20-minute Meals for Today's Cooks

I have a few things in common with Julie Powell.

If you don’t already know, she’s the hilarious, salty-tongued and eponymous blogger/author of Julie & Julia, the best-selling book and now movie (Friday) about her struggle to find meaning in life over a year by cooking all 524 recipes mandated by the art and cuisine of famed chef Julia Child.

For one thing, there’s our shared name. Also, we both love to cook, swear way too much and have a fondness for fiery food. Plus, we both have dark hair. And that’s it. Whereas Powell had buckets of time to follow all of Child’s recipes in her 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and patient friends like Gwen who didn’t mind waiting until 11 p.m. for Gateau de Crepes, I do not.

Rather, I have two kids, a partner and a dog, none of whom are particularly fond of either Rognons de Veau a la Bordelaise or waiting for dinner much past 6 p.m.

But I admire her enormously, cherish her culinary antics and wish that I, too, was her friend and waiting past bedtime for the calf kidneys to be done in her kitchen in Long Island City, New York. And so in homage to what she achieved — and I’m not referring to the extra poundage she gained by using a mountain of Dutch butter, gallons of cream and eating her way through the trauma of Charlotte Malakoff more than once — I recently took on a task more suited to the impatient temperament of my household. Mark Bittman’s new book, Kitchen Express comes with the kind of subtitle guaranteed to leave Juliaphiles shuddering and working mothers rejoicing. Like Child’s famous tome, it promises to expose you to a year’s worth of cooking — but in a fraction of the time by offering 404 Inspired Seasonal Dishes You Can Make in 20 Minutes or Less

. I, for one, have only a nodding acquaintance with Bittman, popular author of the New York Times’

column, The Minimalist. He’s also written the ambitiously-titled How To Cook Everything and the best-selling Food Matters

, a book that urges us to consciously eat less processed food and meat and more of the good stuff, this time to save the planet. The idea runs throughout Kitchen Express, which focuses on things that are available locally throughout the four seasons — and preparing them quickly. “When I learned how to cook, everybody learned to cook from Julia in those days, and me too. I had two kids and a pointer, so I’d take the recipes and shortcut the hell out of them,” he tells me, chuckling. “I’m not saying that a mid-20th century cook book is no good anymore, but times have changed.”

In fact, Kitchen Express is not so much a cookbook as a set of Mum’s recipes scribbled on the back of a paper napkin and translated into something approaching sense.

For example, they don’t have massive ingredient lists, persnickety amounts and precise measurements. There are tablespoons of this and that, but Bittman leaves the rest to your discretion. When he says “cut some bacon into one-inch pieces” for the Date, Bacon and Bean Salad, he means just that. You might add too much or not enough. When I point this out, Bittman shrugs his shoulders and says he trusts his readers to be experienced enough behind a frying pan to work the details out for themselves.

“It does presume a certain level of comfort in the kitchen,” Bittman observes. “Maybe that puts me in the minority of people in North America, but that’s still not a small number. People are definitely not eating out as much, but are they cooking more or just assembling pre-made stuff in the kitchen? I can just say that I’ve had my finger on the pulse for 30 years and I’m more optimistic than I ever have been that people are interested in what they’re eating. I think it’s moving in the right direction.”

The Challenge: Three recipes in 20 minutes

Over breakfast, I scan through the book for dinner suggestions. I am on a tight schedule tonightódinner has to be done by 6:15 p.m. so I can get to a motorcycle riding course at 7 p.m. — so it seems a good time to take fast recipes out for a spin. Many of the ingredients I already have, since the spirit of the book is about getting creative with common things. Suits me. Plus, I don’t feel like going to the store to find celery root. I settle on West Indian Pork Kebabs, warm Carrot and Couscous Salad and Asparagus with Sesame. Sure, the flavours span an ocean and two continents, but I live in a cultural mosaic. I can handle it.

First step: Review the recipes to see what I’m up against, then set the oven timer to 20 minutes.

Nothing tricky here, except that arm wrestling the pork off its bone requires a full two minutes. Plus, I drop a piece and the dog gets it. I puree the ingredients, then add chili flakes, just because. I’ve already used two knives, a cutting board and a food processor, so I get Will, my partner’s visiting 14-year-old son, to do dishes. This, I tell him, does NOT count as part of the 20 minutes. I can feel him rolling his eyes. I frantically rummage for skewers for the meat, find two and realize my eight-year-old has used 120 of them in three months of making crafts.

Second step: Cheat. Actually, cheat two ways: Get Will to peel and shred four carrots for the couscous salad while I e-mail the man himself. “Is it a cheat to blanche asparagus in the microwave? I say not.” Bittman’s answer comes back just as the microwave dings: “That’s what I’d do, the microwave. At least some of the time.”

Excellent. In two minutes, they’re hot, bright green and still crisp. I throw in the rest of the ingredients. Eyeballing the sesame oil bottle, I can’t tell if there really is two tablespoons in it, so I upend it all. What the hell.

Third step: Draft more help. My partner waltzes in from work and is immediately pressed into barbecue service. “Can I take a leak first?” he asks. “Use the backyard,” I snap. “Just get the barbecue fired up.”

Gonzo journalism is a demanding mistress, but I make a mental note to apologize later, anyway. Meantime, the recipe suggests boiling water to cook couscous: I prefer frying my spices to release the volatile oils, so I dump the kernels, cumin and oil, and put Will in charge of stirring. Finally, I add the water, carrots, a handful of golden raisins and some pine nuts, and call it done.

The timer goes off and although we take a few more minutes to wrap up — we DID have to empty the dishwasher and find the skewers, remember — we’re done in 20 minutes. And it’s delicious. As expected, the carrot/cumin combination works well together, the asparagus is crisp in both flavour and texture and the pork is tender and tasty. Even Will, known in two provinces for believing that hotdogs really are made from meat and ketchup counts as a vegetable, ate everything on his plate.

I e-mail Bittman, full of praise. “Just made three recipes in 20 minutes. You are a genius, and I’m a superwoman.”

Julie & Julia? Pah. Make that Julie & Mark— in under 20 minutes.

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Posted in Food on 08/21/2009 - 0 Comments