Ritchie - The Side Dish Handbook: Featuring 40 recipes and expert tips for your favorite ingredients

You will find a lot of roasted vegetables in this book. The brassicas, such as cabbage, broccoli, and brussels sprouts, and the roots, like carrots and beets, benefit from the intense dry heat of an oven, which concentrates sugars and provides the sublime contrast of crunchy on the outside and soft and tender on the inside.

Other cooking methods used are sweating (letting the vegetable cook, covered, in its own juices), braising (covered, but with more liquid and other ingredients added to exchange flavors), sauting or stir-frying (stirring quickly in an open pan with minimal fat), broiling (tucking dishes under the broiler to brown their surface), and grilling (cooking foods over an outdoor gas or charcoal grill). What you wont find is steaming, which drains away flavor rather than enhances it, or deep-frying, which masks an ingredient rather than highlights it.

To make cooking side dishes easy and efficient, you need just a few pieces of equipment. The most common is a sharp chefs knife. With it, you can prep almost everything in this book. For very fine slicing, a mandoline or a food processor is handy. Graters, including a box grater and a Microplane zester, are also practical.

A large, 10- to 12-inch (25- to 30-cm) saut pan is indispensable. What distinguishes it from the relatively shallow, flare-sided frying pan (skillet) is its straight sides about 3 inches (7.5 cm) high and a snugly fitting cover. This single pan enables you to saut, sweat, brown, braise, or sear, and the size is ideal for recipes serving four to six people. Round all-purpose pans with loop handles, stove-top woks, and wide frying pans also work, as long as they have a matching lid.

Because roasting is an essential method, youll need a few sturdy baking sheets. Rimmed half sheet pans (18 by 13 by 1 inch/45 by 33 by 2.5 cm) are the best because the food wont roll off when you move the pan from counter to oven and back again. Parchment paper is crucial for roasting vegetables because it keeps the food from sticking, blots excess oil, and makes cleaning the baking sheet as simple as a wipe down.