The Minimalist Cooks at Home: Recipes That Give You More Flavor from Fewer Ingredients in Less Time

People are hungry for ways to simplify their cooking--without sacrificing quality or taste. Now you can satisfy that hunger with The Minimalist Cooks at Home.

Mark Bittman, author of the New York Times column "The Minimalist," brings one hundred of his innovative recipes (many never published before) right into your kitchen. But The Minimalist Cooks at Home is so much more than recipes. It features Mark's personal quick-cooking lessons, shortcuts, and ideas for variations, substitutions, and spin-offs.

Mark doesn't believe in arduous techniques, long lists of ingredients, and even longer hours in the kitchen. Instead, with a few choice ingredients and a few easy steps, dishes such as Paella, Fast and Easy; Ziti with Butter, Sage, and Parmesan; Spicy Chicken with Lemon-grass and Lime; and 15-Minute Fruit Gratin can be on your table in no time.

And by encouraging versatility, The Minimalist Cooks at Home allows cooks of all skill levels to create a tailored repertoire of sophisticated dinners. This is modern cooking at its best--flexible, fast, and fabulous.

Mark Bittman's New York Times column, "The Minimalist," is a much-consulted source for easy but polished recipes. The Minimalist Cooks at Home features these less-is-more recipes plus others never before published--formulas that require a minimum of technique and/or ingredients. Bittman's dishes draw on the world's cuisines and, taken together, represent what might be called a new kind of home cooking. Anyone seeking delicious everyday food that's quick to put on the table yet satisfies the demands of modern palates should embrace the book. In succinct chapters that cover the major dish categories, salads through desserts, Bittman offers fare like Roast Cod with Tangerine Sauce, Chicken Under a Brick, Real Paella, and 15-Minute Fruit Gratin. These approachable, flexible dishes should enter the repertoire of cooks at all skill levels, as well as please those they feed. Bittman also includes recipes that illustrate a particular cooking technique or sequence; his Creamy Broccoli Soup, for example, presents a formula--three parts liquid, two parts vegetable, one part dairy--that can be applied widely to create new dishes instinctively. Cooking lessons like these, plus shortcuts and multiple suggestions for flavorful variations, make the book particularly useful. With photos that illustrate a number of the techniques, and recipe notes that further explore dish anatomy, the book delivers on its promise to provide strategies for good eating with little fuss. --Arthur Boehm