going on in the food itself. How many other authors have watched hours of footage of the interior of bread baking to see exactly how the bubbles form? Not Martha.

What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained - while not quite as "fun" or easy a read, this book is chock full of information on the chemical and physical info of how food cooks.

Magazines
CHOW - Good food without the snobbery.
Cook's Illustrated - The magazine from the same folks as America's Test Kitchen on TV. NO advertising in it and product reviews are brand-specific.
Cook's Country - I've been subscribing to this one for about a year, since the first issue and have really enjoyed the recipes in it. Most are a little more down to earth than in other magazines.

Sites
Cooking for Engineers - what's particularly interesting is his tabular recipe format that puts the ingredients and process in one easy to read format. Unfortunately, he's got a patent pending on the format. I'm hoping he decides to license it for use because it would vastly improve most recipes.
Slashfood's Summation of 25 Food Hacks - lots of good stuff on Slashfood, but this one is a highlight.