Rating: 
Summary: Please help a non-cook
Review: This isn't a review as much as a plea to people who own this book for honest help. I've bought enough cookbooks that are supposed to have easy recipes only to discover pages of ingredients and instructions plus ingredients I've never heard of and will probably never use again. Additionally, I suffer from rosacea, so standing in a hot kitchen which, incidentally, faces west, does me in rather quickly. I'm tired of frozen dinners no matter how good (if that's possible) and would appreciate e-mail heading me to a good cookbook that isn't exotic (like the microwave book I bought teaching me how to cook brains and tongue). I'm just squeamish, but I do appreciate fruits and vegetables. I'm not a vegetarian. Sorry. I like a good steak, tacos, etc. Thanks. P.S. I couldn't write this review without rating the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Strange and Indispensable
Review: What a strange and wonderful book this is. I started here, and not with Bittman's other book, because I didn't want to be overwhelmed. The recipes are at once more exotic and (even) more simple than I thought they'd be. One can probably learn more about cooking from this slim little book than he would by reading The Joy of Cooking cover to cover. All the same, you won't find here recipes for meat loaf or macaroni and cheese. The book is too urbane and international in its approach for that. A dish has to be both simple and, somehow, elegant. Grown-up. Bittman sees fit to include recipes for things like duck and lemongrass ginger soup with mushrooms in this short primer-not things that, at face value, I'd expect myself to need or even want on a quotidian basis. But there's the rub. The reader quickly learns that, in Bittman's cosmos, virtually any ingredient is interchangeable with any other ingredient. Even a main ingredient-chicken or fish-can be and should be readily and unhesitatingly substituted for what's available in the refrigerator- right now. At the end of every recipe comes a coda called "With Minimal Effort," and it is here that the recipes transcend themselves to inspire and instruct. Here are the substitutions, additions, embellishments, variations and manipulations of the core recipes that transform this from being just a little book to being a little book that can change the way you cook.We shouldn't be running out to buy things. The mantra is making due with only a few high quality items that are already on hand. This is infinitely refreshing vis-a-vis a world of Martha Stewarts - cooks whose recipes seem to me rigidly conceived and which fetishize individual ingredients. Here, it's all about making intelligent substitutions based on a firm grasp of technique and knowing "where the flavor comes from." When I said the book was "strange," what I found so was the juxtaposition of certain recipes that - along with those for duck and lemongrass ginger soup - are so simple as to seem both obvious and antithetical to the book's overall sophistication. Not so. Once you get the hang of it, you learn that simple IS sophisticated. Often, more so than something with 25 different ingredients. Preparing a meal of linguine with olive oil and garlic can be nothing less than learning to cook all over again. I seem to recall making that, years ago, and yet this most pristine dish had fallen out of my repertoire. I had been brainwashed into believing that "more is more." Having reintroduced the dish, I want to make some substitutions with the very same dish tomorrow night: adding an herb here, a vegetable there. But not too many. I won't be making any special trips to the market. Bittman wouldn't want me to. Besides, too many ingredients might muck up the individual flavors, which is want I want to come through. One could probably make a case for the idea that to master all of the recipes in this book would lead one to be able to cook anything. As the author points out, recipes can be "symbolic" of other recipes. It's nothing less than an education to be in the presence of a teacher whose goal is to demystify cooking itself by helping us make these connections. My only bone to pick with Bittman is a tendency to underestimate the preparation time of some of the recipes. I myself have never peeled and minced garlic in less than fifteen minutes. If you can, you'll get even more out of this book than I did.
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