mark bittman how to cook everything fast

Assign specific prep work to be done during natural downtimes in cooking.įor the most part, these techniques work and you start looking for ways to apply them to your other recipes.

Use techniques like grating or slicing things so they cook faster, using the food processor, or mincing multiple ingredients all at once.

Do things in the right order, like preheating oven, preheating pans, or boiling water first.

Streamline recipes down to critical ingredients, or substituting easier ingredients when possible.

Every recipe is laid out so you can see the entire thing with the book open on a stand (see image below).

Clearly indicate whether it will take 45, 30, or 15 minutes to make.

Here are some general observations on how this cookbook tries to differentiate itself from the many other cookbooks out there. There are some good techniques to streamline your home cooking. But don’t expect nice pictures, as color pages are expensive. It cost me $21 shipped from Amazon, so if you measured cookbook value by recipes per dollar or pounds per dollar, you’d be a happy frugal camper. At over 1,000 pages and 2,000 recipes (including suggested variations) crammed inside, you probably won’t be bringing this to the grocery store with you. This cookbook is the size of a large phone book (for those of you young enough to remember phone books). 😉 ) I bought How to Cook Everything Fast: A Better Way to Cook Great Food because Mark Bittman has been a long-time advocate of cooking at home and it received positive reviews including a 4.4/5 average rating on Amazon. (So far I’ve managed to lose over 20 pounds by cooking at home and eating less of what I cook at home. Anytime you cook anything, it’s a success story.As part of my ongoing effort to Cook It Yourself in 2015, I’ve been trying out new cookbooks.

You can have scrambled eggs with mushrooms, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes I just want a bowl of rice with some stuff on it. I go there because I don’t want to think about the food. I have this Japanese restaurant in my neighborhood that’s not bad, but it’s just not that great. That means not every one of those meals is going to be the best thing we’ve ever had. We want to be cooking of the nights we’re at home. It’s corny to say that perfect is the enemy of the good, but it’s true. If you don’t set yourself up for failure, it’s for exhaustion.

That’s not always a bad thing, because it can push you into a place you might not go otherwise, but it is a thing that can damage confidence rather than build it. 'I would say that the most common mistake of people who decide they’re going to cook something on a weeknight is over-ambition-they do something that’s past their level of comfort.

Mark bittman how to cook everything fast