New Cookbook Brings 3 Takes On Favorite Dinners

When it comes to dinner favorites, it’s nice to have options. Maybe you’re looking for something quick and easy, or maybe you want to bring more vegetables into your diet.

Mark Bittman, food writer and author of more than 20 cookbooks, is taking on that challenge.

His newest cookbook, “Dinner for Everyone: 100 Iconic Dishes Made 3 Ways,” covers those bases with three takes on the same dish — one fast, one vegan and one crowd-pleaser version.

The book follows three home cooking principles.

“One is that everybody wants to cook faster … the second is that most everybody will confess that they need more plants in their diet, and the third is that we know that we love to cook for other people,” he said.

Developing recipes for quick weeknight meals was easy, Bittman said. But for the vegan version, making a plant-based dish that was appealing and satisfying for dinner wasn’t quite so easy.

“It’s really like what is the spirit of this dish and how can we make it plant-based without losing its soul, but without introducing a bunch of weird ingredients,” he said.

In his vegan recipe for enchiladas, Bittman combines sweet potatoes, corn and peppers with guacamole and a tomato sauce for creaminess.

“We could use vegan sour cream and we could use vegan cheese, but you know what is an enchilada? It’s a tortilla stuffed with good stuff and baked with creamy stuff and there’s no reason to start resorting to faux foods,” he said.

Bittman’s crowd-pleaser enchiladas take about twice the time as the easy version, but they are worth the effort, he said. It starts with cooking your own whole chicken.

“We’re using more of everything, more spice, more onion, more seasoning and we’re frying tortillas, which of course takes some time,” he said. “This is an instance where the blowout version is not all that different from the fast version, it’s just better.”

The cookbook also takes on a Wisconsin favorite — the fish fry. Fried calamari and onion rings with cocktail sauce is the easy recipe, followed by mushroom tempura with orange-soy dipping sauce as the vegan recipe.

And for the crowd pleaser, Bittman suggests beer-battered fish and chips with tartar sauce — made even better if you have walleye.

“I’m not claiming that I’m reinventing the wheel on this one, but a great fish fry can take some time,” he said.

Ultimately, Bittman said to take the pressure off and do what works for you.

“Our job as home cooks is to make things taste as good as they can and make them look appetizing, but our job is not to turn food into art,” he said.