How To Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food [Paperback]

I was a very reluctant beginner, and I was initially discouraged with this work, because I found the author's suggestions on doing everything from scratch overwhelming. But another purchase, "How to Cook Without a Book," got me on my feet, and after a few good results, I found myself turning more and more often to this one. I now use it every day.

From it I have learned everything, from the basic to the mysterious, and after months of use I can honestly say I have never had a bad result. My family doesn't know what hit them, and their compliments have grown in stature until yesterday my husband announced that I am a better cook than his mother, a small, round Italian woman dedicated to her craft, and someone I hope never reads this. (: I have had so much success from every recipe I have used that I, um, well, I actually kind of like to cook now, which is a minor miracle considering how I felt about it before.

This book with the other I mentioned have changed my family and even social life. My family is delighted and eating far better than they were, and I am much more willing now to have people over, knowing I can serve up something warm and delicious, elegant or comforting, without panic and apprehension.

So it's 5 stars to my former 3, and a "thank you" to the author to boot.

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.

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!