The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion: The All-Purpose Baking Cookbook — Classic Cookbook

This cookbook has the honor of being The First. The first cookbook I fell in love with, the first cookbook I bought with my own money (and at a time in my life when a $35 cookbook constituted a major purchase!), and the first cookbook that brought me success in the kitchen. It would not be stretching it to say that this book is at the root of my food writing career — had those gingersnaps not been so very perfect or that first strawberry-rhubarb pie not been such a smash hit in those first tenuous days of falling in love with food, who knows where I might have ended up?

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Ten Ways to Make a Pork Butt Last All Week (Or Just All Day)

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Though it’s one of my favorite big-party dishes, a slow-roasted pork butt is also an ingenious way to get food on the table all week long, or parsed out over a month or two. A typical five or six pound boneless pork butt will yield a nice pile of cooked meat. Once you have your mountain of shredded pork, the possibilities are almost limitless.

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