It seems that for the most part everyone is just too busy these days and in order to continue to get food on the table and eat well we need food that is nutritious and delicious but in record speed. I’m not talking about every day because there are days (weekends especially) when I like to slow down and really take my time to cook, but during the week there are definitely days when I need something delicious for dinner that doesn’t take long to prepare and cook and will keep everyone happy. I’ve tried using my slow cooker which is ultimately long slow cooking (where you do nothing) with fast and easy preparation but so far have yet to be wowed so How to Cook Everything Fast by Mark Bittman seems like the perfect solution…Good food fast.
When I
received my copy of How to Cook Everything Fast by Mark Bittman it was like
Christmas had come early! The doorstopper of a book (and I mean a doorstopper)
has over 1000 pages and is packed with 2000 recipes and lots of invaluable
advice on ingredients, cooking techniques and plenty of other information that
is both important and very helpful. When you flick through the book the first
obvious downfall is that there are absolutely no photographs. It’s probably
just as well since it is already a monster book and photographs would just add
to it but if you are someone that has to have photographs you will be
disappointed. Ordinarily I am that someone but for some reason it didn’t really
bother me with this book once I had gone through it…. Maybe because it seems
more like a culinary encyclopaedia ….regardless, with this book I was ok
without the pictures.
The book has
14 chapters devoted to recipes including Soup and Stews, Pasta and Noodles,
Beans and Tofu and Meat as well as additional chapters on how to prepare your
kitchen for speed, how to shop for speed and lots of others fast strategies.
So what
about the recipes?! Well the downside to reviewing a book with 2000 recipes is
that it is virtually impossible to narrow down that many recipes and pick only
a handful to test, especially because there were so many I wanted to try. In
the end however I had to pick what really appealed and I finally chose 5
recipes which admittedly doesn’t do the book much justice when there are so
many other hundreds and hundreds of recipes I want to make! Still time
restraints and a limit to how long this review could be was of major importance
so 5 recipes it was!
