Recipes By Mark Bittman
974 recipes found
Braised Fish, Pot-Roast-Style
Lobster With Pasta and Mint
Striped Bass Poached In Spicy Soy Sauce
Poaching fish in a mixture of soy sauce and water is a simple, fast method that adds gorgeous flavor to fillets, which emerge moist and succulent. It is also flexible and forgiving, with a cooking liquid that can accommodate a host of seasonings. Here those seasonings are sugar (to cut the saltiness of the soy sauce), scallions and an optional fresh or dried chile pepper (either minced or put in whole), but you could experiment with ginger, garlic, lime juice or other flavors. Combine all the ingredients, except the bass, in a skillet. Bring to a boil, add the fish flesh-side-down, and adjust the heat so that the mixture does not bubble too aggressively. The fish cooks in 8 to 10 minutes, until its flesh is mahogany-colored and doesn’t resist when you slice in with a thin-bladed knife. Serve on top of rice, garnished with the cooking liquid and the scallions, which are now limp and tender. Other fish, like cod, halibut, monkfish and salmon, also work, but keep an eye on it as it poaches — you will likely need to adjust the cooking time slightly.
Pasta With Cauliflower
This dish is derived from a Marcella Hazan recipe. It’s dead simple, and the cauliflower can be precooked a day ahead or so. Or, the whole thing can be made at once: cook the cauliflower in water, scoop it out and then, later, cook the pasta in the same water. It’s already boiling, and you want the taste of the cauliflower anyway, so why not? The cauliflower gets cooked more, in a skillet with toasted garlic, so don’t boil it to death, although you do want it to be tender. And in the original Minimalist recipe, from 2000, bread crumbs were added to the skillet along with the cauliflower, but since some pasta water is usually added to the skillet to keep the mixture saucy, the bread crumbs become soggy. Better, then, to stir the bread crumbs in at the very end. They should be very coarse and ideally homemade, and if they’re toasted in olive oil in a separate skillet before you toss them in, so much the better.
Ginger Fried Rice
This recipe comes to The Times from the fertile mind of the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Like all fried-rice dishes it begins with leftover rice (freshly cooked rice is too moist to fry well). It’s jasmine rice here, but white from Chinese takeout works nearly as well and is more convenient. Perhaps unsurprisingly — this is a chef’s recipe, after all — separate cooking processes are called for: ginger and garlic are crisped, leeks softened, rice and eggs fried. But no step takes more than a few minutes, and the results are absolutely worth the effort.
Olive-Oil-Poached Fish With Pasta
There are no fish I can think of that don’t cook nicely slathered in warm olive oil. Here, a mix of several varieties is tossed with pasta, tomato and herbs. How could you go wrong with that?
Beef Tartare Burger
Grilled Kofte Burgers
Pasta With Anchovies and Arugula
The original version of this recipe, which I wrote in 2000 to accompany a column about the many wonders of anchovies, is one of the rare Minimalist recipes I wasn’t entirely happy with when I re-examined it. The problem was the proportions of the ingredients. My thinking about pasta dishes has evolved, and the more-sauce-less-pasta approach that’s emerged is one that’s pretty brilliant, if I do say so myself. So, it was a bit of a shock to look back at my original recipe and find that, for four people, I called for a full pound of pasta but only two cups of arugula. The resulting dish is delicious, thanks to garlic and anchovies, but uniformly starchy and a bit lacking in textural and flavor contrast. You can barely even taste the arugula when there’s only a half-cup in each serving. So I decided to do a little tweaking. My new version contains almost equal parts cooked pasta and raw arugula. Thanks to the increase in greenery, Pasta With Anchovies and Arugula 2.0 is lighter and more interesting than the original, though no less satisfying.
Grilled Tuna Burger With Ginger Mayonnaise
Cumin-Spiced Lamb Burgers
Tarte Flambee
Braised Duck With Green Beans, Thai Style
Braised Goose With Pears
Slow-Cooked Duck Legs With Olives
Duck Stock and Confit
South Indian Eggplant Curry
Eggplant is good steamed or fried, but try making it in the microwave. The timing is forgiving in this recipe from reader Roopa Kalyanaraman, and the texture of the eggplant is mind-blowingly good, soft and not at all oily or soggy. Like steaming, but better.
The Mother Of All Butter Cookies
Chicken Skewers With Peanut Sauce
That peanut butter is relegated to the sandwich while sesame butter (tahini) is seen as an exotic food item is one of the wonderfully preposterous anomalies of American cooking. In the rest of the world, especially Asia, peanuts are special, used not only as a garnish but as a main ingredient in sauces. One such sauce incorporates coconut milk and classic Thai seasonings: curry paste or powder, nam pla, lime and cilantro. The coconut milk and peanuts make the mixture too powerful-tasting for most fish and too heavy for most meat. It is perfect, however, when teamed with chicken on the grill, especially boneless thighs.
Vanilla Meringues
With only a little practice you’ll produce lovely little mounds of meringue with curls like chocolate kisses on top. And when you grow tired of pale white ones, add a couple of drops of food coloring, or follow the recipe modification for cocoa-flavored meringues.
Oysters With Sausage
Methi Makai Kebab (Corn Kebab)
Leek and Cardamom Fritters
These leek fritters from Yotam Ottolenghi were featured in a Times Magazine article in 2011, and they are absolutely delicious, an easy answer to anyone asking for a vegetarian main dish. They’re somehow both ultratender and wonderfully crisp, sweet from the caramelized leeks and bright and riotously flavorful thanks to the abundance of herbs. You can substitute onions if leeks are unavailable. But try for leeks.
