Transcript
Question: What do you do when friends are coming over and you haven't got anything prepared? Mark
Bittman: I often don’t
figure out what I am cooking until an hour before people come over but I make
sure there's food in the house and I think that's important. It seems so obvious when you say it but
so many people don’t do it.
If you have a
lot of food in the house cooking is much easier because now you have so many
options plus there's pressure on you to cook because you don’t a want the stuff
to go bad. So what I cook for
people pretty much depends on what I have. I try to always have, you know, something.
Question: Tell us about one of your dinner
parties.
Mark
Bittman: I had made a
deal with a friend who was an architect and he designed an office for me and
the deal was that I was going to cook dinner for him and his wife and two of
his friends and my wife.
So there was
going to be six of us. And we set
a date, I guess; he says we set a date.
And that morning -- that afternoon actually, about two o'clock he called
and said what time do you want us to go over? I had completely forgotten about it. So I went shopping and I made -- I ran
out to the store, I came back, I made – this is a long time ago -- but I made
roast chicken with vinegar, was sort of classic French recipe, some kind of
potatoes, a salad, and I don’t know if I made or bought a bread and I made
chocolate mousse for dessert and I did that in about two hours, which, for me,
is a lot of time in the kitchen for me; I don’t spend two hours in the kitchen
that often.
The great thing
was the food was not that great.
The food was fine. The
great thing was, a.) I got away with it and, b.) they thought it was fantastic
and it was then that I realized that if you cook for people in your home they, a.) they're looking forward to it, b.) they're going to cut you so much
slack. They're going to give you
every benefit of the doubt.
They're going to be grateful and, therefore, the food is going to taste
better than it would if you were in a restaurant where the server was annoying
you and you knew you were going to spend a lot of money and, you know, you had
to travel to get there and blah, blah, blah.
So I think it
was really – and that was probably 12 or 15 years ago. So it was about halfway into my -- I've
been cooking for 40 years, so it was two-thirds of the way into my life as a
cook when I realized that you can do pretty much anything in your home if you
take it seriously and do it as well as you could do it and your friends and
family are really going to appreciate it.
Question: What defines a Mark Bittman meal?
Mark
Bittman: My presence. I guess there's other kinds of Mark Bittman meals. Well really its simplicity, its
honesty, it's not overdoing it.
Generally speaking, it's very few ingredients and very little technique
and not that much time and its home cooking. There's nothing fancy about it. There's no pretense, I like to think there's no
pretense. I mean this all -- it
sounds too good to be true. It
sounds like better than I am but it really is what I do. So I guess I'll take some credit for
it.
