… Celeriac & Spinach Rice
With Christmas now over I should be able to get back to cooking more 15 Minute Meals again. I had thought I’d manage more than just one over the whole Christmas period. But I’ve ended up being very busy. It’s the first day of the new year and it seems like a good day to start cooking again. Cooking 15 Minute Meals that is, I have done a huge amount of other cooking over Christmas. I have noticed a bit of a change in how I cook, which I think is down to doing these meals. I noticed that I am now much more confortable cooking, two, three or four things at a time than I ever used to be. I am becoming a multitasker! I think I only had one incident where I burnt some sugar I was caramelizing because I was distracted by doing some other cooking at the same time. I also use the food processor for chopping, slicing and grating far more than I ever did. I am so used to using it while doing the 15 Minute Meals, that it has become very natural to use it. It has been nice to cook other things for a while and not to have to always slavishly follow a recipe. But I’m excited to get back to doing these meals.
I bought the ingredients for this meal a couple f days ago while doing the food shop for new years eve. This recipe requires a swig of vodka. I don’t really like vodka. I don’t have any vodka and I don’t buy it. I now needed to buy some. In the various supermarkets I visited I looked for a miniature bottle. I guess even a miniature has more than a swig in it. There weren’t any. I didn’t buy any vodka that day. That meant that today I was faced with all the ingredients of the meal bar one. My own self imposed rules mean that I have to use all the ingredients as specified unless I genuinely can’t get one. I can get vodka. I can get it easily. I just don’t want to spend money on buying a whole bottle. In the end I have no choice I have to buy a bottle. I now have a whole bottle of vodka less one swig and nothing to do with it!
This meal requires you to remove the knobbly end of a celeriac, peel it and then dice it into 1 cm cubes. Removing the skin for a celeriac is a fiddly job at the best of times. Inconveniently they are often not very round and quite knobbly. Also cutting something this big and this shaped into 1 cm dice takes time. I have reasonable knife skills, but it still is not a quick process. It takes more than six minutes for me to do this and get the celeriac cooking. The next task is to start to cook the (product placement alert) Uncle Ben’s 10 minute rice. You may have spotted a problem here. If you have to cook ten minute rice and you are already more than 6 minutes in you’re in trouble! I don’t really think I could have prepared the celeriac any quicker. It wasn’t even a particularly big one.
The rest of the cooking process was quite smooth. But there was no real hope of making up the time. There is an exciting part where you set the vodka, which is poured over the meatballs, on fire. I no longer have a gas hob so I lit it with a lighter. My hand was briefly on fire, but it was fine! The meatballs have cranberry jam added to them. I had some cranberry sauce which I had made left over from my new years eve meal last night so it was put to use in this meal. I was more than three minutes over the fifteen minutes, and I don’t really think I could have done this much quicker.
This is a nice meal. But I have mixed feelings about the ten minute rice. I really don’t think it tastes as good as “normal” rice. It isn’t bad, but just not as good. In some of the other meals where this has been used, there have been some quite big flavours alongside the rice and so the rice is less noticeable. The flavours in this meal are quite subtle. The rice is a key part of the dish and I do think it would be better done with “normal” rice. If I did this again, with out the rules associated with doing this as a project, I would cook “normal” rice even if it meant that it took just that bit longer.
By the way the photos for this post were taken with my new camera which was a Christmas present form my brother – thanks.
Who with: Gordy and Gavin
How Long: Eighteen minutes and twenty one seconds
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