Ben Cooks Everything

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…)

I’ve admired Melissa Clark’s recipes for years now, mostly through her contributions to the New York Times’ Dining section. That led me to Greenlight Bookstore last week to a reading to celebrate the release of her latest cookbook, Cook This Now: 120 Easy and Delectable Dishes You Can’t Wait to Make. (more…)

Ratatouille, to me, is the perfect dish for this very moment of the year: fall is here, but summer produce is still all in season at the market. So you can stock up on zucchini, tomatoes, and eggplant, and then actually turn on the oven and make the dish without fear of collapsing in a puddle of your own sweat. (more…)

I’ve lately found myself cooking recipes from How to Cook Everything a lot less. It’s not that I don’t still love the cookbook; it’s still an essential text for me, the book I recommend to everyone that wants to learn a thing or two about cooking. But HTCE is, I’m starting to think, a little self-defeating. The more recipes you make from it, the less you need it. I’ve made so many of Mark Bittman’s recipes that (and I think Bittman himself would love this) I’m cooking more and more without recipes. I’ve gained the essential tools and techniques I need, and now I can fly on my own, like a little baby bird leaving the nest. Aw. (more…)

Parsley is really hard to find in Chinatown! It’s so hard to find the stuff that by the time you finally do find it, you may not even realize that it’s actually cilantro. Until you get it home. So, watch out for that. (more…)

I did this once before, with creamed spinach: skimped on the butter and subbed 1% milk for the cream or half and half. It doesn’t thicken as nicely, but you don’t feel quite as heavy when you’re done eating it. So, a trade-off. (more…)