Jamie's 30 Minute Meal

My lovely cousin HH gave S and me Jamie's 30 Minute Meals for Christmas. As we are a couple who are reasonably impatient, but love our food, this was a perfect present. And it is a gorgeous book with the promise that, with a reasonably well equipped kitchen, one can turn out meals with side-dishes and more than one course in 30 minutes. As a lover of Nando's, I decided to go for the piri piri chicken, with dressed potatoes, rocket salad and quick Portuguese tarts. Before Jamie starts cooking, his ingredients and equipment are always ready (you never see a shot of him, builder's bum hanging out, ferreting about in a cupboard looking for a bottle of sauce or an attachment for his Magimix). So I made sure my equipment and ingredients were ready. See the (awful) picture above, laying out the stuff took 10 minutes.

So off I got to a flying start, just like he does in the shows, lots of things were on the go and I was bouncing about like a four year old on too many red Smarties. The chicken was frying, the tart cases were blind baking and I was just chopping my potatoes, when the frying pan with the chicken in set the fire alarm off. This cost me five precious minutes, spent opening windows and wafting, so whilst I was whizzing up my piri piri sauce, black smoke started to gush from the oven; the tarts were RUINED. And the kitchen looked like a bomb site. Five minutes later, my beeper (the one I should have been using to time the tart cases) then went off to herald the end of my 30 minutes. At this point, I decided to chuck  out Jamie's frantic cooking method and cook to my own pace.

Having tidied up (Jamie leaves no time for keeping tidy as you go), I calmed down and had a much nicer time of it. Things still got done, the potatoes and salad were dressed, the tarts were remade, and the chicken finished - - but I slowed down, and paid attention to what I was doing. The whole thing, including making the tarts twice, took 1 hour 20 minutes - - a perfectly respectable amount of time for a main dish and sauce, two side dishes and a pudding. As you'd expect with a recipe book from Mr Oliver, the meal was very good, it all tasted very fresh and clean. The feta cheese in the potatoes was inspired. The tarts were light and certainly not stodgy. I'd cook like this for company and, not doubt, will use this book to do so. Jamie's Easy Dinner Parties might be a better name for it. (I'm counting this as 3 new dishes, the chicken was certainly a new recipe, as were the tarts, I'd never think of cooking potatoes like that. Counting dressing rocket in lemon juice and salt and pepper as a whole new dish might be pushing it.)

Meadow soup

The Guardian had really good recipes this weekend. Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall had a special on biscuits, and the peanut butter and chocolate sandwich variety definitely winked at me from the page. Quite how he passed this off as an English recipe when it looks somewhat like a whoopie, and is crammed with peanut butter and thus must have roots with our cousins in the US, I'm not sure. (I thought they sounded marvellous though - - chocolately peanut butter cookies clamped around chocolate ganache, you really can't go wrong.) Our friend C came round for tea and I made these facing her like a Blue Peter presenter from behind our kitchen table whilst we caught up. The biscuits themselves were crispy and the salt from the peanut butter stopped the chocolate ganache from being horribly sickly. C ate one and declared it delicious, even though she doesn't really like peanut butter. They then went on to fuel an all-night poker game with our friends H and M, and only two survived till morning. These only took 40 minutes to make and fill, and I definitely commend them to you!

I also made a batch of Shrewsbury biscuits. These were crispy little things with caraway seeds and lemon zest. After the gloriously brash peanut butter cookies, sorry Hugh they're a cookie not a biscuit, the Shrewsbury biscuits seemed a bit plain. That said they'll probably make a perfectly acceptable way of boosting my energy levels in the office when I hit the afternoon slump. If I make them again, I'd double the amount of lemon zest.

S and I always have Sunday soup to round our weekend off, this week we were joined by F. This week I tackled herb soup  from the new vegetarian column, also in The Guardian. It looked like I'd liquidated a meadow it was so green! And to give it a more accurate title, it is spinach soup with a lot of herbs in. But it was very nice, and the feta, which is crumbled on top at the end, stops it tasting too much like something you find in Holland and Barrett.

Not really cheating...

I've been asked a few times whether the film 'Juliet and Julia' was the inspiration for this blog. Of course, I've seen the movie, but the germ of the idea came when I saw an item on BBC news with the depressing statistic that the average family eat the same eight dishes on rotation. I counted on my fingers how many dishes S and I ate regularly and came to the realisation that it was fourteen - - so seven dishes each. A few months later, when we were returning from our Christmas trip to see our families, my heart sank at the idea of the same old soup - - so I decided to expand what I cook. One hundred and eleven is an arbitrary number in all but the fact that it forces me to cook at least two new recipes a week.

This week has a theme of 'quick and easy'. For my first recipe, I had a bash at 'Donut Muffins'. There are few smells that make me feel as hungry as fresh donuts, so when I saw that 'Cupcakes, Muffiins and More', (Parragon Books) have come up with a muffin donut hybrid, I had to try them. Don't worry, this does not involve deep frying muffins -- although I bet they'd be nice). It is a muffin made to taste like a donut, only you don't need a deep fat fryer. Incidentally, the batter tastes amazing, the nicest bowl I have ever licked! Make sure your muffin tray is deep if your granny is coming to tea, mine rose in all sorts of rude shapes. To create the donut effect, these are finished by painting on butter and sprinkling on cinnamon and sugar. Best eaten warm with a mug of tea, and they did remind me of donuts. They went stale disappointingly fast, but were revived with a zap in the microwave and a splash of cream, filthily delicious and no waste!

Number two for this week was Nigel Slater's recipe for his Lazy Loaf of soda bread. Slater's recipe was a joy; no kneading, no proving, the quicker you move the better. I made a couple of substitutions with this recipe. There was a derth of buttermilk in Leeds, however, full-fat milk with a squeeze of lemon juice, will provide all the acidity you need to let the bicarbonate of soda do its stuff and make the thing rise - - so don't bother searching if you can't find it - - in fact, it's a slightly cheffy ingredient which isn't needed in this recipe, don't look for it at all! I also swapped wholemeal flour for embarrassingly middle-class kamut flour. Apparently this is an ancient Egyptian wheat flour, eaten by the Pharaohs, if the packet is to be believed. I swear it was the closest thing that I could find to wholemeal flour. Despite the substitutions, the loaf turned out well, it was chewy and dense and not too heavy, just like a soda bread should be! It needs eating hot -- it really doesn't keep. As someone who is trying to improve their cooking repertoire, this has given me a loaf of bread I could prepare on a week night, as F proved to me on Wednesday. 

One hundred and four to go!

We won't mention the words 'New Year's Detox'

Nothing can be as good at banishing the after-Christmas-blues as a baking session with your best-friend. My first new recipe of this week was fudge. F (best-friend in question) received a copy of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall River Cottage Everyday, and it was this fudge recipe that caught our eyes. We started out with the salted pecan variety. My only previous attempt at cooking with sugar like this was when, aged about 11, I made and burnt toffee (few smells one creates in the kitchen are as revolting in burnt sugar) before I understood the importance of a sugar thermometer. So this time, I had a thermometer in hand, and F and I watched our bubbling pan like sugar-starved hawks. Despite whipping it off the hob the second it hit the required temperature, we overheated it.  It seems sugar and butter keep on cooking after they are removed from the hob, as they trap heat rather well. It turned to something that looked like sand when F beat the chopped pecans in. Once it had got below scalding temperature, we tried some, declared it nice and squashed it into our prepared tray to cool  - - pressing extra hard with a metal spoon in the hope it would hold together and chop into squares. Had I been cooking on my own, that would probably have been an end to it as I am lazy and quite able to satisfy myself with a nice tasting accident. F, however, is made of stronger stuff and suggested we try again with the basic vanilla recipe. This time we were quicker to take it off the hob, and beat it by hand (the stages after the fudge has been removed from the heat don't take anything like as long as Hugh's longest estimates). It worked well and has sustained us all week -- although we did manage to turn out the pecan accident and this, I think, tasted even nicer!

I am now going to turn hypocrite and relate that despite promising never to cook with James Martin amounts of fat, I did just that this week when I made his asparagus soup. I've always thought that boiling something as expensive and delicious as asparagus to the point that it will blend is a mistake. However, we were low on supplies this week, but happened to have most of the ingredients for this. The soup is poured around an island of potatoes, watercress and fried asparagus tips. I added bacon to this, as it was the day before my lovely other half  (S's) birthday, and he believes bacon improves most things (I think on this occasion it did). I've probably been doing Mr Martin a disservice, his proportions of cream and butter are so delicious! (We won't mention the calories.)

For my final new recipe this week, I made S a birthday cake. I always try to make birthday cakes for him and my very favourite friends. Having always enjoyed a good line in birthday cakes, from the first one I can remember (I was three, it was chocolate and covered in more Smarties than I could count), to truly beautiful ones I had made for me by a dear family friend when I was in primary school- - my favourite being a treasure island with multi-coloured sponge - -to the M&S ones that F has been sourcing for me in recent years; I like to ensure that I hand on some of this sugary love to other people. S likes lemon flavoured cakes, so aiming to top the drizzle cake I made last year, I picked this monster. Let me say this, slowly and emphatically, this cake does not take a mere 55 minutes to make. It took me a little under three hours to construct. Don't get me wrong, as soon as I saw it was the type of sponge that requires egg whites in peaks and a mousse filling I expected it to take ages, and as it was a birthday cake, I didn't mind. As you would expect from a recipe from an organisation as auspicious as Good Housekeeping, it worked brilliantly, despite the sponge being the temperamental without fat type and a filling made with gelatin - - an ingredient I have hitherto avoided ever using. The sponge was light, the filling fluffy, S loved it and it shows I'm rather fond of him.

Who ate all the pies?

Perhaps I am a great big Yorkshire cliche, but I love pies - - meat and potato pies, apple pies, cherry pies, chicken pies, pork pies - - I don't care what kind. However, I am not a great pastry chef - - my hands seem to change temperature as soon as I think about making the stuff. So something I love but rarely make, seemed a good place to start making a dent in my 111 dishes. The spirit of this challenge is to try cooking all types of things, not just those that I think I will be good at, so I picked this recipe from 'Something for the Weekend' and off I went. Although the recipe seems to suggest that you should make the pastry and then the filling, do it the other way around, all I know about hot water crust pastry, is that it likes to be kept hot, so best have everything ready to go for when it's done! The filling just involved mixing, so I won't dwell on that, but the pastry was tough do to. Every time I picked a piece up it would slowly open before disintegrating, and I was soon murmuring by very best Anglo Saxon words. Perhaps it would have been easier to handle if I had used the recommended lard, instead of vegetable fat, but I couldn't bear the idea of eating it so soon after Christmas and its excesses. I also made the school girl mistake of not quite leaving enough pastry for the lid, so there were one or two unwanted ventilation holes. The pie was not pretty, but then again, good pies are not best known for their looks.Taste test wise, this was a winner - - you can't really go too wrong with chicken, bacon and sausage in pastry, although I reckon serve it hot, not cold as suggested, on a cold day there is nothing so comforting as warm pastry.

In my enthusiasm for getting this task started, I decided to knock off two recipes in one night and have a crack at mayonnaise to make a potato salad as an accompaniment to go with the pie. I used Marguerite Patten's recipe from her book 'A Century of British Cooking', a book which never normally fails me. And it didn't this time. I have no objections whatsoever to eating raw eggs in dishes, but when I do, I make sure they're ones that are fresh, and I always use free range ones - - you can taste the difference, as well as being safe in the knowledge that the hens have a happier time of it. I am obviously very sheltered, and had never tasted fresh mayonnaise before. It's such a different substance to the white stuff you get in a jar (not that I have objections to that, it's delicious). But this was yellow and creamy and sharp enough to offset the stodge of the pie and potatoes. It was however, slightly runnier than required, Patten, helpfully, doesn't tell you how much oil, merely saying 'up to 300ml', and as a first timer, I wasn't sure when to stop.

If I've learnt anything from my endeavours today, it's not to panic when things don't quite go to plan (this coming from a girl who once dismayed her boyfriend by throwing out a batch of cupcakes that didn't rise properly), ok, so, the mayonnaise was runny, and the pastry had potholes, but it was still a more than acceptable supper, and I have 109 recipes to go.