Five recipes you can’t live without

Some nights I sit at our kitchen island and spend hours reading through my favorite cookbook, turning up the corners of its pages, marking the dishes I want to try. The book chronicles my cooking adventures: the best recipes smudged with hastily penciled notes in the margins, well-worn pages stained with watermarks, wine marks and who knows what else.

If you don’t own a copy of How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman, I recommend you purchase one. Immediately! HTCE offers flavorful, simple (never boring) dinner recipes that allow for a good dose of “kitchen improv” – like adapting cooking techniques from the meat section and applying them to various savory dishes from the vegetable section, or swapping listed ingredients with whatever happens to be in the fridge.

I consider this cookbook my food bible and use it most every night. I don’t even have to search for my go-to dishes. The pages flip open automatically to the places where I’ve broken and flattened the spine over and over, meal after meal.

Here are a few of my favorite HTCE dog-eared recipes I know you won’t be able to live without:

1. The Most Delicious Chicken Ever The easiest way to roast chicken. Use a whole chicken, chicken parts or just thighs. Stick with olive oil, salt and pepper as suggested, or instead substitute sesame oil, turmeric, cilantro, green onion, garlic and cumin.

2. Cooking bread scares the bejeezus out of me! How to knead it? When to let it rise? Jim Lahey’s No-Work Bread creates delicious, fluffy, chewy bread with no heavy lifting needed. Plus, it makes the house smell like a Parisian boulangerie. Paired with a rich slather of Gorgonzola Dolce, it renders me incapable of doing anything other than eating more of it.

3. Bouillabaisse Trust me on this one. It doesn’t sound like an easy dish but it is. Ignore the long list of ingredients. Frankly, any available seafood will do. And whatever you don’t have handy can be deliciously replaced with a can of white beans and Italian-style spicy sausage. Believe me, master this one and you’ll forever impress guests.

4. If bouillabaisse seems too rich try instead Roasted Shrimp with Herb Sauce for a quick, easy and healthy meal. Cook it in a cast-iron skillet. Substitute cilantro or basil or whatever herbs you’ve got in the fridge. Plus, it goes well with Jim Lahey’s bread recipe. You’ll need something to sop up all that shiny green seafoody goodness left in the bottom of the roasting pan.

5. Finally, this one isn’t a dinner recipe but I consider it the most important part of cooking: a glass of Dona Paula Malbec. It’s incredibly intense, heady and heavily purple, and my favorite pairing with all of the above.

Tracey Hope-Ross

Pregnant mama who tells stories & believes in magic. Infatuated with Bergman & Bacall. Secret crush: Gregory Peck. I dance often to Billie Holiday, follow my heart, love yoga, & digging in the dirt.