Hooray! Bittman strikes again!

My favorite NYT food feature has a new edition -- this time Mark Bittman provides us with capsule recipes for 101 seasonal salads. He's become an increasingly passionate advocate for a plant-dominated diet, so I look forward to these mostly-vegan and vegetarian recipes with health and good taste in mind.

Bittman strikes again

I have been following @bittman on Twitter, who is none other than our beloved Minimalist. Yesterday he posted a link to his Bitten blog, which had a recipe for Roast Chicken with Cumin, Honey and Orange. I immediately began craving this dish, so I went to the supermarket on my way home from work and got a chicken. One nice thing about this dish is that you're likely to have all the ingredients but the chicken already in the house. Anyway, it was beyond easy to make -- I love dishes like this that require you to dirty only one small dish other than the roasting pan (see also Donna Hay's cookbooks). You can't really get away from the kitchen while it's cooking, because it has to be basted every 10 minutes, but I found that was a value-added aspect, because it made me sit at the dining table with a magazine and a glass of wine for an hour.

The chicken came out glossy and crisp, with delicious juicy meat. We had it with some string beans dressed with olive oil, salt, and garlic. Just perfect.

Daily Bittman

My time-honored approach to holiday shopping is the old "one gift for you, one for me" method, so while buying myself stocking stuffers, I picked up the How to Cook Everything page-a-day calendar for 2008. It's actually a recipe box stuffed with excellent, simple Minimalist recipes, and my only complaint is that you don't get 366 of them, but a few days share each page. However, it comes with month and type of dish dividers so they can be organized, you can take them with you, and it's going to be very helpful at that time of day when you sit there at your desk going "what the hell am I going to make for dinner?"

Today's recipe is for "Sweet Simmered Pork Chops" in a soy-sherry-ginger sauce that doesn't even require you to brown the chops first. I'm definitely going for it.

UPDATE:
This dish was AMAZING and easy. The only problem was that after I removed the cooked chops to the oven to keep warm while I reduced the sauce, I got caught up on the Internet and let it burn. So I had to remake the sauce, but it wasn't that much of a big deal, and so worth it.