Yeah, he’s been a regular on serious eats since I was a teenager

I'm a big fan of the food lab.

A lot of cookbooks give you the steps, but not enough tell you what steps are most important, and what, specifically, you need to be paying attention to to get the best results. The food lab does stuff like telling you how the salt changes the chemistry of scrambled eggs, then doing samples of "cook immediately after scrambling", "wait 3 minutes", "wait 5 minutes", "wait 15 minutes" and showing pictures of how it changes the outcome, before telling you his conclusions.

When you understand the core bits, it allows you a lot more flexibility and variety in how you do the surrounding bits. (I like Flour Water Salt Yeast for bread for the same reason.) Too many cook books are more recipe books that don't teach the fundamentals.