"God I hope he is wearing his bow tie. That inspires me." The cute, twenty-five-year-old woman breathily confided to her friend as we stood in the serpentine book signing line at Cooks of Crocus Hill in St. Paul. The "he" she was referring to was Christopher Kimball of Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen. We had the pleasure of standing in line with a hundred other cooks while waiting to get books signed by Christopher Kimball and Lynn Rosetto Kasper. After the signing, we were lucky enough (thanks to Carl) to finagle our way into a Q&A/dessert-tasting session upstairs at Cooks.

The interactive session mirrored Rosetto Kasper's radio show, The Splendid Table, with a session of Stump the Cook and general cooking questions. The Stump the Cook session was especially interesting in that six of the forty-one guests yelled out ingredients, and Rosetto Kasper concocted a dish of salmon-based gnocchi with turnips and chard. Christopher Kimball, Desiree (my wife), and I took exception to the dish and the impossibility of making the gnocchi sans eggs and flour. Virtually all the other guests thought it sounded like a good idea and wanted to eat it without hesitation.

During the active Q&A session, the attendees had very interesting questions for Kimball, and when he was given time to answer, he did so with intelligence and humor. One of the questions was, if you could have only two cookbooks, what would they be? Kimball answered with Epitaph for a Peach and American Cookery, and Rosetto Kasper gave The Art of Eating and The Breads of France. It's interesting that neither author could truly answer the question because each chose one non-cookbook as a favorite.

Having been fans of Kimball for a long time, we found kinship with him in the passion for scratch cooking. As he quipped: "I don't grind my own cornmeal . . . yet."