Welcome to Clio's Test Kitchen!

One of the first cookbooks I bought as an adult is The Best Recipe, by America's Test Kitchen. You may know them as the folks behind Cook's Illustrated magazine or on a more personal level from the Chipole-Lime Dip that I make for parties. Their mission is to find the best version of popular dishes from both the past and present through trial-and-error and repeated testing. This ensures that their recipes are always tasty and virtually fool-proof for home cooks, even if they are not particularly adventurous.

The ATK folks really helped me master the basics and build a repertoire of solid crowd pleasers. As I became a more experienced home cook, I learned to trust my pallet and rarely stick to recipes anymore. However, I still always reach for The Best Recipe when I am contemplating a baking project or trying to figure out what to do with all the apples I just picked or when I have a dish in mind and want a reference for ingredients or amounts.

Anyway, the ATK folks recently launched a new PBS show called Cook's Country, a companion to that magazine, where they cook classic American dishes. Yesterday, I went to their website to get a recipe from the show and saw this ad:

If you're interested in joining a select group of volunteers who help test our recipes before they appear in print, please click here to find out more and register as a recipe tester for Cook's Country magazine.

If you need to even ask if I "clicked here", then you don't know me. I am a born hand-raiser. So, now I am officially registered as a volunteer recipe tester and will be sent my first recipe to test in about 1-2 weeks. After that, I will receive roughly one recipe a week and have 1-2 weeks to make it and give feedback. Since this is on a purely volunteer basis, there is no obligation; I can pick and choose and skip weeks.

I am extremely excited about this, if you can't tell. So, here is my mantra (repeat after me): I will stick to the recipe, I will stick to the recipe, I will...