[.ca] How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food (ISBN 0764562584)

From Amazon.com:
Mark Bittman, award-winning author of such fundamental books as Fish and Leafy Greens and food columnist for the New York Times ("The Minimalist"), has turned in what has to be the weightiest tome of the year. There are more than 900 pages in this sucker--over 1,500 recipes! This isn't just the big top of cookbooks: it's the entire three-ring circus. This isn't just how to cook everything: it's how to cook everything you have ever wanted to have in your mouth. And then some. Bittman starts with Roasted Buttered Nuts and Real Buttered Popcorn, and moves right along, section by section, from the likes of Black Bean Soup (eight different ways), to Beet and Fennel Salad, to Mussels (Portuguese-style over Pasta), to Cream Scones--and he hasn't even reached seafood, poultry, meat, or vegetables yet, let alone desserts. There are 23 sections in this cookbook (!) that reflect directly on the how-to of cooking, be that equipment, technique, or recipe. Every inch of the way the reader finds Bittman's calm, helpful, encouraging voice. "Anyone can cook," he says at the beginning, "and most everyone should." More than a few college kids are going to head off to their first apartments with Bittman's book under arm. More than a few marriages will benefit with this book on the shelf. And anyone who loves cooking and the sound of a great food voice is going to enjoy letting this book fall open where it may. No matter what the page, it's bound to be a tasty and rewarding experience. --Schuyler Ingle

Great book with a few problems:
I haven't done a lot of cooking in my life, and only recently I started cooking regularly for family. How to Cook Everything has been the only cookbook I've used in eons. Therefore, I don't have a good basis for comparison to other cookbooks. I can, however, compare the food I cook to what I eat and enjoy in restaurants. I've made about 40-50 recipes from this book. Some advantages of the book: - It assumes you know virtually nothing about cooking. There are sections on how to mince garlic, dice an onion, core a bell pepper... For me, and for many others, it's great. Experienced chefs can easily skip these parts. - It's huge. It has an example of just about every (Western) food you might want to cook. Certainly, one could go much further in each area by buying specialty cookbooks. - The philosophy of the book is ideal for home cooking. Pick good ingredients, add minimal flavorings, cook, and serve. Most of the recipes are fairly quick. Disadvantages: - The prep time of many recipes seems significantly underestimated, and often needs to be doubled. Maybe the time printed in the book is amount of time Bittman takes, but as more of a beginning chef, I can't fathom it. - Ingredients can be a pain to find, and what Bittman says is easily available in supermarkets often doesn't seem to be available anywhere around Harrisburg, PA (not exactly an out-of-the-way place), without checking dozens of specialty markets. What this and the previous statement mean is that cooking these recipes becomes significantly less easy to do after work. - My biggest problem is that the results, while generally good for home cooking, have been a bit hit-or-miss. I enjoy good restaurant food, and I'd like to think that I could cook the same quality food at home. Bittman's best recipes are excellent, food that I would praise in a restaurant, and it's a treat to find one of them. His worst recipes are purely average, or even a bit below. What I've surmised so far, although I've only cooked a small percentage of the book's recipes, is that Bittman is at his worst with foods that need a lot of added flavor or spice. I've noticed this in his Italian, Chinese, and Thai recipes - all of them seem to be clearly missing some crucial element of flavor. If I were more experienced as a cook, I'm sure I could identify what it was, but I'm not. Generally I think this is more a problem with quality control and scope than anything else - with 700 recipes, it's hard for Bittman to wholeheartedly recommend and repeatedly test all of them. I still have no problem recommending this book to everyone as a base cookbook, with the caveats above.

Stays on my counter:
I have owned this cookbook for at least four years. When I first got it, I hardly cooked anything that didn't come from a box, can, or jar. I was afraid to deviate from the recipe and found most cookbook recipes too complicated, with too many ingredients. This book changed all that. In this book, you are encouraged to improvise, and helpful pointers for doing just that are provided throughout. Every section explains the basics of that type of cooking, then tells you how to expand on that. The fruit and vegetable sections are the best, with an alphabetical listing of fruits and vegetables, explaining how to select them and what to do with them. I only wish I had the copy with the CD-rom. Oh, and I wish it came in a ring-bound format, as my copy is falling out of its binding now from so much use (and many of the pages are a bit sticky)!

A really useful volume...great!:
Well, my binding just wore out after six years! But I'm ordering another copy right away. This book literally has workable recipes for almost everything. Everyone will find nits to pick (mine is sate, which is served with some peanut sauce, NOT marinated in it! It's marinated in coconut milk!) but in general it is just fabulous, especially for encouraging you to get into the kitchen and check it out for yourself. My two examples, from this evening alone, are POPCORN and MUFFINS. I spent some years eating microwave popcorn, and then I stumbled across the "recipe" for cooking your own popcorn, just the way my mother used to do it. "Recipe??" Put some oil in a pan, throw in three popcorns seeds, cover, and wait. When they pop, put in the rest of the popcorn and cook, covered, shaking the pan occasionally. It'll all be done in five minutes or less, and it's really, really good! The cost of the popcorn could hardly be more than five or ten cents...maybe add another dime for the melted butter, if you want it! More than that, not one piece was even close to being burned, or excessively hot! Muffins... I recently got an oven, here in Thailand, and have been playing around with it. Lately I started making muffins, from an Australian muffin mix which costs around $4 imported. Now, I look at the actual recipe for muffins (flour, sugar, baking powder, milk, oil or butter, etc.) and then I look at the box of "muffin mix." Well, the mix contains (surprise!) flour, sugar, baking powder, and powdered milk. When I prepare the mix, I have to add an egg, some oil, and some water. If I make the muffins from scratch, I just mix together flour, sugar, baking powder -- and proceed as with the mix! Duh!! :-) My other favorite cookbook is the James Beard cookbook, which is still a classic in its third edition. Both of these books have one incredibly important feature for the cook living overseas: they will NEVER, EVER say something like "add one packet of Betty Crocker smorgasbord mix." When you're overseas, you can never buy this sort of pre-packaged Americana; all recipes have to deal with basic ingredients understood everywhere on the planet. Beef, flour, milk, rice, pepper, salt, chili, and so forth! Overall, this is just a great cookbook! Highest possible recommendation!

Can't Cook you say? You can now....:
I am known among my family and friends to be possibly the worst cook in the world. I even screw up Kraft dinner. With the help of this book I made the most delicious Prime Rib. Even my 'former butcher' father and Chef boyfriend agreed - and believe me, they'd tell me if it was horrible!! I also used the recipe in this book for Chicken satays.. delicious! Bottom line, reading the sections of this book that explain cooking techniques, cuts of meat, substitutions for ingredients as well as the fantastic, easy to follow recipes has taken the worst cook title away from me...

A Great Cooking Core Book:
I come from a restaurant family and am an avid collector of all types of cookbooks from vintage to Martha and I consistently grab Bittman's How to Cook Everything for how to "cut to the chase." His writing style is terrific for: explanations, definitions, useful tips and information, technique and recipes that I can't find in my vast collection of cook books. I must have in anyone's cookbook library.