Bittman Basics

Simplifying Vegetables

It helps to categorize them

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You can cook a different vegetable every day of the week and go a whole month without eating the same one twice.

There are so many varieties that even an expert can’t know everything about all of them. To make vegetables more manageable in the kitchen, I lump them into three groups — greens, tender vegetables, and hard vegetables — based on how fast they go from raw to mushy.

This helps you substitute one for another in recipes and try things that may be unfamiliar. So when you encounter a new vegetable that resembles another, more familiar vegetable in the same group — think broccoli and cauliflower, for example, or beets and turnips — you have a point of reference. This method is far from scientific, but it works together with the techniques, tips, and variations in this chapter to demonstrate how easy it is to cook all sorts of vegetables.

Think of vegetables in groups

Greens
These vegetables cook in a flash — anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes. In addition to salad greens (you can even cook lettuces!) and greens like chard, watercress, collards, kale, mustard greens, and different bok choys, this group includes tatsoi and whatever you might encounter at farmers markets and…