NYTimes: Marc Bittman says you don't really need the expensive kitchen stuff

I won't send you the cookies I made, either.

I need you to keep them from me, I'm fat as a freaking hog.

I have no problem w that proposal.

The argument for limiting the use of food stamps to actual food is consistent with established policy. They’re already disallowed for tobacco, alcohol,vitamins, pet foods, household supplies and (with some exceptions) food meant to be eaten on premises. Payments have been based on the cost of a “nutritionally adequate diet.”

uh yeah, the 'established policy of food stamps is that they should be for food'. if you want to establish a policy where they can only be used for some food, they should be called 'foods-I-think-are-okay stamps'

I already got into this in some other thread the answer to every problem is to just give poor people wads of cash

whether or not we should make it harder to buy sugary foods should have nothing to do w/ poor people in particular

otm

if you limited food stamps to foods that don't contain added sugar, probably the only food people could buy with food stamps are cardboard and shredded newspaper

ok even i officially can't stand this guy
1) mark bittman -- you do not own the concept of "healthy sensible eating"
2) anyone who names his own diet and tries to sell it to people is an asshole

i appreciate that he is trying to help people and i understand that what he's selling is good -- i just object to the commodification of eating practices in general. yuck.

OK who is more insufferable Bittman or Pollan?

bittman's got a good oatmeal cookie recipe in the food matters book.

pollan's got nothing. shoot him into the sun.

Good question.

I haven't read Pollan and honestly I don't know much about him beyond his mantra and his name. Bittman started as someone who wanted to help people learn how to cook, and ended up being someone pushing his own thing. Not sure who's grosser, but I'm gonna go with Bittman because I expect more than scolding/diet books from people who like to cook and eat and serve food to people. Stop talking about diet and keep talking about food. What's so hard about that?

tbh I will take both over Gwyneth, I mean how the fuck did she ever get to do a food show with Mario Batali, also her new book gah.

also she was featured on the cover of Bon Appetite shortly after the demise of Gourmet; inside, she offered up "her recipe" for mango salsa, which went like this: mango, avocado, red bell pepper, onion diced, toss with cilanto and lime. Fuck you and your 2010 "mango salsa recipe" that ever decent cook ever has known how to put together since like 1982.

we should have a rolling bon appetit thought/taste crimes thread. amazing article in the current issue about a chef travelling from rich lady's house to rich lady's house and learning the true meaning of home cooking and being friends with rich ladies.

barf @ all of this preposterous attention-hogging

I had to suffer from about nine months of Bon Appetite (I really hate that Andrew "The Foodist" douche) after Conde Nast used it to fulfill the remainder of my would-be Gourmet subscription, and seriously I might as well have just gotten Cooking Light.

Actually there are a couple of issues here at the house we are renting; I will be happy to contribute to the BA-bashing thread.

I don't think I've ever read that magazine, so I've got nothin

every month i excitedly turn to the "foodist" column and read all the preposterous shit out loud to my appalled fiancee. yes we subscribe to bon appetit. i honestly couldn't tell you why.

it is like Us Weekly for people who like food.

Bittman's "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian" is a good cookbook. I think he's wrong upthread about "buy cheap knives, who gives a shit" but I rather like his "throw in this ingredient or that ingredient, it'll be cool" approach - I'm cooking from Ottolenghi's cookbook a lot lately which is the exact opposite (" add 1/8 tsp pink himayalan salt + 1/18 tsp kosher salt. stir one minute, then add white from one duck egg"). however I can't lie Ottolenghi's recipes are ridiculously delicious if you have the time to make them

How to Cook Everything is indeed a good cookbook, one that I have given as gifts to people who want to cook but don't really know where to start; I also liked his Minimalist column in the NYT. But dude has jumped a shark.

I'm on board with cheap paring knives that you throw away when they get dull, but gtfo with a cheap chef's knife. Get a good one, keep it sharp, profit. Skimp on crap like nonstick cookwear imo.

I like Bittman's original How to Cook Everything approach because it frees the cook from the recipe -- you have the power to make it however you want, you're not gonna fuck it up, go ahead, try different things. That's not ego-oriented food advice. I guess I really dislike ego-oriented food writing -- make my recipe my way, etc. It's like insisting on a brand name -- I just find it gross.

i turn to "how to cook everything" when i need proportions for a pancake recipe or something--he's good at sort of calmly delineating the basic shit that needs to get done to realize a given dish.

it's when bittman tries to go ottolenghi that it all goes wrong.

bon appetit is the worst

at least you can get the occasional good recipe out of Cooking Light. Bon Appetit's not even a decent bin liner.

maybe it's yelp fallout but even good food writers i'm starting to find faintly obnoxious

otm

i can't even really roll/w beloved ol jonathan gold much anymore, idk why.

but can you bun?

That's why I liked Old Bittman -- he was like "you can do this!", the end. No weight loss/"health" bs, no rhapsodizing over olives from an old Lebanese woman's backyard, just unfussy food-making and -eating.

rhapsodizing over olives from an old Lebanese woman's backyard

irl lols @ this

i think bittman is coming to terms with his own mortality; he's spent a lifetime eating well and eating richly. he's worried. he's trying to unwind the odometer.

I just wish he would keep it to himself. Proselytizing is gross even if his recipes are good. As I said before, imo naming and selling your own diet is what assholes do (among other things).

i've got a new diet i'm calling "the leong game", which involves kale, spinach, and tomato juice smoothies at every meal. $19.99 for the recipe and a free diet calendar.

the vegemite solution: eat healthy snacks during the day and then pig out on icecream because you had a crappy day at work

Leong Gamers gather fortnightly to exchange algae cultures and shame each other for eating > 6 almonds.

almond unen-joy

oh hey like every issue bon appetit has a feature on some restaurant in some stupidly far-flung part of the world (well, far-flung if you are american). like, some place in darkest fucking sweden or, this month, some dude cooking with flowers in a strip mall outside of melbourne. every one of these articles is a hilarious and transparently desperate bid to "discover" the next rene redzepi or adria or whoever.

i read this and then i go lie down and read elizabeth david until sanity returns.

mark bittman says
who the hell cares what mark bittman says anymore?
that's what i want to know at this point

i bought some ocean perch at the store yesterday with the intention of doing something lemon-buttery with garlic and dill, and i consulted his book Fish (that's the kind of book title I appreciate), which confirmed what i thought i should do and gave me a few other ideas for next time i want to eat this (very delicious, inexpensive, and tender) fish. It didn't have a stupid name and claim to elongate my life. It just told me how to make the fish in a variety of ways. RIP that mark bittman :(

can you give me an example of the new bittman article

i mean, an article written by the new bittman

he is selling a diet book with a special name that he claims is "his" diet -- isn't that enough?

doesn't really raise any red flags for me

yeah see i guess i feel that's gross -- i can stand personal branding! it grosses me out.

UGH
i meant can't
my outrage (i'm not really that outraged) has made me typo crazy

i guess because i believe in his general philosophies w/r/t food i don't mind that he's building his personal brand

i agree with him and i still think it's gross
he has become a pontificator, and i preferred him as an educator. i realize it's a fine line, but still somehow in my mind he has crossed it

that's probably true but i think the enemies on the other side of the line (corporate food laboratories and taste labs and advertising and etc. etc. etc.) are so numerous, that....

you're totally right -- i realize not everyone would feel the same way
cooking is a basic life skill, imo, and treating it like a program/commodifying it is kind of antithetical to that
again, imo
what could a businessman ever want more, etc. i'm a product of my times! it's inescapable.

How to Cook Everything was the first cookbook that made me feel like I could actually succeed at cooking, and it opened me up to a lot of foods -- it's like the ipad/iphone of cooking in terms of user-friendliness compared to most of the other available stuff, at least when it came out.

Which he used to be so good at doing! And I really don't understand why the NYT feels they need a sub-Michael Pollan pontificator when they already have Michael Pollan pontificating.

Ugh. Thx for the update, what a shame.

chicken is awesome, buzz off bittman

What if chicken blood gets on my lettuce in a shopping bag? What if someone else’s chicken contaminates my apples on a supermarket conveyor belt?

then you're a dummy

I don't mind his cookbook but I'll be damned if I choose to read his ideas about food policy.

file under 'nope'

Op-Ed | Mark Bittman
Years Ending in 4

Disaster has been well represented in years ending in “4,” but probably not disproportionately so. Does history give us reason to be optimistic about 2014?

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geez louise, what's wrong with him?!

That this man, instead of me, got to spend time with Marcella Hazan in her final weeks is just so wrong!