Host - Celebrated food author Mark Bittman has written about how to cook, well, everything. But when it comes to cooking fast, he says it’s about strategy not skill.

Mark Bittman - There’s a lot of downtime in cooking, it takes time for the heat that you’re using to be applied to the food that you’re using it on, and you can use that time to do other things that make the whole procedure go more quickly.

Host - He’s out with a new edition of his book How To Cook Everything Fast. That’s lucky because we’re focusing on recipes you can make in a pinch. One of those is his spinach carbonara, a vegetarian twist on the Italian classic that’s often made with pork.

Mark Bittman - Adding spinach to this turns it more into a one pot dish if you will, or a sort of whole meal that has a variety of different nutrients and just mixes things up a bit.

Host - It requires just a few ingredients. Pasta, cheese, olive oil, eggs, and of course spinach. Once you’ve got all that it’s simple to throw together.

Mark Bittman - You do oil in a pan, you do water in a pot. You do garlic and spinach in the pan, you do pasta in the water, you toss it with cheese and egg, and that’s the dish.

Host - If you’re in the mood for something hardier, Bittman says, try a stir fry. He says they’re perfect for fast cooking because stir fry employs a critical technique. Utilising downtime to cook. Take, for example, his recipe for chicken and Swiss chard stir fry.

Mark Bittman - You start oil in a pan over a high heat, and while that’s heating you cut some boneless chicken up, and season it. And then you cook that. While you’re cooking that in a skillet you’re preparing ginger and garlic. While you’re waiting for the chicken to be done you chop some scallions, you rinse some chard, you chop that, and then you add those ingredients one at a time to the stir fry.

Host - Of course, we can’t forget dessert. Bittman recommends the skillet apple crisp. It’s got that classic combo, butter, apples, nuts, cinnamon, and sugar, but…

Mark Bittman - The difference is that you start by melting butter in a skillet and cooking, while that’s melting you chop the acorns, chop the apples, and you add them to the skillet with a little bit of water, and you cook that until the apples are tender.

Host - And while that’s happening, Bittman recommends, you guessed it, using that time to prep the topping.

Mark Bittman - Butter, nuts, oats, coconut sugar, cinnamon, salt, all of that. You cook that until it's, you cook that in a separate pan until it’s nicely browned and crisp, and then when the apples are soft you top it with the crisp topping, and you serve. And it just works great and it becomes a 15 minute recipe as opposed to a 40 minute recipe.

Host - But if none of these dishes speaks to you, don’t worry. You can make fast, easy meals with any ingredients you have, just keep three things in mind.

Mark Bittman - Preparing and cooking at the same time instead of preparing first and then cooking second, and I think that’s the key strategy. The second is really having a well stocked pantry, refrigerator and freezer as well of course, but to the extent that you can keep a good larder you can cook a lot of recipes without shopping, and that’s a real advantage. And then the third is to almost always cook more than you need. Be planful about leftovers, if you’re cooking beans for a dish then cook a lot of them, and either refrigerate or freeze what’s left. Same with whole grain, same with that head of cauliflower, etc., etc., etc. Whenever you’re cooking, it almost always pays to cook more, even if it’s just cooking more of the given dish so that you can have lunch or dinner tomorrow. I think that that’s the kind of thing veteran cooks know and learn, and that we’re trying to teach it fast to people who have not done a lot of cooking.

Host - That was food writer Mark Bittman. The updated and revised edition of How To Cook Everything Fast is out now.