Recipes By Mark Bittman
981 recipes found
Creamed Spinach Sauce
Playing steakhouse chef means dreaming up the sauces and side dishes that you would most like to see on the table. Creamed spinach gives you a classic steakhouse experience in sauce form, and makes the perfect accompaniment to a grilled rib-eye.
Pasta Alla Gricia
The star here is guanciale, which is cured jowl. It is increasingly easy to find, but if you don't have it, use pancetta or even bacon. (It won't be authentic, but it will be really good.)
Pasta With Chickpeas, Chorizo and Bread Crumbs
If you're a planner, you can soak and cook dried chickpeas for this easy pasta dish, but if you're not, no worries. Using two or three cans makes it a real cinch; you'll have it on the table in about 20 minutes. First, brown the chorizo or kielbasa and set aside. Toast the bread crumbs in the same pan with a smattering of minced garlic, and set that aside, too. Dump the chickpeas into the pan with a bit of their liquid and let that reduce a bit while the pasta cooks. After draining the pasta, toss it with the chickpeas and sausage, and heat through. Serve it in big bowls with bread crumbs scattered over the top and a few aggressive grinds of the pepper mill. Our favorite pasta shape for this recipe is conchiglie, or shells, because the chickpeas nestle inside like they belong there, but it will work with almost any small cut pasta.
Bulgur-Ricotta Pancakes
Mark Bittman's Pasta With Clams
Here is a simple, elegant take on pasta with clam sauce that serves as a beautiful, light dinner with salad, perfect in advance of a movie night or reading session on the couch with family or friends. The key to its success is using less pasta that you generally might, which helps place the focus of the dish squarely on the meaty clams.
Parboiled Brown Rice
Pasta With Meatballs and Herb Sauce
Before you use herbs as a main ingredient — it helps to know which ones work on a grand scale. Parsley, obviously, works in abundance: it’s clean-tasting, pleasantly grassy and almost never overwhelming. You can add literally a bunch (bunches!) of it to salad, soup, eggs, pasta, grains or beans. The same is largely true of basil, and you can use other mild herbs — chervil, chives, cilantro, dill, shiso — by at least the handful. (Mint is also useful but will easily take over a dish if you add too much of it. But all of these are great for making herb pastes, or pestos, alone or in combination. Use the same technique you use for basil pesto.)
Citrus Rice Salad With Parmesan
In all of American cooking there is probably no term less meaningful than “salad.” I’m racking my brain for a way to narrow the definition, but the best I can do is a dictionary-like “mixture of food, usually cold or at room temperature, with some kind of dressing.” That’s not saying much, but it opens a world of opportunities, especially when the base ingredient is rice, which offers a far wider variety of flavors and textures than any other grain.
Light, Fluffy and Rich Pancakes
Basic pancakes are simple to throw together and are guaranteed to delight a crowd. But go one step further, separating the eggs and beating the whites, and you turn the ordinary pancake into something almost soufflé-like. These also contain ricotta, for extra richness that doesn't weigh the pancakes down.
Pasta Aglio, Olio e Peperoncino
This late-night Roman staple is astonishingly full-flavored. Start the water before you do anything else, because the sauce takes less than 10 minutes start to finish.
Spicy Scrambled Eggs
By most, the humble egg is not considered substantial dinner fare, but these spicy scrambled eggs, which are incredible on their own, make a satisfying meal when piled into a burrito, teamed with rice and beans. Bittman’s cooking technique, borrowed from Jeans-Georges Vongerichten, calls for combining the eggs with butter in a cold saucepan then cooking until creamy and soft – not unlike loose oatmeal – with small curds throughout.
Paul Buxman’s Biscuits
Scrambled Eggs with Chicken Livers
Greek Scrambled Eggs
For a fresh and bright variation on your morning eggs, try strapatsatha, a simple Greek dish of scrambled eggs with tomatoes. It's as simple as can be: The best, freshest tomatoes you can find are grated on a box grater and reduced a bit, then scrambled with eggs, a little olive oil and garlic. A handful of tangy feta crumbles finishes it off.
Cornmeal Pancakes With Vanilla and Pine Nuts
Almond-Apricot Granola Bars
Many granola bars are assumed to be healthy, but aren’t. These are. A combination of granola, almonds, apricots and crisp brown rice, the recipe is wide open to interpretation as long as you keep the ratio of glue (the almond butter and honey mixture) to granola and mix-ins about the same. Mix everything together, press it into an oiled dish lined with plastic wrap, and throw it all in the fridge for an hour. These bars are more chewy than crunchy, and will fit well into a child’s lunch bag or a grown-up’s breakfast plate.
No-Bake Granola Bars
Here is a good alternative to a commercially made granola bar. It’s a flexible recipe, allowing for any number of additions: dried cherries, pistachios, peanuts, dates, orange zest. You could substitute a dried fruit purée (directions are in the notes) for the honey and brown sugar, providing a complex twist on the binding agents. You could add chocolate. Coconut. The possibilities are endless.
Vanilla-Fruit Smoothie
Ninety percent of the time, I eat savory breakfasts. But I don’t like to impose my will on others (at least not early in the morning), so when there are guests, I tend to make smoothies. I’m a big believer in frozen fruit, especially off season; it’s much more flavorful than, say, Chilean peaches.
Spanish French Toast
There is French toast, and then there are torrijas, the Spanish version. The origins of both are undoubtedly the same: yet another way to make good use of bread that’s no longer fresh. Though torrijas, like French toast, can be served at breakfast, they can also be a knockout dessert.
Herb-and-Olive Frittata
In this recipe, herbs are the focus, but to use herbs on a grand scale, it helps to know which ones work in that role and which ones don’t. Parsley, obviously, works in abundance: it’s clean-tasting, pleasantly grassy and almost never overwhelming. You can add literally a bunch (bunches!) of it to salad, soup, eggs, pasta, grains or beans. The same is largely true of basil, and you can use other mild herbs — chervil, chives, cilantro, dill, shiso — by at least the handful. (Mint is also useful but will easily take over a dish if you add too much of it.) I put most other herbs — epazote, lavender, marjoram and oregano, rosemary, sage, tarragon and thyme — in the category of strong herbs, which must be used more sparingly than mild herbs. You usually don’t want to use more than a tablespoon or so of strong herbs in a dish. This frittata uses generous amounts of both parsley and basil and lesser amounts of dill, mint, rosemary or thyme.
Chicken With Salsa Verde
Though there are a lot of ingredients in this recipe, it's a straightforward chicken saute-and-sauce combination. Brown the chicken -- dark meat is preferable -- then lightly brown the seeds, then soften the vegetables. The tomatillos, if canned, provide enough liquid; if you're using fresh tomatillos you might need to add a little water or stock, but not much. The chicken simmers in the sauce, and lime juice completes the picture. This is traditionally served with a host of garnishes, which I see as optional but fulfilling.
Welsh Rarebit
Anyone can lay a few slices of cheese on toast and melt them, but creating a thick sauce of cheese, beer and spices and then spreading it on toast creates one of the best late-night snacks I know. This is Welsh rarebit, or rabbit, a traditional British dish whose name has a long and complicated history, one we will not go into here.
Mark Bittman's Gravlax
Use king or sockeye salmon from a good source. In either case, the fish must be spanking fresh. Gravlax keeps for a week after curing; and, though it's not an ideal solution, you can successfully freeze gravlax for a few weeks.
Pasta Frittata
This dish is one recipe calling for leftover pasta that is actually worth planning for. It's portable, it's endlessly versatile, and it's practically foolproof. Substitute almost any cheese for the Parmesan (or leave it out altogether) and toss in any cooked vegetable or meat. Make it your own. One last bit of advice from Mr. Bittman: “The key to extreme enjoyment is to make sure that some ends of pasta pieces protrude from the top of the mixture when you put it in the oven. They will become crunchy, giving the leftover pasta yet one more pleasant dimension.”