Posts Tagged ‘How to Cook Everything’

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Join Slow Food USA for just $1 – today only!


2011
09.30

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Posted in Food, Steals and Deals | 2 Comments »

This Foodie Friday we’ve got a super important question for y’all: do you like your food slow?

Slow Food USA stands for real food, grown by real people. They’re a great organization that sponsors all kinds of events to raise the bar for organic and sustainably produced food, and to educate consumers on the choices they make every time they pick up their forks (like the upcoming Richardson Farms tour here in Austin). Slow Food is all about real food — not the kind that comes in a box. But they’re also about supporting the farms and farmers that grow your fruits, veggies and even your meats.

In short, their motto is “supporting good, clean and fair food.”

For the month of September, they’ve dropped their usual membership fees of $60 down to a “pay what you can” system, in order to add more voices to their advocacy group. If you can afford to donate $30 or more, you’ll receive a farmers’ market tote made of sustainably-sourced cotton. But even if you can only afford a $1 donation, you can still join!

I just donated a buck myself, to support their good work. Because while living on a Shoestring doesn’t have to suck, it also doesn’t have to mean eating sub-par food.

If you’ve got a buck to spare, I strongly suggest taking advantage of this temporary fee waiver (which ends today!) and joining the Slow Food network. As an added incentive, the first 60 people to donate will receive a free Mark Bittman iPod or iPad app. You can choose from How to Cook Everything (reviewed on our site here) or How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.

Join the Slow Food movement and stand up for your right to clean, healthy food!

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Cooking apps: How To Cook Everything On The Go


2010
05.02

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Posted in Recipes | 3 Comments »

Here at Shoestring Austin, we like to blend deliciousness with cheapness. In our quest for delicious, cheap food, we have naturally downloaded many a free cooking app from the iTunes store. Unfortunately, as with many things in life, when it comes to free cooking apps, you get what you pay for.

Enter Mark Bittman, aka “The Minimalist.” New York Times food writer Bittman is all about cooking inexpensive, minimally time-consuming recipes with good, fresh ingredients, and has written several excellent books on the subject, including the brashly titled How To Cook Everything. And now, there’s an app for that: How To Cook Everything On The Go. (Click on the link or image below to download from the iTunes store for the iPhone or iPod Touch.)

For just a buck ninety-nine ($1.99), Bitty will literally teach you how to cook everything, without having to connect to the Internet. It’s a great self-contained app that offers easy access to a wide variety of recipes, kitchen basics, ideas for quick dinners and even lists compiled by Bittman like “Top 102 Essential Recipes,” “10 Soups to Eat Hot or Cold,” “16 Sauces for Any Simply Cooked Tofu,” and “15 Meat Dishes That Are As Good or Better The Next Day.”

With Bittman’s cooking methodology, it’s all about getting good, fresh ingredients and not screwing them up. His recipes are simple (or minimalist) mainly because he will teach you how to mix and match recipe ideas with whatever you’ve got in your cupboards, how to keep the right ingredients stocked at all times, and how to quickly and easily prepare straightforward meals. Most recipes offer a “variations” tab that will show you how to change up your old favorites, to keep things interesting, and they’re often cross-linked to accompanying dishes that pair well.

Truly, a great app to invest in, and at $1.99 it’s well worth the price.

One of the recipes I’ve recently tried from the app is the Radish Salsa, which offers a unique take on an old favorite. While Bittman doesn’t include tomatoes in his recipe, Celebrity Intern saw yellow tomatoes on sale at the grocery store and couldn’t pass up a deal, so we tossed in a few for the following colorful and tasty results:

Photo (and yellow tomatoes) by Celebrity Intern

Looks great, tastes great, and can be served up solo or stuffed into the taco of your choice. Yum!

Ingredients for this salsa include: chopped radishes, English cucumber (the long skinny kind), red onion, scallions, garlic, jalapeños or serrano chiles, lemon juice cilantro and salt and pepper. Toss in a few tomatoes (red or yellow) if you like, or download the app to check out Bittman’s unique Thai-inspired variations on the theme.

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Simple pleasures: Caesar salad


2010
02.07

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Posted in Recipes | 1 Comment »

Y’know, I had never been much of a salad freak, but when my husband started making me delicious—and easy!—Caesar salads with just a rotisserie chicken, some Romaine lettuce, Parmesan cheese, and store-bought extra-garlicky Caesar dressing, I was hooked. I even wrote about this simple “recipe” in my previous blog. Since we’ve moved to Austin, the Caesar salad is still in regular rotation for dinners at our place, but without the dressing we’d been loving in Montreal, we’ve been sampling various American brands in a quest to re-create the deliciousness of our Canadian favorite, Renée’s Mighty Caesar.

Sad to say, so far we just haven’t found anything that measures up to that pure garlic kick we love. (Heck, I even emailed Renée’s to ask where I could find ‘em here in Austin, but so far their customer service department hasn’t bothered to reply.) We’ve tried Ken’s Creamy Caesar, Marzetti’s Supreme Caesar (they make a mean Ultimate Blue Cheese dressing that we use as a dip), Marie’s Creamy Caesar, and Safeway Select Fresh Garlic Caesar. The closest we’ve to the Holy Grail of the Renée’s Caesar is a mixture of Ken’s and Safeway’s Caesar dressings, and even that’s only okay.

What we really need to do, though, is whip up some homemade Caesar dressing, complete with anchovies!

Here’s the recipe I’ve got from Mark Bittman (the New York Times’ Minimalist) that I want to put to use, one of these days:

This recipe is from Bittman’s How to Cook Everything: The Basics, which is an excellent book (and now an iPhone app!) for anybody on a shoestring budget looking to get away from Kraft Dinner and ramen noodles on a nightly basis. It’ll teach you everything you need to know, and serves as a great Bible in the kitchen, the way some people look to Betty Crocker cookbooks or Julia Child. Since Bittman’s a lifelong minimalist, he’ll teach you how to produce big flavor from just a few good ingredients, and how to get the most of out of even the barest of kitchens (the dude actually cooks brilliant meals in a classically cramped NYC apartment with one of those miniature stoves and refrigerators, so he knows whereof he speaks).

In the meantime, I would suggest spicing up the Caesar with a turkey breast or even pork cutlets, pan-fried to perfection, if you think you’d be into it but don’t have the rotisserie chicken on hand. It’s a surprisingly versatile salad, and impresses people when you present it with real, hand-grated Parmesan cheese. I think that’s probably the key to looking good in the kitchen, in general, as a friend of mine once confided that her husband swore she was a brilliant chef solely based on her ability to buy the “good” Parmesan and grate it herself.

Rock on over London, rock on Chicago. Caesar salad in the hizzouse!