Heidi, the wonderful thing about Cook's Illustrated/Cook's Country is that, rather than being primers on cooking in general, they have different topical books (there is a "Best Chicken Recipe" for instance) that teach you to cook dishes of varying difficulty as you go. It's much more than just individual recipes thrown at you with the assumption that you have a certain amount of cooking knowledge. Besides lots of helpful sidebars featuring particular ingredients, techniques (e.g. what on earth to do to fennel to get it into the thin slices the recipe calls for), they basically assume, every time they develop and write a recipe, that you know next to nothing about cooking/baking, or about any slightly atypical ingredients (that part is probably not applicable to you, but they will go into detail about what the ingredient is/isn't, whether or not you can make substitutions, etc.). They head off any substitution disasters from the start, by emphasizing, for example, that you want pearl barley rather than regular hulled barley. Anyway, since neither of you would be eating barley, let me give you an example. This may be something Ruben would actually like so I will include the whole recipe verbatim.
Chicken cordon bleu
Serves 2
To help prevent the filling from leaking, use large (8 oz) chicken breasts and thoroughly chill the stuffed breasts before breading. We like Black Forest ham in this recipe.
4 thin slices deli ham (about 4 oz.)
4 oz. Swiss cheese, shredded (about 1 cup)
2 (8-oz) boneless, skinless chicken breasts, trimmed
12 Ritz crackers, finely crumbled
3/4 c. panko bread crumbs
3 Tbsp. unsalted butter, melted
1/3 c. unbleached all-purpose flour (they always use unbleached by default, but the world won't end if you use bleached)
1 large egg
1 Tbsp. Dijon mustard (which of course you could leave out or substitute regular mustard if that is inoffensive)
1. Adjust oven racks to lowest and middle positions and heat oven to 450. Following photos (there are 3 photos that show you how to prepare the chicken in detail), top each ham slice with 1/4 cup cheese and roll up tightly. Pat chicken dry with paper towels. Cut deep pocket in thickest part of breast and stuff each breast with 2 ham-and-cheese rolls. Season chicken all over with salt and pepper, cover, and refrigerate for at least 20 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, toss cracker crumbs and panko with the melted butter and bake on rimmed baking sheet on middle rack, stirring occasionally, until light brown,a about 3-5 minutes. Let crumbs cool slightly.
3. Place flour in shallow dish. Beat egg and mustard together in second shallow dish/plate. Spread cooled crumb mixture in third shallow dish/plate. Dredge one stuffed chicken breast lightly in flour, shaking off excess. Coat in egg mixture, allowing excess to drop off, then dredge in crumbs, pressing to adhere. Transfer to a clean baking sheet. Repeat with remaining stuffed chicken breast. Uncooked stuffed and breaded chicken may be refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 24 hours.
4. Bake on the lowest oven rack until the bottom of chicken is golden brown, about 10 minutes. Move baking sheet to middle rack, reduce oven temperature to 400 degrees, and bake until chicken is golden brown and registers 160-165 on an instant-read thermometer, 18-24 minutes. Transfer to platter and let rest for 5 minutes before serving.
That is from one of their Cooking for Two books, which present the obvious advantage of already having the recipes scaled down to serve two; so if the dish wasn't a hit, you don't have tons of leftovers to reckon with by yourself. This particular book features many recipes Ruben would not be interested in, but like I said, just reading through the recipes you will learn about cooking. On a recipe for Thai red curry with shrimp, there is a large box with information on shrimp sizing (what "21-25 per pound" means), how to efficiently cut carrots into matchsticks, and how to devein shrimp.
So that is my plug for this style of learning to cook. I have a Julia Child compendium (Julia's Kitchen Wisdom) which I thought would be a good starter book. It does have some useful charts for times and methods of preparing lots of different vegetables, but the problem is that she doesn't get specific enough for me, like she tends to assume I know more than I do about French food. As a novice I want the most specific directions, visual cues, etc. Cook's Illustrated will give you that. If they don't answer any questions that arise when I want to take on one of their recipes, I just google it and eventually will find the answer. Foodsubs.com is a nice reference for when you want to know the difference between cuts of meat (which are often bewilderingly named different things in different parts of the country), for example.
I am at a loss as to what to recommend, other than maybe 
