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.)