Best Cookbooks of 2008 and the Only One You Really Need to Make Family Dinner

The wonderful thing about beautiful cook books and impressive food blogs is that they celebrate good food, made at home. They can inspire, and encourage, you to try new things. Food porn jokes aside, it is great entertainment to leaf through a wonderful cooking book. Food and foodie blogs with those great photos are fun and useful in different ways. Search-able recipes on the Internet is the ultimate convenience as you try to figure out what to make for dinner on the fly. The bad thing, of course, is feeling intimidated by the complicated steps or ingredients and/or feeling like your own cooking can never live up to that standard.

This is one reason I have a renewed appreciation of Mark Bittman, both his books and his Bitten Blog. I used to feel like his books were a little too dumbed down. But our old Mark Bittman "How to Cook Everything" cookbook tells a different tale. Its pages are literally falling out of the binding and it is held together with old cooking grease and string, stained and strained from frequent use. Writing this blog and listening to parents who want to have family dinner but don't know where to begin, I have to recommend his cookbook as a great place to start. It's really is the only cookbook you need. Use his book and take his advice, like the French chef in "Ratatouille":

Anyone can cook, and everyone should.

Short-cuts, simple steps, and quick cooking tips are the way to make cooking everyday work for busy families. Plus, unlike so many of the recipes that pop up on Cooks.com, you can really count on him. Nothing spells home-cooking disaster more than a "quick & easy" recipe that turns out to be inedible. Get down the basics, then added flourishes, steps, or new ingredients to keep it interesting. Bittman's new revised edition will be under our tree this year and will again be pressed into service. (Here's a review from Cookbooks We Love, to show I'm not the only one who feels this way!)

A quick round-up of other recommended 2008 cookbooks or blogs to give or to treat yourself to, especially if you already own and use Bittman!

Best Blogs for Foodies, Tara Parker-Pope, NYT Well Blog, 12.12.08
Bon Appetit's Blog Envy, List of great food blogs, 12.08

Best Cookbooks of 2008 from:
NPR
epicurious
Project Foodie: Baking
Cookbooks for Your Holiday Gift List, Tara Parker-Pope, NYT Well Blog, 12.02.08
Food and Wine
Al Dente Blog's report on Amazon's 2008 List

And in the "No Excuses" category:
So Your Kitchen's Tiny. So What? Mark Bittman, NYT, 12.13.08
Anatomy of a Minimalist Column, Mark Bittman, NYT Bitten Blog, 11.17.08

Worth Fighting For

Martin Klimas for The New York Times

Food and food politics were the leading topic of the New York Times Magazine this week (Food Fights! 10.12.08). So many interesting and informative articles to peruse. Mark Bittman gives a personal, cook's perspective on how attention to food can improve your health and lifestyle. But food policy reaches beyond personal health and well-being; it is comingled with the economic health of the nation, energy dependency, and national trends in morality and morbidity. As usual, Michael Pollan gives us some shocking stats on the state of the (food) union. He also offers wise words and innovative solutions for how to rebuild and improve America's food system.

Pollan says that the next President will have to address the nation's food crisis. I'm not so sure. Health insurance has been a crisis in this country for over 30 years, yet it has only recently become a campaign issue with any life. (Bill Clinton was one of the first, believe it or not.) Even so, health insurance reform is a perennially "left behind" because strong lobbyists oppose meaningful change. I trust Obama, who at least has eaten arugula in his lifetime, to be ably equipped to deal with complex issues surrounding food. Yet, food policy is not easily wrenched from the hands of agribusiness and pork barrel subsidies, just as the health insurance companies and conservative lobbyists have ably undercut health insurance reform.

Still, good food, and all that represents, is worth fighting for. It's a fight you can take on personally, at home, with all the choices you make for you and your family around the dinner table.

Why Take Food Seriously? Because Your Life Depends on It. Mark Bittman, NYT 10.12.08
Farmer in Chief. Michael Pollan, NYT, 10.12.08
Attack of the Tomato Killers. Doug Fine. NYT, 10.12.08
A country so polarized that consuming arugula has become a political act. John Schwenkler. Plenty. 10.6.08

Tips and Inspiration for Home Cooking

Catching up on my food blog reading this week, I found some great posts on home cooking from the New York Times blogs. In her Well Blog, Tara Parker-Pope interviews Mark Bittman and he has great tips on how to start "home cooking" for the intimidated or time-pressed. Kate Stone Lombardi has a lovely article about enjoying cooking for herself and her husband, a family of two, now that her kids are grown and in college. (They come back for favorite home-cooked meals, naturally!) Plus, I found some cookbook suggestions, Family Style Food Blog, and tips from Chowhound.

Lessons in Home Cooking, Bittman Interview in NYT Well Blog, 3.28.08

Joy of (Still) Cooking, Kate Stone Lombardi, NYT, 3.30.08

Readers' ideas for Best Cookbooks (about 250 comments!) NYT Well Blog, 3.20.08

Family Style Food A blog with interesting stories and recipes, lovely pictures, and a "family style" focus, that is beautiful food that you might be able to put together for your family dinner.

Home Cooking Section of Chowhound. Lots of Articles and Ideas for Home-Cooking Foodies

Bittman Blog

I just discovered Mark Bittman's new Blog Bitten. It looks fantastic, with lots of simple, quick to make recipes that should be an inspiration to us family cooks who often need a good meal in minutes. Beautiful photos to boot; gotta love the Times' production values.

I have Bittman's How to Cook Everything and I often read his The Minimalist column in the Times. I made his Pernil recipe on Super Tuesday, not realizing the irony of serving pork on election night until it was on the plate. Still, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with his recipes. They are often terrific, just the right balance of simplicity, speed, and quality. Yet I have definitely been burned by his methods. Take too many short-cuts and the quality suffers. If the final result of the dish is poor or mediocre, you wonder why you expended any energy at all. First time cooks might not realize that some of his short cuts compromise the end result and they might just give up.

I have searched for an "everything, everyday" cookbook to replace my battered Bittman, but I have had little luck. I've been scanning bookstore shelves and searching on Amazon, but I haven't been impressed by the general cookbooks offered. It's strange that there are so many faddish, Food Network cookbooks out there, yet so few reliable new standards. I have lots of cookbooks, mind you. I have Julia Child's, The Way to Cook as well as her classics, and The James Beard Cookbook works for basic roast chicken, steak, and burgers. I have other old-fashioned standards that can be great for cookies or cake, but just don't work for modern cuts of meat. I have specialty cookbooks that I love for specific cuisines: Chinese, Italian, Vegetarian, Southern, BBQ and many more. Epicurious.com works if you have a specific ingredient in mind and a well-stock cabinet of spices and special add-ins.

In the end, I keep going back to Bittman for basics, even though I'm occasionally wary or frustrated by the very simplicity he espouses. Maybe he is just the best out there. Any suggestions for a new basic cookbook?