Ben Cooks Everything

I’ve written a few times now about how much I adore Melissa Clark’s recent cookbook, Cook This Now. In a year when culinary hero Jacques Pepin released an expansive career retrospective, Melissa managed to write the best cookbook of the year for my money (which is not to downplay the Essential Pepin, a truly essential work).

My admiration for her work led me to reach out to Melissa a few months back, and to my delight I found myself doing some freelance work on her blog over at melissaclark.net. Melissa’s been blogging recipes over there for years, but she wanted a page that would index all those recipes. As it turns out, there are over two hundred of them in all! I’m proud to tell you that as of today, that page is live on Melissa’s site, and there’s something for everyone on it. (more…)

Here’s one of those elegant-yet-simple Pepin dishes from Essential Pepin. Toss together tomatoes, bread (torn or cubed up), garlic, parsley or thyme, salt, pepper, olive oil and parmesan cheese. Put in a gratin dish. Bake at 375 for 40 minutes. Garnish with some more parsley or thyme, but only if you feel like it. Serve. Try not to eat the whole thing in one sitting. I think I ate half in the kitchen before I served it. (more…)

So, I’m a little late here, but you could certainly make this for Valentine’s Day, or the Super Bowl. Or to celebrate that you don’t have bedbugs, and that your paranoid freakout just that, nothing more. Wait, what? I digress.

For these I used toasted pumpkin seeds and dried cranberries, for their Christmas color scheme, and broken up pretzels, because I love any chocolate/pretzel combination. Recipe follows, adapted from this one from the Barefoot Contessa. (more…)

So, this recipe is something I made based on a Minimalist recipe for fish poached in soy sauce, which is a great way to cook any type seafood (flavorful and forgiving). As Bittman noted in his column, the scallions end up being the best part after simmering in the poaching liquid. I threw in some tofu and greens to round out the dish and served it over rice. Click through for the recipe. (more…)

This beef stew, the recipe from How to Cook Everything augmented with a whole lot of dried shiitakes, was a Fishner joint all the way: my brother and I collaborated in the kitchen to make a huge double batch of it (way too much, incidentally). Which is to say, it was all his fault that the beef came out dry and flavorless. Okay, fine, that’s not really true. I think we just picked out too lean a cut of meat. Dry meat aside, it was still delicious. I picked the beef out of my portion, and upped the amount of egg noodles. A fantastic meal, all things considered. (more…)

Shopping at the farmer’s market is great for a number of reasons. One of them is the interesting, lesser known vegetables you can get your hands on that are never seen at your local A&P. But what do you do when you get home with a bunch of parsley root? I’ll tell you, below, with a recipe to boot. (more…)

This Thanksgiving, we went to my cousins Sara and Ari’s place in Suffern, NY. Ari is a master of turkey roasting, and for three years now he’s cooked the best bird I’ve ever had. We also got to share the holiday with Ari’s family, which was a pleasure. In addition to the turkey, there was stuffing, butternut squash, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, quinoa, cranberry sauce, and more, all delicious.

For my part, I brought an enormous batch of potato leek soup (secret additional ingredient: Jerusalem artichokes) and a new recipe that I’ve been working on, a carrot salad with miso and ginger. I figured that with all that meat and starch*, a bright, crunchy raw vegetable would be a welcome addition to the Thanksgiving table. It’s equally good on the side of a turkey sandwich. Recipe below. (more…)

Last month saw the release of Essential Pépin, a comprehensive collection of recipes from Jacques Pépin’s 60+ year career. This is marvelous news. Instead of owning the 27 (27!) previous cookbooks the man has written, you can just hold on to this one. It has over 700 recipes, and they’ve all been revised and retested for this volume. (more…)

There’s a line in the introduction to the recipe for Stir-Fried Chicken with Leeks, Oyster Mushrooms, and Peanuts in Melissa Clark’s Cook This Now where she really gets to the heart of the matter on stir-fries:

And here’s what I’ve learned, something I’ve known in theory but never really lived: stir-fries are easy. They are quick. The hardest part is cutting up the ingredients, but once that is done, dinner practically is, too.

I can relate. Everyone is always saying this about stir-fries, but I never quite believed it in my heart of hearts. So far everything I’ve made from Cook This Now has been delicious, and all of Clark’s advice sound, which was enough to make me give this recipe a shot. (more…)

If you make beans from scratch, the cooking liquid is the best part. A smoked ham trotter and a couple pounds of beans cost about $3 in total and will leave you with more beans than you know what to do with (freeze them). Cooking them in the oven takes a lot of guesswork out of it for me, and works with or without a soak, though soaking reduces cooking time greatly. My usual method is below, along with a recipe for one of my favorite things to do with the beans: cook them with greens, which makes the most of their delicious broth. (more…)