Websites:

There are really two periods in my life: Before Elise and After Elise. BE I set the stove on fire trying to boil water. BE my shortbread cookies led to, ahem, gastric difficulties. BE my hardboiled eggs had a closer resemblance to golf balls.

And then there was Elise. Elise and her beautifully designed website, her careful tutorials and tips, her recipes each tested again and again. I love Elise.

AE I not only know what ‘deglaze’ means, but I can do it successfully without catching anything on fire. AE I do not make shortbread cookies, I make shortbread pie crust for homemade rhubarb pie. Who the hell even knew what rhubarb was before Elise?

Go to her website. Go. Go. Everything there is incredibly delicious. Everything there is beautiful. Magical. And simple.

You’re looking for a recipe. Let’s say banana cream pie. You type ‘banana cream pie’ into Google. Up pop thousands of recipes, all different, all completely inscrutable. You just wanted a damn banana cream pie recipe. How hard is that?

Turns out, not very.

If for whatever reason I can’t intuit a recipe and Elise doesn’t provide a magical guide to perfection, I hit up Tasty Kitchen. Like a lot of websites (the majority of the internet food world), it’s a conglomeration of user recipes BUT unlike most recipe resources, many of the recipes at Tasty Kitchen are done by well-respected food bloggers but conveniently stored in one easy place.

This means: PICTURES, instructions that generally make sense, PICTURES, useful ratings and reviews, and PICTURES.

Tasty Kitchen, oh marvelous Tasty Kitchen, I’m rather quite fond of you.

Books:

You ever wonder what the difference was between a muffin and a cupcake? I mean, beyond the fact that one’s got a layer of delicious (preferably cream cheese) frosting and the other, well, doesn’t?

You haven’t? Really?

Because this is, honestly, one of those philosophical quandaries that keep me up at night. What the heck is the difference between one of those gargantuan chocolate cakes masquerading as muffins in the break room and an actual chocolate cake? It looks like chocolate cake, it smells like chocolate cake, but there it is, pretending to be a muffin. What gives?

Michael Ruhlman knows the answer for Michael Ruhlman knows all.

Ratio isn’t a recipe book. It’s a cook book. Confused? It’s okay. Ratio doesn’t have recipes for zucchini bread, pumpkin bread, banana bread. Instead it provides the quintessential formula for quickbreads (also known as muffins) from which any of the above recipes are derived. And not just quickbreads. Bread. Cake. Cookies. Sausage. Everything. Anything. The basic, no fuss formula and an interesting explanation behind the science and purpose of cooking. It’s the building blocks for cooking, the foundation for you to try anything, add anything, and invent your OWN recipe.

Do you smell that? That’s the smell of freedom.

So Michael Ruhlman gives you the bare bones, structural formula to make anything you damn well please. Fantastic! But what if all that freedom is a bit too much? It’s a bit like your first semester at college. You can do anything. But is underwater basket weaving really the right thing to do? Should you really be triple majoring in electrical engineering, sociology, AND literature?

College provides academic advisers to talk you out of that particular academic suicide. And so do I. Because I’m really quite fond of you and I would hate for your first adventure into culinary freedom to end with something even the dog won’t eat.

Meet your culinary counselor, The Flavor Bible. It provides some fascinating literature on the relationship of tastes, temperatures, textures, and other fun things. And then it gives you the Bible. An index of every flavor, every ingredient hundreds of professionally trained chefs can think of listed with their complimentary flavors.

It. Is. Awesome. The perfect compliment to Ratio. I’ve got other recipe books. Loads of ‘em. But these two? These two are my one-two punch into culinary paradise.