Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

My personal Top 20:
1. Bacon and Potato Omelette (I'm from germany and can't live without my "Bauernfrüstück")
2. Pasta with a garlic sauce
3. Spaghetti with meatballs
4. Roasted Chicken
5. Kao Pad (I'm also half Thai, and grew up with this dish)
6. Pancakes
7. Steak
8. Pizza
9. Potato Soup
10. A good Sandwich
11. Satay Sticks
12. Mashed Potaoes
13. Meatloaf
14. Gravy
15. Thai Sausages
16. Green Cabbage and Smoked Pork Chop
17. Spareribs
18. Quesadillas
19. Burger with some Fries and Fried Onions
20. Double Mud Chocolate Cake

You should mention who the pastry chefs are at these places - they don't get the recognition they deserve.

Okay I know no one is looking at this, but I thought of the cheapest and most fun dish.

Carmel corn!
1lb of popcorn is 99 cents. Popcorn has a ratio of 40-1. So lets say you can make 20 cups of popcorn with a quarter of the bag. Next you will need sugar 2 cups approx, salt, and baking soda, well you can look up the recipe. Its so cheap!

2 small boxes vanilla pudding + milk req. by directions
1 reg. sized container of cool whip
1 box graham crackers
1 can store bought chocolate icing (I like the darker, or fudgier kinds, but any will do)

Prepare the pudding and mix with the cool whip. Lay out crackers in a single layer, trying to fill in the whole area as well as you can on the bottom of a 9x13 pan, and spread half the pudding mixture on top. Carefully lay out another layer of crackers on top of that--they sort of float on there. Carefully spread the second half of the pudding mixture and float another layer of crackers on top. This layer it's important to make sure you cover as much of the pudding as possible with the crackers and not get any pudding on top of the crackers. You will use the icing to frost the top of this, and seal the pudding/crackers underneath it. You want to aim for a thick layer of icing, sort of gluing the crackers together to form an icing crust on top. You can refrigerate this overnight before the event, and in fact, it's best if allowed to sit overnight, because the crackers absorb liquid from the pudding and get soft. You want to let it chill for at least a few hours before serving. My MIL calls it "chocolate eclair" and it is so good, I started taking two of them with me when I took any, because it goes so fast. Cheap and ridiculously easy.

Probably too late, but get 2 boxes of dark chocolate brownie mix. Mix together with crushed Oreos and bake both boxes together in one 9x13 pan. Make sure to underbake them a little so they stay moist and fudgy. People will think they are homemade and will only set you back a few bucks.

For years I went to Martha's Vineyard in August and entertained
using a cookbook I bought at a local bakery--Scottish Bakehouse
Cookbook by Isabella White. I used it until the pages came unglued
and put a rubberband around it. Julia inspired me to just use a
cookbook as a starting point and create your own style. Thanks, Elaine

The French Chef, of course! When we were married 38 years ago, my husband-to-be's next door neighbor gave us a Swing Way can opener and a copy of The French Chef. I have been using both all these years, but the French Chef has many more miles on it. I was 19, had never cooked and knew back then, in a very un-feminist way, that the way to a man's heart was through his stomach. It worked! I love this book and always will.

Urban Italian: Simple Recipes and True Stories from a Life in Food, by Andrew Carmellini. I'm a vegetarian, but there are still plenty of recipes for me to try. I repeatedly take it out of the library. Please, someone buy me this book for Christmas!

An autographed copy of Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook. One evening after a school dance, friends descended on my parent’s home and one of them piped up, “Where’s the eggs benedict?” I popped into the kitchen and shortly produced something resembling poached eggs with Hollandaise. (One egg never made it past the side of the stove.) From that first effort, I prepared several other winning recipes like Knockwurst in beer. Fast forward 15 years and dozens of other cookbooks and I am co-author of Passport to New York Restaurants and auction correspondent for Wine Spectator.

The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen by Grace Young. The dishes really tastes like the ones I had growing up.

The James Beard Cookbook ~ my very first cookbook from which I learned that there was more to cooking than my mother's standard operating procedure of putting a hunk of meat under the broiler, plopping frozen vegies into pots of boiling water, and pitching potatoes into the oven to bake.

Better Homes & Gardens New Cook Book, my mom used hers all the time and now that I'm away from home I use the one she bought for me! just the classics : )

My grandmother's cookbook, which is a collection of her own recipes as well as others she's cooked and tweaked to make her own throughout the years