Dear Friend of America’s Test Kitchen,

The Pig Roast was a big success this year thanks, in part, to good weather. I cooked the pork to about 200 degrees internal - that is about 5 hours-plus in my roasting box. It was, if I say so myself, fall-apart perfect. This year, I also formed a new band to play for the event. We call ourselves Shady Grove and started with some old-time tunes including “Shady Grove,” moved on to bluegrass (“Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms”), and then of course, finished with a few classic Grateful Dead tunes including “Eyes of the World.’’ View a few photos here. (Playing guitar with one’s 20-year-old daughter’s boyfriend is a unique bonding experience.)

You have all heard about the problem with honeybees dying off. Well, this year, I am changing tactics. I took off only a modest amount of honey, leaving most of it for the bees. (This means that they can feed off of their own honey instead of sugar water.) I am also foregoing the usual chemical strips that beekeepers put in their hives in the fall to kill mites. It’s all-natural or nothing this year. (Maybe we have been stealing their honey for too long and over-medicating them as well?) I’ll let you know how it goes.

Since we have been overrun with bears this year, I tied a game camera to a tree in the middle of a wild blueberry patch, hoping to catch one walking by. (The camera is motion-activated and runs off of batteries.) I did catch something large, but not a bear. Click here for the photo!

Charlie, Whitney, and I took a “Huck Finn” rowboat ride one afternoon in August, ending up at the covered bridge over in New York State. We saw ducks, a bald eagle, hawks, and a large blue heron. (No fish, however.) It was like a nature adventure ride at Disney with no lines. We also went up to Beartown to look for the wreckage of a small airplane that had crashed years back. We never did find it but plan on a second outing before deer season. It’s pretty wild up there, although in the winter the logging trails are used for snowmobiling.

The Best of America’s Test Kitchen 2009 has just been published. Since we work on so many recipes during the year for our two magazines and all the cookbooks we publish (and our two television shows), I find this volume an easy and quick resource for our “best” recipes. Of course that is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, but it’s nice to have our favorite stuff all in one place. When it first came back from the printer, I flipped through the pages and did, indeed, find some of my personal favorite recipes from the last 12 months: Drop Biscuits (no rolling required), Blueberry Scones, Almost No-Knead Bread (baked inside of a Dutch oven; fabulous crust), Skillet Barbecued Pork Chops, Grilled Brats and Beer (a simple recipe but a winner), Chicken Saltimbocca, French Chicken in a Pot (one of my all-time favorite recipes from our test kitchen and dead simple to boot), Foolproof Pie Dough (this one uses vodka to make it easy to roll out so it bakes up flaky), and Apple Slab Pie (this is a huge rectangular pie, much like a Pop-Tart, and feeds a crowd). It was a good year for recipe development, and our best work is right here, all in one book.

If you would like to order The Best of America’s Test Kitchen 2009, we’ll give you a 30% savings off the $35 cover price (you’ll pay just $24.50) and put a copy in the mail in short order. This book also makes a nice gift for someone who likes to cook but who may not be familiar with our work.

By the way, our new television show Cook’s Country is launching this month on public stations around the country. Just log on to www.cookscountrytv.com for more information and a tour of the house and test kitchen. (We are taping season two right now.)

I leave you, of course, with a Vermont story. A young man asked a Bennington horse trader what he wanted for a mare.

“I’ll take a hundred and a half for her,” the trader said. “But she don’t look so good.”

They haggled a bit and, finally, the new owner went off with his purchase. He was back again the next day and pretty riled up.

“What’s the matter with that horse,” he demanded. “She ran me right off the road.”

“Been blind for a year,” the horse trader admitted. “Told you that she didn’t look so good.”

All the best.

Christopher Kimball
Founder and Editor
America's Test Kitchen