Recipes By Mark Bittman
974 recipes found
Grilled Lamb Chops With Mint Chutney
Chicken With Vinegar
Jean-Georges Vongerichten learned how to make this recipe from the great Paul Bocuse, who added it to his repertoire while cooking for Eugenie Brazier, his teacher at La Mère Brazier in Lyon, France. Chicken with vinegar is one of the great poultry dishes from that area, where the chickens are considered by many to be the best in the world. Mr. Bocuse insisted that it was neither the amount of work nor the cost of ingredients that determined the worthiness of a dish, but how it tasted. The variations are numerous, but the piercing flavor of vinegar is so dominant that it matters little whether you use shallots or garlic, thyme or tarragon. One technical note: Most wine vinegar sold in the United States has an acidity level of 7 percent; many French vinegars are just 5 percent acidity. So it's best to cut strong vinegar with some water.
Grilled Swordfish With Fig Relish
Pilaf With Meat
Grilled Fish Fillets or Steaks
Fish steaks are relatively foolproof — they’re practically designed for grilling. It always helps to make sure the grill is clean and well oiled just before you put the fish on. Just hold some paper towels in tongs and dip them in a small bowl of oil, then rub on the grates.
Chicken Under a Brick
It isn't easy to cook chicken so that its skin is crisp and its interior juicy. Grilling, roasting and sauteing all have their problems. But there is an effective and easy method for getting it right, using two ovenproof skillets. A split chicken is placed in one of them, skin side down. The other skillet goes on top as a weight, which helps retain moisture and insures thorough browning. A couple of clean rocks or bricks can be used instead of the second skillet. (If the weight of choice doesn't seem terribly pristine, it can be wrapped in foil.)
Braised Beets With Sour Cream and Chives
Fried Hominy
Cyril Renaud's Citrus Gravlax
Peas With Halibut
Real Ranch Dressing
This is real ranch dressing, not something bound with preservatives and corn syrup, a creamy, savory topping for mixed greens and a cool dip for summer days. You make it in a jar with a tight-fitting lid, which you can then use to store it in the fridge for a few days.
Broiled Fish With Green-Tea Salt
Maya Citrus Salsa With Red Snapper
Xec (pronounced “shek”) is a sweet, sour, juicy citrus salsa from Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, and it makes a brilliant match with almost any kind of fish, cooked almost any kind of way. The combination here — orange, grapefruit, lemon — is not traditional to Mayan cooking, nor is it a mandate. Add lime if you have it, a bitter orange if you can find it. Don’t skip the minced habanero, though, which adds a bit of heat and yet more flavor. The fish starts on the stove for a few minutes, and is soon moved to the oven to finish cooking, for a total time of less than 10 minutes.
Grilled Meat Skewers With Bay Leaves
Collards Braised In Red Wine
White Beans With Squid And Broken Noodles
Chicken Meunière
Traditionally, the term “meuniere” refers to fillets of sole that are floured and sauteed quickly, then finished with lemon juice, parsley and browned butter. But there’s no reason to be parochial about it. This is a fast, surprisingly elegant approach to boneless, skinless chicken breasts, or cutlets of pork, turkey or veal.
Parsnip Gratin
Each recipe below is based on a given root, but feel free to mess around. Bake beets instead of celeriac; make creamy potato soup, braise carrots, braise parsnips and so on.
Prune-Stuffed Gnocchi With Vin Santo Glaze
Saffron-and-Mushroom Barley Risotto
Many vegan dishes (like fruit salad and peanut butter and jelly) are already beloved, but the problem faced by many of us is in imagining less-traditional dishes that are interesting and not challenging. Here are some more creative options to try.
Chicken With Apricots
Chicken with dried apricots is hardly a new idea, but I had issues with its most common interpretations. For one thing, they were almost always cloying; the routine addition of cinnamon and cloves does nothing to offset the apricots' sweetness and makes the dish taste more like dessert than dinner. For another, they were usually stewed rather than braised, turning the chicken skin sodden. I brown the chicken in a nonstick skillet with no fat, and that works well. A tablespoon or two of butter, stirred in at the end, will make the sauce richer. Or you can render some bacon, remove it, and brown the chicken in the bacon fat, then crumble the bacon and stir it in at the end of cooking. Finally, any dried fruit can be used, or a combination; with the short cooking time, even prunes will remain intact. But be aware that fruit dried with sulfur (the common method) becomes tender much faster than fruit dried organically, which needs a couple of hours of soaking before cooking.
Curried Sweet Potato Soup With Apricots
Miso-Broiled Scallops
Miso, the traditional Japanese soybean paste, is one of those convenience foods whose complexity belies its ingredients: it contains only soybeans, salt and grain (usually rice or barley, though others are used too), inoculated with the Aspergillus orzyae bacteria and aged for up to three years. The production process is not unlike that for good hard cheese, and miso is frequently compared with Parmesan. It is equally complex, and both are known for the strong presence of umami, the Japanese word for the fifth taste (after salt, sour, sweet and bitter), roughly translated as ''deliciousness.'' Here, miso is combined with little more than scallops, then allowed to sit for a while before grilling or broiling. The combination and preparation are traditional, the equivalent of slathering something with barbecue sauce before cooking. Of course, miso is a far cry from barbecue sauce: its elegance is unmistakable.
