Mastering cooking times in America

When I moved to the US almost three years ago (Kronos is a devouring god alright), the last thing on my mind was that I would need to relearn to master cooking times. This problem completely caught me off guard. There are three sets of issues I have been experiencing, caused by three very different things:

Cause No. 1: A matter of taste
Often the cooking times recommended in most American books seem to differ vastly from those that I was accustomed to in Europe. The differences are particularly striking when dealing with vegetables. Americans seem to like their vegetables (carrots, green beans, peas, snap peas) on the raw/crunchy side of things. In most of continental Europe we enjoy vegetables cooked as not to resemble stones. This is one of the reasons why I rarely order certain type of vegetables at the restaurant here: I don't enjoy to have stones in my mouth...

Examples abound: all of the vegetable recipes in Barefoot Contessa's Back to Basics: Fabulous Flavor from Simple Ingredients have recommended cooking times that are far too short to my taste. Pan roasted root vegetables ready in 15 minutes? No way those roots are going to be edible in 15 minutes! In fact, I let them roast for at least 25 minutes, at the very least.

Cause No 2: mistakes
Then there are cooking times that are, simply, wrong.  Last night I cooked an onion soup from Julia Child's The way to cook. According to the recipe, onions (2 1/2 pounds of them, 1 kilos) should have been caramelized after 30 minutes. I have news for you: the freaking onions started to caramelize after 90 (ninety, not thirty) minutes, and were finally caramelized after 2 hours, that is. 120 minutes! The result was outstanding - if I may say so myself - but the time issue left me puzzling (and googling this thing, it turned out that Julia Child's recipes with caramelized stuff are often criticized for their messed up cooking times).

Mistakes can be found in cookbooks from everywhere in the world, they are not a US prerogative. The fact remains, though, that I am finding a lot of them in US books. But this could be also for the simple fact that I am cooking from them more often than from other books.

Cause No. 3: the oven
Then there is the trickiest issue, and this has to do with the oven. Every oven is different from the others, but here in the US I have the impression that ovens dry foods a lot faster, while cooking them slower. Which is a problematic combination at best, when you actually know your oven, and it becomes a freaking mess when you are new to the oven. The number of baked goods I had to throw away because they were as dry as a desert is countless.

So here I am, at 38, trying to relearn my cooking times...
sss