Eggplant and chicken parmesan. Baked falafel with tahini sauce. Vegetable pancakes. If you want to bake any of these (really, really, really delicious foods) there’s one person you turn to. Mark Bittman. Formerly of the New York Times, he’s just released How to Bake Everything: Simple Recipes for the Best Baking. And he’s got a lot of ideas about food and the way Americans prepare it.
Three Takeaways:
- Don’t worry too much about being a perfect chef on your first attempt. Bittman says people should think about cooking like tennis. “No one expects to go out on a tennis court and hit the ball really well the first time they go out there.”
- Cooking benefits both your budget and your waistline. Bittman argues that “those who claimed that the food they were selling was more convenient than homemade food” have convinced the American people to turn to processed, industrial creations. Bittman believes we should embrace real, unadulterated food.
- How can we move away from an unhealthy and environmentally costly food system? Bittman wants to tax what he calls “non-food” items -- things like soda and junk food -- and use those taxes to subsidize fruits and vegetables.
More Reading
- Potato nik. That sounds good, right? Here’s Bittman’s recipe for it.
- And if you have a hankering for more Bittman recipes, here are a whole bunch.
- Bittman writes about how sugar taxes can help American cities.
