Rating: 
Summary: Simply Splendid!
Review: For years, I thought that 'real cooking' was for people with unlimited time. Having spent my adult life as a working mother, AND a non-creative 'eater', my cooking has long been limited to basic, efficient, but not very inspiring meals. When I decided that I wanted to become a better cook, I checked out Amazon and found this book. I wish (as does my family!) that I'd found it years ago. From scratch? with fresh foods? Make my own soups? Mark Bittman made me a believer with his down-to-earth, clear writing, unpretentious style, and chrystal-clear instructions.Don't like some of the ingredients in an interesting recipe? He offers 5, 7 or even 15 variations in near-by list! Bake my own bread? I've been doing it now for 3 weeks and I am hooked at the ease of making low-cost, delicious sour dough bread. Pizza dough. Broiled chicken pesto. French Onion Soup. Making great stuff out of things I'd throw away (shrimp stock with 30 seconds of work and 20 minutes to simmer turns into a fabulous pasta sauce a week later. -- my great-cook brother was amazed and chagrined to learn this trick from his 'can't-cook' sister!) I could go on and on. I'm buying 3 more for Christmas gifts for each of my kids. What more can one say??
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Summary: Could become the backbone of one's cooking library
Review: Simpler and more user-friendly than The New Joy of Cooking, this book could become the backbone of one's cookbook library. For those of us who already know our way around the kitchen, but want a simple, quick reminder on, for example, carmelizing onions, mixed drinks, or making mustard from scratch, this is where to turn. Bittman's two dirty words are Convenience and Gourmet. His credo - that there's no reason to buy a box of processed macaroni & cheese when you can have pasta with butter, parmesan and sage in the same amount of time; that we need not aim for perfection and be intimidated by the prospect of cooking real, fresh, homemade food for ourselves and our families every day - is a welcome one. Especially a time when more and more cookbooks aim to transate the lofty heights of four-star restaurant chefs' creations for the home cook, clearly a recipe for frustration in the work-a-day world of most of us. Bittman provides standard, template recipes for classic American food and popular ethnic fare. Obviously, this is not the book to open if you seek TRULY authentic Thai, Mexican, or other foreign fare. However, if you hanker for, say, Indian potato pakoras, and don't have all day to hunt for ingredients and follow a complex recipe with unfamiliar techniques, Bittman offers a do-able and perfectly delicious alternative. I check his recipes as a guidepost by which to compare quirkier versions of the same dish from other sources. He gives you the standard for your average pound cake; now you can ponder why your cooking magazine wants you to add twice as much liquid. Once you have tried your hand at these classics, though the results may not always be extremely exciting, you will gain the confidence to explore a world of variations. And many of Bittman's own suggestions for variations, such as the onion and bacon in his basic quiche, are still simple and accessible, but also wonderful. It's quite a comprehensive achievement in one fat volume. I highly recommend owning it!
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Summary: My Bible
Review: I have had this book for over 4 years now, and I still love it. It is my bible. It is rare that I will think of something too cook and the item won't be in here. I especially love how he takes time out to explain foods, how they should look when you buy them, what different people use the item for etc. He also inspires me to experiment a little which is wonderful. This book is well work the money. I bought it back when it was $30 so you are getting it for a steal!! LOL
Rating:
Summary: This may be dumb but
Review: what sold me on this book is how he's included recipes even for the simplist things - like how to make popcorn from scratch. How many people under 35 know how to do that? I agree that the binding leaves much to be desired, though.
Rating: 
Summary: Helpful for Beginning and Experienced Cooks
Review: This cookbook is great if you are new to cooking or are more experienced generally but need basic tips in certain areas. Divided into convenient sections by type of food, the book gives you all the info you need to work with every type of food -- meat, fish, vegetables, grains, etc. This book really should be sub-titled Simple Recipes for Good Food, not Great Food, since everything seems to be good, just not out of this world. Unless you are an absolute beginner who doesn't know anything, The New Basics and other books have recipes that result in better tasting food, although the recipes there are slightly more time-consuming and complicated. One of the best features of this book is the lists the author has helpfully compiled -- sauces you can freeze, dishes you can make in less than 30 minutes start to finish, soups that make a good meal in and of themselves, etc. It's a huge help in menu planning for the week. It helps you allocate time and plan meals in advance. Great for working people who don't have that much time to cook. The book also contains useful information on shopping and setting up a kitchen. It really is terrific for someone without a great deal of cooking experience or who could use improvement with his or her techniques, and is also quite good for people who know who to cook but want good, simple recipes at hand or who need help with managing their kitchen time.
Rating:
Summary: Great book with a few problems
Review: I haven't done a lot of cooking in my life, and only recently I started cooking regularly for family. How to Cook Everything has been the only cookbook I've used in eons. Therefore, I don't have a good basis for comparison to other cookbooks. I can, however, compare the food I cook to what I eat and enjoy in restaurants. I've made about 40-50 recipes from this book. Some advantages of the book: - It assumes you know virtually nothing about cooking. There are sections on how to mince garlic, dice an onion, core a bell pepper... For me, and for many others, it's great. Experienced chefs can easily skip these parts. - It's huge. It has an example of just about every (Western) food you might want to cook. Certainly, one could go much further in each area by buying specialty cookbooks. - The philosophy of the book is ideal for home cooking. Pick good ingredients, add minimal flavorings, cook, and serve. Most of the recipes are fairly quick. Disadvantages: - The prep time of many recipes seems significantly underestimated, and often needs to be doubled. Maybe the time printed in the book is amount of time Bittman takes, but as more of a beginning chef, I can't fathom it. - Ingredients can be a pain to find, and what Bittman says is easily available in supermarkets often doesn't seem to be available anywhere around Harrisburg, PA (not exactly an out-of-the-way place), without checking dozens of specialty markets. What this and the previous statement mean is that cooking these recipes becomes significantly less easy to do after work. - My biggest problem is that the results, while generally good for home cooking, have been a bit hit-or-miss. I enjoy good restaurant food, and I'd like to think that I could cook the same quality food at home. Bittman's best recipes are excellent, food that I would praise in a restaurant, and it's a treat to find one of them. His worst recipes are purely average, or even a bit below. What I've surmised so far, although I've only cooked a small percentage of the book's recipes, is that Bittman is at his worst with foods that need a lot of added flavor or spice. I've noticed this in his Italian, Chinese, and Thai recipes - all of them seem to be clearly missing some crucial element of flavor. If I were more experienced as a cook, I'm sure I could identify what it was, but I'm not. Generally I think this is more a problem with quality control and scope than anything else - with 700 recipes, it's hard for Bittman to wholeheartedly recommend and repeatedly test all of them. I still have no problem recommending this book to everyone as a base cookbook, with the caveats above.
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Summary: Useful and fun
Review: "How to Cook Everything" is the most useful cookbook I've ever owned. Each type of food has a "Basics" section which includes lots of preparation tips. The recipes themselves are detailed enough for beginners, and not so esoteric that you have to make a trip to a specialty grocery store every time you want to cook something. Especially helpful are the suggestions for expanding on each dish. For example, after the basic Chicken Kebab recipe, there are four modifications, including Chicken Kebabs in Yogurt-Cumin Sauce. I'm re-learning the way I prepare even the most basic things, like sandwiches and scrambled eggs! Who would have thought scrambled eggs could be so good? And the Pan-Grilled steak has weaned me from the backyard grill forever. No other cookbook would warn you that "clouds of smoke will instantly appear; do not turn down the heat." That bit of fear that your fire alarm will go off at any second just adds spice to the whole cooking experience. The breadth of this book is just amazing. Besides having nearly every type of Western cooking you can imagine, it also has recipes from Japan, India, Thailand, and... you get the idea. There is one drawback-this book has no photos, just a few hand-drawn illustrations. However, the book is just so huge that if it did have photos, it would probably cost much more than it does.
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Summary: A Great Cooking Core Book
Review: I come from a restaurant family and am an avid collector of all types of cookbooks from vintage to Martha and I consistently grab Bittman's How to Cook Everything for how to "cut to the chase." His writing style is terrific for: explanations, definitions, useful tips and information, technique and recipes that I can't find in my vast collection of cook books. I must have in anyone's cookbook library.
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Summary: Stays on my counter
Review: I have owned this cookbook for at least four years. When I first got it, I hardly cooked anything that didn't come from a box, can, or jar. I was afraid to deviate from the recipe and found most cookbook recipes too complicated, with too many ingredients. This book changed all that. In this book, you are encouraged to improvise, and helpful pointers for doing just that are provided throughout. Every section explains the basics of that type of cooking, then tells you how to expand on that. The fruit and vegetable sections are the best, with an alphabetical listing of fruits and vegetables, explaining how to select them and what to do with them. I only wish I had the copy with the CD-rom. Oh, and I wish it came in a ring-bound format, as my copy is falling out of its binding now from so much use (and many of the pages are a bit sticky)!
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Summary: A really useful volume...great!
Review: Well, my binding just wore out after six years! But I'm ordering another copy right away. This book literally has workable recipes for almost everything. Everyone will find nits to pick (mine is sate, which is served with some peanut sauce, NOT marinated in it! It's marinated in coconut milk!) but in general it is just fabulous, especially for encouraging you to get into the kitchen and check it out for yourself. My two examples, from this evening alone, are POPCORN and MUFFINS. I spent some years eating microwave popcorn, and then I stumbled across the "recipe" for cooking your own popcorn, just the way my mother used to do it. "Recipe??" Put some oil in a pan, throw in three popcorns seeds, cover, and wait. When they pop, put in the rest of the popcorn and cook, covered, shaking the pan occasionally. It'll all be done in five minutes or less, and it's really, really good! The cost of the popcorn could hardly be more than five or ten cents...maybe add another dime for the melted butter, if you want it! More than that, not one piece was even close to being burned, or excessively hot! Muffins... I recently got an oven, here in Thailand, and have been playing around with it. Lately I started making muffins, from an Australian muffin mix which costs around $4 imported. Now, I look at the actual recipe for muffins (flour, sugar, baking powder, milk, oil or butter, etc.) and then I look at the box of "muffin mix." Well, the mix contains (surprise!) flour, sugar, baking powder, and powdered milk. When I prepare the mix, I have to add an egg, some oil, and some water. If I make the muffins from scratch, I just mix together flour, sugar, baking powder -- and proceed as with the mix! Duh!! :-) My other favorite cookbook is the James Beard cookbook, which is still a classic in its third edition. Both of these books have one incredibly important feature for the cook living overseas: they will NEVER, EVER say something like "add one packet of Betty Crocker smorgasbord mix." When you're overseas, you can never buy this sort of pre-packaged Americana; all recipes have to deal with basic ingredients understood everywhere on the planet. Beef, flour, milk, rice, pepper, salt, chili, and so forth! Overall, this is just a great cookbook! Highest possible recommendation!
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