Taste 10, Looks 3*

The dish you see pictured above, that mound of mystery-meat-looking brownness sitting in a puddle of its own leacheate (a dandy term learned in Environmental Law class, and which my ignorant spell-checker does not recognize) is in fact one of the most delicious things cranked out of my kitchen in many a moon. Vegetarians can skip this post. It's a slow-cooker barbecued beef brisket, and the juice in the bottom is the delicious sauce, two cups of which were served on the side and are not pictured here. Now, I have a notorious and snobbish dislike for any type of cookery that includes the word "country." I lump it in the same category as cookbooks full of reader-submitted recipes, most of which tend to include canned cream of mushroom soup or are topped with a crunchy layer of breakfast cereal. And don't even get me started on mayonnaise.

That said, the latest arm of the America's Test Kitchen empire (namely "Cook's Country" magazine and the affiliated show) is an endeavor for which I'm willing to carve out an exception. The basic gist of CC combines the exacting, scientific approach of "Cook's Illustrated" with a more, for lack of a better term, family-friendly approach. The thing is, CI recipes are usually intensely delicious, faultless and reliable versions of familiar but perhaps slightly fancy foodstuffs - nothing terribly outre - but CC takes a simpler, "weeknight meals" approach to comfort food and dishes appropriate for a potluck. I still avoid the reader submissions - they strike me as sketchy - but I had to try this recipe for brisket.

The grill is my Achilles' heel, and I don't mess around with smokers (hoping to change that this summer). This brisket was rubbed with various red spices and canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (my new favorite ingredient), sat twiddling its meat-thumbs in the fridge for 24 hours, and then took a day-long sauna perched atop an inverted mini-loaf pan inside my slow cooker. Beneath said loaf pan was a tasty little mound of sauteed onions and more of the aforementioned adobos. At the end of the process, the recipe assured me that I would have two cups of liquid with which to gin up a sauce. At first, it looked like I had only a meager puddle, but raising the inverted loaf pan resulted in a mini barbecue-tsunami. The resulting liquid measured PRECISELY two cups. And THAT is how America's Test Kitchen ROLLS.

The meat was so tender that it essentially fell apart. The mess you see above is what happened when I attempted to cut it into slices. It was just about too spicy for the boys but perfect for me and the huz. I am considering making a few of these and serving the meat on buns at a Fourth of July bbq - what else, if anyone cares to suggest, would you put on such a sandwich? And since I have no patio furniture, would it be socially awkward to host a BYOC party, the "C" standing for "chair?"

*Mini- CWTD contest- name this pop-cultural reference! Prize: bragging rights. Maybe I will bake you something.