Mark Bittman's Kitchen Express: 404 Inspired Seasonal Dishes You Can Make in 20 Minutes or Less

by Mark Bittman

Overview

Award-winning cookbook author and popular New York Times columnist Mark Bittman offers 404 quick, easy seasonal recipes, now in paperback.

DO YOU HAVE 20 MINUTES TO MAKE A GREAT MEAL?

In Mark Bittman’s Kitchen Express, “America’s foremost home cook” (New York Observer) presents more than 400 incredibly fast and easy recipes tailored to each season and presented in a simple, straightforward style. Bittman’s recipe sketches are the ideal mix of inspiration and instruction: everything a home cook needs to prepare a delicious, healthful, and cost-conscious repertoire of meals for any season and any time of day. And since they’re written with an eye for speed and flexibility, you can be cooking on a moment’s notice—just check the pantry or fridge and away you go. With Bittman’s trusted voice leading you, you’ll be in and out of your kitchen in 20 minutes or less. Bittman also includes a guide to the foods you’ll want on hand to cook the Kitchen Express way as well as suggestions for seasonal menus and lists of recipes for specific uses, like brown-bag lunches or the best dishes for reheating. You may never order takeout again!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416575672
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	06/21/2011
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	7.18(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

Mark Bittman is the author of Food Matters, How to Cook Everything and other cookbooks, and of the weekly New York Times column, The Minimalist. His work has appeared in countless newspapers and magazines, and he is a regular on the Today show. Mr. Bittman has hosted two public television series and has appeared in a third.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

The simple format of Kitchen Express belies all that it has to offer. Here are 101 incredibly fast and easy recipes for each season — 404 in all. The experienced home cook can play with each to great advantage, yet at their core, they're recipes presented in the simplest form possible, understandable and readily executed by anyone who's done some cooking.

As a group, they are precisely imprecise. This is unusual for recipes, but it's long been my belief that the most specific recipes are the most limiting. Specificity is fine for baking, where the chemistry among the ingredients often determines success or failure. But in savory cooking, where amounts can vary wildly — there's almost never a critical difference between one onion and two: A "head" of broccoli might weigh one or one-and-a-half pounds; a steak may be three-quarters to an inch and a half thick — to try to force cooks to follow recipes demanding precision robs them of the ability to improvise, to relax, to substitute, to use their own judgment.

Jacques Pepin once remarked to me that the old adage about never stepping foot in the same river twice holds true for recipes also: You don't start with the same amount of ingredients, they're not at the same temperature, they're not the same age or from the same place, the ambient temperature and humidity are probably different, as are your equipment and mood. Everything is different, and the results will be too.

These little recipes acknowledge that up front. I don't really care how much garlic you use in most recipes, so "some" is as good as "a teaspoon." Similarly, garnishes are garnishes: You use more, you use less, you leave them out — it shouldn't matter. "A carrot" in a soup could certainly be a big one or a small one, and so on. So I rarely give exact measurements, unless proportions are critical.

This style of cooking is about three things: speed, flexibility, and relaxation. If you read one of these recipes, if it inspires you, and if you have the ingredients (or something approximating them) to throw it together — then go into the kitchen, assemble what you need, and have at it. Twenty minutes later, max, you'll be eating something delicious. What's wrong with that? Copyright © 2009 by Mark Bittman

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“I’d buy any cookbook Bittman wrote.”

—The Miami Herald

“This is a man who loves food in the most unstuffy way possible.”

—The Chicago Tribune

Editorial Reviews

I’d buy any cookbook Bittman wrote.”
—The Miami Herald

“This is a man who loves food in the most unstuffy way possible.”
—The Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher