Reddit reviews How to Cook Everything Fast: A Better Way to Cook Great Food

My everyday cookbook is How to Cook Everything Fast by Mark Bittman. I recommend it for anyone who's past the boiling water phase and is competent at reading recipes, but who wants to learn to put things together on their own - the stage I was at when I got it. I could prattle on about this book, but the most important things to me as a novice cook are:

1. It emphasizes flow in the kitchen. Many recipes assume you already have everything diced, peeled, cleaned, etc. This book assumes you just came home from the grocery store. It lists everything you have to do in an order that makes sense, like reminding you to preheat your oven or get your oil hot before you start vegetable prep.
   
2. It encourages substitution. Most of the recipes have several variations and there are a few "recipe-free" recipes, telling you how to put together a basic soup, braise meat, or cook a pilaf with whatever you have on hand.
   
3. True to name, it's quick. Cooking a 3 hour recipe is great for special occasions, but not every night. Most of the recipes take about 30 minutes - add sides (which it will recommend for you, by the way) and cleanup, and you're looking at 45 minutes to put a full dinner on the table. You get more cooking experience in this way too.
   
4. A few different cuisine styles are emphasized, so you'll learn which spices, meats, veggies, etc. play nicely with each other. Even so, even the most poorly equipped supermarket will get you through 90% of the recipes. Similarly, the only special equipment he calls for is a food processor. No waffle iron, ice cream machine, or sous vide recipes here.
   
   By the way, it's crazy cheap on Kindle right now. I'm not a huge fan of the e-book layout - I vastly prefer my paper book - but if you wanted to check it out for $3, now's the time.
   
   I'd recommend anything by Bittman. There are a lot of New York Times articles you can read by him for free, too. He takes a very laid-back, intuitive approach to cooking that encourages experimentation, and I love that!
   
   Another favorite that used to be on my shelf but I lost in a move: Kitchen Quick Tips from Cook's Illustrated. I recommend just about anything from the America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Illustrated family. It's not a cookbook, but it's full of little tips on all sorts of kitchen things - the most efficient way to dice an onion, peel a potato, remove a stuck wine cork, etc. It's the sort of stuff you'd see on /r/Lifehacks but all collected into one place.

Recommended Reading. The recipes can be hit or miss, but there are some real gems. Most require very few pots and pans (skip anything that requires a breading station, never worth it). For cheap avoid the ones that require Kombu, Bonito Flakes, Crab, and Scallops and you should be good. The soups, salads, and americanized ethnic food are where it shines.

Bittman's How to Cook Everything Fast is my new bible: http://www.amazon.com/How-Cook-Everything-Fast-Better/dp/0470936304

Serious Eats mentioned elsewhere here is also reliably great, especially The Food Lab. But I don't have the patience to cook a lot of the recipes. If you're like me, ditto the advice to cook big for a week. I'd add in crockpot recipes too.

Random other things that have helped me:

• Get prewashed and pre-sliced veggies and other things so you can skip a step or two
  
• Learn what can be prepped and saved ahead of time (like single serving rice in the freezer - and I say this as someone who is Asian and has a $300 rice cooker)
  
• Go all out on a collection of sauces and spices. They can make it easy to cook (sometimes just slather a sauce all over a piece of meat and cook it kind of easy) or they can make it easy to enhance a food without sacrificing healthiness. Also drastically lets me cut down on salt, which isn't great for you in excess. (Unfortunately I find it hard to go out and eat because so much is oversalted to my taste...)
  
• Keep some basics at hand all the time. My husband really likes to have sandwich fixings around for when it's 2pm and he forgot to eat lunch. My idea of basics is things like curry paste and coconut milk and bamboo shoots + leftover meat for a quick curry (and rice from the freezer ;) ) Bittman can help you with this at the beginning of the book I linked (and I think he also has a "cooking for beginners" type book as well in the How to Cook... series)
  
• Keep things simple and expand on the basics. One of my favorite meals is a cheese or chicken/bacon/leftover meat quesadilla, and a small side salad. Takes 5 minutes tops to assemble. I used the same technique to use leftover shredded pork Chinese delivery for moo shu pork with my own hoisin (remember the sauces?) and the fresh tortillas I had in my fridge. Then a breakfast burrito in the morning!
  
• Soup is a great way to get rid of leftovers.
  
• Smoothies are a great way to eat veggies. Blend in some spinach+kale with "strong" flavored fruits like frozen berries, mmmm! Don't forget to toss in some nut butter too :)
  
• In case you forget to eat altogether - my "secret" is Ensure. On-the-go drinks are super convenient and at least stop me from snacking endlessly until the next meal.

A cookbook that shows you how to cook fast It's always nice to be able to cook yummy food and not have it take all day. I think you should go to the movies this weekend. I love watching movies.

So, the best cook book I know of for learning specifically is how to cook everything fast by Mark Bittman. It covers how to interweave prep, recommends side dishes to go with main dishes, and has reasonably accurate time breakdowns of timing.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Cook-Everything-Fast-Better/dp/0470936304

I recommend the cookbook How to Cook Everything Fast by Mark Bittman.. It has lots of recipes with easy-to-follow instructions and suggestions of how to adjust many of the recipes. Local libraries have copies if you want that: link.