Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

My fence-and-driveway-hemmed "tomato jungle" is keeping me busy! Our local (Cleveland area) farmers' markets can't compete with the one we visited on a short vacation to San Luis Obispo, CA... if I'd only had a kitchen!

San Luis Obispo, CA's Thursday night farmers' market beats any I've been to. It is both a fresh fruit and vegetable mecca as well as an all-out local street party. They shut down a main street for blocks and the restaurants come out and barbecue, street musicians play... I miss it dearly, as our little Saturday-morning market is nowhere near as festive, well-attended, or rich in variety.

On the central coast, CA stop in San Luis Obispo, on a Thursday night. Really, it is worth timing your visit around their Thursday night downtown farmers' market. They shut down blocks and blocks of the main drag and have restaurants bbq-ing in the street, farmers hawking their items, all kinds of people, music in the street, a great party. We love the town and timed our last-summer CA coast road trip around this very night.
In Santa Fe, stop at The Shed in downtown for enchiladas Christmas-style - with red and green enchilada sauce. This is a sit-down, medium-priced restaurant.
If stopping in Phoenix (not mentioned, but I think you might have to pass through), Pizzaria Bianca (or Bianco?) has some of the top-rated pies in the country, but the waits are long (get there when it opens, put your name in, explore downtown or hang out on their lawn/fire pit for a few hours - really! - and then enjoy a fantastic pie and authentic atmosphere. It's worth it.
Believe me when I say: there's nothing memorable about the food in Grand Canyon Nt'l Park. The views are, but the food - meh.
And if you're driving through the Napa Valley, be patient, and drive all the way to the northernmost part, Calistoga, for a funky, wild-west style town. If you're looking to pinch pennies, like we were, eat at, party in, and then go upstairs and sleep in the Calistoga Inn. Not fancy, shared (clean!) bathrooms, but runs about $99 per night - you won't find anything so well located for less than half that. There's a bike store down the street that'll rent you bikes and tell you which wineries are a comfortable distance for tasting!

Wow, that's long. Sorry.

We love spicy shell pasta with garlic, tuna, and peas.

I need to take a proper BBQ vacation down south; but so far the best BBQ I've had was in NYC, strangely enough, at Blue Smoke. Might've been all the delicious sides that tipped the scales, or the house-brewed beer, but I still remember it as the best ever.

Yum, cake. I love all kinds, but on the hottest day of the year, I love ice cream cake the best!

Love mini-shells with garlic, red pepper flakes and oil, maybe some onion, with a can of oil-packed tuna thrown in and sweet green peas. Parmesan me and call it dinner in 10-12 minutes!

I love my Wustof 7" Santoku. If you go by democracy alone, I think we've beat out the competition.

If my knives weren't a Christmas present, however, I would have done the go-to-the-store-and-hold-it thing.

I'd recommend the book to any home cook for its simplicity, approachability, and lack of pretension, 3 things I find lacking in most breadmaking cookbooks. The results are far superior to the "no-knead bread" I'd made before, especially considering the more immediate and lasting results - bread can be ready with maybe 15 minutes total of active time, about 3 hours from the time you start, but once you've invested that time there are 2-3 more loaves waiting for you (in dough form) in the fridge, ready within an hour or so.
There are very few books I purchase with no 'sneak preview' from the library, and even fewer that I use more often than this cookbook.
Visit my webpage for pictures, etc, or feel free to send me any more questions you have about the process.