Tal just sent me a link to what looks like a very promising new website: The City Cook.

It speaks particularly to people with small kitchens, and anyone who prefers a home-cooked meal to nightly takeout–so far it’s not totally bursting with content, but what’s there is very helpful. (And actually, it’s kind of nice to have a limited quantity of info–easy to absorb, so then you can keep up with it each week.) It won me over with the big picture of artichokes, but there’s a lot more…

On the same theme, Melissa Clark has been writing a really excellent column in the New York Times, every other week or so. Called “A Good Appetite,” it presents a dish and the thinking–often extemporizing–that went into creating it. This week’s is particularly good, because she talks about how she ruined a soup, how she fixed it, and how she made it better the second time. Here it is, though you’ll have to register to read it: “A Soup with a Difference, Born of Adversity and Error”.

The fact that many of the columns are based on her being hungry for a particular something, then going on to figure out how to make it, is one of the more convincing arguments for learning how to cook.