Ben Cooks Everything

A little off topic, but you guys have got to watch this segment from CBS Sunday Morning about school lunches in France. Trust me. Embedded below.

I was born in the wrong nation.

There are a lot of fried rice recipes in Mark Bittman’s repertoire, between How to Cook Everything, the Minimalist columns, and now the Food Matters Cookbook.  It makes sense: fried rice is delicious, versatile, a fridge-clearing dinner that can be as simple or involved as you like.  But this one from FMC is my favorite–the crisp browned mushrooms complement the brown rice I used perfectly. Click “more” to check out the recipe. (more…)

Well, the good folks at Simon and Schuster came through for me and sent over a copy of the Food Matters Cookbook! For at least the next month or so I’m going to switch the blog over to recipes from this new monster of a cookbook. I’m very excited: the Food Matters philosophy is one I more or less subscribe to, with varying degrees of commitment, and nearly every recipe in this book looks like a winner.

Beans are central to the Food Matters philosophy. They are convenient, versatile and healthy, but they are also hearty and filling and can be delicious. In Food Matters, and now the Food Matters Cookbook, Bittman writes alot about how deprivation is not recommended. “Feel free to eat the foods you’d miss, just in smaller portions and less frequently,” he writes. As such, you find a lot of recipes where a small amount of meat flavors a huge amount of beans or veggies or grains. Having beans on hand all the time is encouraged (as it was in How to Cook Everything), and cooking them yourself means they will be infinitely tastier. Keep reading to see the best way to cook beans. (more…)

This recipe, from Bittman’s new Food Matters Cookbook, is typical of the book’s style and message: subverting the usual egg to vegetable ratio, it’s healthier than your usual frittata, but it’s also tastier and heartier.  Generally, a frittata (like, say, the frittata in How to Cook Everything) has a lot of eggs and usually some milk or cream, plus some vegetables for flavoring.  The Food Matters frittata, however, uses two cups of vegetables to every egg.  Just enough to bind and let the other ingredients shine. (more…)

Bittman and company are getting ready to drop a monster on us: the long awaited (by me, at least) Food Matters Cookbook, which is a How to Cook Everything length cookbook based on the tenets laid out in 2008’s Food Matters. (more…)

Bittman’s Minimalist column this week is all about the food processor and what a wonderful tool it is. Every word in it is true (althought I once messed up food processor mayo, and felt bad about it, and now I feel terrible about it). If I paraphrased, I’d have to copy the whole thing, so just go read it now. If you have one of these, and it’s living in the back of a closet, get it out onto the countertop ASAP. (more…)

Yesterday was the start of Rosh Hoshanah, the Jewish New Year, and I’ll be celebrating tonight with dinner with my extended family at my parents’ place. Traditionally, you eat sweet things on Rosh Hoshanah for a sweet new year. The traditional thing is apples dipped in honey, but I like this wheat berry salad. (more…)

I was in Chicago last week. I’m by no means an authority on Chicago’s food scene, but I can say without any doubt that it has a bright, vibrant one that anyone, even a jaded native New Yorker, would be happy to live with. And oh, the hot dogs! And the tacos. (more…)

This is the time of year when the market is so full of incredible produce that you have to do almost nothing to it to make an incredible meal. Take this gazpacho: the tomatoes at market are so delicious right now, so bursting with juice and flavor and color, that it needed barely any of the seasoning called for in the recipe, just a dash of vinegar and black pepper to bring out the vibrant heirloom tomatoes I got from Eckerton Hill Farm recently. (more…)

One of my favorite dishes for tomato season, which is glorious full swing here in New York, is Pamela Sherrid’s Summer Pasta, which I have been making since I read about it in 2007 in a Times article by Amanda Hesser. (more…)