Awesome New Magazine

Ok, so I know that in my last post I mentioned that I had recieved my first copy of Cook's Illustrated Magazine. I really only had time to glance through it since I had to get ready to go to dinner. Well, after I got ready, I had plenty of time to read through it, seeing as I was waiting for my dad.
This is truly the coolest magazine I have ever read! Like most cooking magazines it has a Q&A section, I am always interested in these, but I usually know the answer and am stuck wondering where the idiot that asked has been for the last 10 years. But I was pleasnatly surprized to find that I only knew the answer to one of the questions out of seven!! The one that I found the most interesting was about preheating a pizza stone before you use it. I had never even heard of doing that, I figured that if you got it up to 350 degrees, without anything on it, that it would crack. I have had one snap in half before and it is a very depressing experience. Dark day in Kami's Kitchen. But according to this, if you preheat your stone in the oven for one full hour the nyou will get really tender and aity crust. Who knew?
There was also an article about achieveing the very best Old Fashioned Stuffed Turkey. Now I'm personally not big on making my stuffing inside of the turkey, I think it leaves far too many openings for disaster and I hate setting myself up for a bad day of cooking. But this also talks about some of the other problems faced when making turkey, getting crisp skin but not ending up with breast meat that is better suited as sand paper, how you can solve the sandpaper problem by brining but then you end up with rubbery skin, I had never realized that my week long pickling might be contributing to the not rendered rubbery skin problem. But then I don't like the skin, so I was just pleased with moist meat. This also says to roast it with the breast down and salt pork laid across the back.
Needless to say I can't wait to start doing some Pre-Thanksgiving testing to find the best way possible to make our bird. As I test things I will be sure to post what I tested and what my results are.
The rest of the articles were super interesting too. Even the one about making really good roasted potatoes, now everyone know how I LOATH POTATOES ENTIRELY, but things like that are always good to know when you are a caterer. Because unfortunately, most of the rest of the foodie world loves potatoes. There was an article about knives and what kind are good, best and worst. The highest rated knife that didn't cost a zillion dollars was the Forschner 8 inch chef's knife. Why, yes, that is the knife that I use!! Oh yeah!!
In other news, today I pre-ordered Michael Symon's Live to Cook cookbook and am sooooooo excited for it to get here. Unfortunately it doesn't come out until November 3rd, so I will have to wait a while.....
This weekend I am trying Dry Brining, I have never done this before, so I will post how it goes and if it turns out nicely I will add the recipe.

xoxoxo