… Old-School Coleslaw and Corn on the Cob

I did this meal on Sunday, for lunch. This had 24 ingredients, which is significantly more than the other two meals I have made. There is also more text to read.  This made me think it would be quite a challenging dish to do in 15 minutes.  I have done several of Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals and when I’ve gone over the 30 minutes, it was almost always due to the amount of time I spent reading the next step and even just finding where I had got to in order that I could read the next step.

I start.  The corn on the cob goes in.  I then begin to put all the various ingredients in my food processor, spilling some of the pinky red liquid from the tin of mixed beans on the rug in the process! I guess the measurements, to save time, but I’m pretty good at this and often do this even when I’m not cooking against the clock.  They all just fit in the food processor.  This is to make the patties for the bean burgers.   I hit a big problem.  My food processor does not cope at all well with trying to blitz up frozen broad beans.  I double-check the recipe.  It does say to use frozen broad beans, with no suggestion that they should first be thawed.  I assume that this is correct because having to make sure they are thawed before you start would go against the ethos of 15 Minute Meals. 

In the end I have to blitz the mixture for a second, open the top, push the mixture back down, blitz again, open again, push the mixture back down again and repeat this more than a dozen times.  I know this is taking too long and I already know I’ll significantly miss the 15-minute mark.  It’s very frustrating.

In the end the pieces of broad beans are larger than they should be.  But I continue on.  The rest of the process goes entirely smoothly.  Other than I forgot to put the burger buns in the oven until much later than I should have. 

This meal is really, really tasty.  The flavours, textures etc balance well.  It’s fun too.  It’s fun to eat because you build your own burger and its fun to look at because of all the colours.  This would be a great meal to have with kids.

Gordy and Gavin have had the first three meals with me.  This has been Gavin’s favourite.  I would have agreed with him, but I can’t get over how delightful it was to make buns for the Chicken Dim Sum. 

Ok so why did it go wrong.  It was the frozen beans.  If I did this again (and I think I will – but only after the remaining 112 meals are cooked) I would take the time to thaw the beans. Was this a problem with the recipe or my food processor?  I think it might have been the latter.  My food processor is by no means the best, biggest and beefiest you can by.  But it is also not the cheapest and smallest you can buy.  If I were buying a new one I would not choose this one (not least because it is white and ugly). But it came free with my last house (which is another story all together). I think a really good food processor would have coped adequately.  But should you have to have a really good (and therefore expensive) food processor to do these meals?

Disappointment with the time aside, this was a great meal. 

I have still not yet bought a better pepper mill and it is still causing me issues.  Can anyone suggest one that looks good, works well and is not too expensive?

I think I need a better camera as well.  

Having done three meals now I have noticed that as soon as we start to eat, I eat at full speed.  I’m still in my Fifteen Minute Meals mind set.  I have to stop and remind myself the purpose is to cook the meal fast, but then enjoy eating it.

I should add that the cost below is much it cost to buy all the ingredients I needed.  I have quite a bit left over (3/4 of the broad beans, half of the cabbage etc).  I will not be working out how much it really cost.  I’m not that boring.

 How much: £10.29.

How long: Twenty minutes and forty seconds.  

Who with: Gordy and Gavin. 

… Coconut Buns, Cucumber Pickle & Hoi Sin Sauce

I bought a Bamboo steamer.  Don’t worry I did not pay £17. 

I was a little worried about doing this one.  I found it hard to believe you can make eight buns in fifteen minutes. 

I immediately hit on a problem.  The recipe calls for a twenty five centimetre bamboo steamer.  The one I bought is only about twenty centimetres.  This means that I can’t cook eight buns.  I can only fit six in.  I make eight but only put six in the steamer.  I also cut down on the amount of chicken and broccoli by about a quarter.  I am actually only cooking for three people so it worked out ok.

The buns are so fast to make.  I think they’re in the steamer in two minutes.  They look cool, but I just can’t believe that they’ll be cooked in time.  The chicken and mushrooms and the broccoli is also in the steamer in no time at all.  I am still concerned that it won’t all be cooked in time. 

The cucumber pickle is fun to make.  I nearly burn the sesame seeds … but there ok.  The pickles and garnishes are all on the table in about thirteen and a half minutes.  I check the buns – they look cooked.

I check the chicken.  It’s raw! Not totally raw but the bits in the middle of the steamer are raw.  I give them a bit of a jiggle around and put the top tier and lid back on.  We’re now at fourteen minutes. 

I don’t think this is a problem with the recipe.  I don’t have a wok.  I have put the steamer in a large frying pan of water and I don’t think that the water is boiling as hard and thus the steam is less intense than it should have been.  It a shame because I would have had this meal done and on the table in fourteen minutes.  It’s cooked and done by sixteen minutes and fifty seconds. 

This meal is lovely.  One of the buns is very slightly under done in the middle.  The chilli I have for the garnish is a bit too hot (unusual for a large fat red chilli). The flavours are lovely and delicate.  I am delighted that I made these lovely little buns in such a short time. 

I had quite a few pantry items for this one and the cost below excludes any money for the coriander as I borrowed a small bit from the large bunch I have for tomorrow’s meal. 

How much: £9.58.

How long: Sixteen minutes and Fifty seconds.  

Who with: Gordy and Gavin. 

… Mixed Tomato & Quinoa Salad

So its starts.  I fanny around, cleaning the kitchen, making sure things are organised and … well just fannying around.  I feel nervous.  I don’t get nervous when I cook.  The last time I can remember being nervous about cooking was when I last cooked for a girl I liked (as in like liked). That was a long time ago. I’m nervous tonight.

This meal uses Quinoa.  I have never cooked Quinoa.  It was one of the ingredients I had to look up when I was making my shopping list of pantry items.  I still don’t know how to pronounce it.  This is going to be quite a cheap meal.  I only have to buy Mackerel, tomatoes and yogurt.  And I will be using much more of the yogurt in another meal (so that meal can bare the cost).  Everything else I have.  They were either in my pantry ingredients, or I just happened to have them (like the lemon, chilli and basil and in the case of the rosemary the large bush at the bottom of the garden provides for me).

It goes well.  The Quinoa is easy to cook.  So is the mackerel and it smells great too. The only bit that’s time consuming is chopping all those tomatoes.  I could see that if you don’t have very good knife skills this could really slow you down.    

In all I’m done in 15 minutes and ten seconds.  I could have shaved two seconds off that if my tongs had been put away in the right place!! 

It was a great meal.  The salad was great and I’ll be cooking Quinoa again. The horseradish sauce just hot enough. And the mackerel was lovely.  I love mackerel. I love fish.  For some reason I don’t cook or eat that much of it so I really enjoyed this meal.   

Lessons learnt: don’t put the book and ingredients on the other side of the kitchen.  Buy a better pepper mill. 

In all the whole thing takes about an hour.  Fifteen minutes to cook, about thirty minutes to eat and about fifteen minutes to do the dishes.  

How much: £9.38 (and I have lots of tomatoes left).

How long: Fifteen minutes and ten seconds.  

Who with: My brother Gordy and my friend Gavin.  

Thursday night has come around. Thursday was meant to be the start of this project. I felt tired, really tired. I didn’t want to start the project like this.  So I didn’t.  What I should have done was go to bed early.  Instead I went to the pub.  I went very specifically for one beer.  Which turned out into two. But then I did go home and to bed.  

Although I have no intention of cooking the meals in order it did seem like a good idea to start with the first meal.  It just made sense. This requires a bamboo steamer.  I do not have a bamboo steamer.  I have a steamer, of sorts, and I contemplated using it.  But the recipe calls for two elements of the dish to be served in the steamer.  I have to buy a steamer.  A bamboo one.  

I have today off.  It’s nice to not have to do anything.   I have just bought a new computer and I spend the large part of the day copying all the records I have bought in the two or three years since my old laptop refused to accept anymore music.  This will be a long job and not nearly finished yet. Having the day off has allowed me to get a bit organised.  I pick three meals.  One for Friday night. One for Saturday. And one for Sunday lunch.  I go shopping for all the ingredients.  I have to go to two supermarkets because one of the meals calls for mixed tomatoes.  Which means a mix of colours.  Sainsbury’s only has red tomatoes.  I know Tesco sell orange/yellow tomatoes so I go there as well. I have included the Chicken Dim Sum in the meals so I now have the ingredients which means I MUST buy a bamboo steamer.  I fail.  The only bamboo steamer I can find is in the delightful little cooking shop near my home.  It cost £17.  I don’t buy it. I know very well that if I went to a Chinese supermarket I could pick one up for a few quid.  What this means is that tonight I cannot cook the Chicken Dim Sum so I am cooking the Mighty Mackerel – Mixed Tomato & Quinoa Salad on page 148 instead.  Anyway my brother is coming for the weekend and he thinks he doesn’t like chicken.  He will be more pleased with mackerel.  

As I have said in an earlier post I am much better at cooking for other people and better at cooking larger meals.  I also love slow cooked food, like pies and a shoulder joints.  Some of the things I cook take days, even a week or more to prepare and cook.  Things like hams, and salt beef and confit goose legs.  All of these are regular features of the Christmas celebrations.  Over the last two Sundays I have had people round for lunch and I have used this as an opportunity to do some long, slow cooking.  This really is the last opportunity to do this type of cooking before my project begins properly. 

The Sunday before last I cooked a huge piece of lamb, a shoulder joint, cut long.  It only just fitted in my small oven (I only have one of those 50cm width cookers).  I spent a very happy Saturday morning preparing all the food for Sunday, whilst listening to some old records, all either records that came out or that I was introduced to in my first few years at University.  Make Yourself by Incubus, Hundred Reasons’ second record and One by One by the Foo Fighters all featured, among others.  I got up really early on Sunday morning to put the lamb in the oven.  In part this was due to the size of the joint, in part due to the crappiness of my oven and in part because I had to leave it in the oven whilst at church and the nervous part of me does not like leaving the oven on at much above the lowest possible setting.  All this meant it was a very long slow cook, after being marinated for the best part of a day, which could not be more different to what this project is about.  The accompaniments all have a bit of a Greek theme going on.  The nine people I had round for dinner all seemed to enjoy it and with the most complements for the lamb.  I think that this has a lot more to do with the quality of the meat than what I did with it, so thanks Ron and Jill. The photo is of the dishes in their uncooked state, I forgot to take a photo of the finished product.

This Sunday just gone, was a beef and pork pie, made with a porridge oat pastry and served with loads of lightly boiled vegetables. Just dinner for five this Sunday, with my friends Andrew and Carol, their son Josiah, and my friend Gavin for dinner.  The pudding, a particularly lovely trifle, was supplied by Carol.  It was another happy Saturday morning of cooking with the pie mix simmering away for many hours.  This time the record listening was more up to date with the new Vaccines and the new Mumford and Sons records featuring.  I have enjoyed both.  Lots of leftovers served to make a nice lunch on Monday and dinner on Monday night. 

In reality this won’t be the end of the cooking longer, slower food.  If I manage to cook all these meals over the next 6 months then there is Thanksgiving and Christmas, New Year and Burns Night in the way.  All these require lots of cooking of celebration food.  I have threatened to do a proper American Thanksgiving meal for the last several years and never quite got round to it.  I will do it this year, I promise.  My three-week holiday in southern states of the US earlier this year made me remember just how good (and also how bad) American food can be.  I really must do a Thanksgiving meal this year.  I also brought a great (southern) cookbook on holiday and I haven’t been that good at cooking from it yet.  However with 115, 15 Minute Meals to cook, the amount of the type of cooking I have done over the last few weekends will have to get less.  I am excited to start this project.  Thursday night looks like it is when the first meal will be cooked. 

… Some Shopping and Some Tiding

So typically of Jamie (and others of his ilk) the book begins with a list of essential equipment and store cupboard ingredients.  By and large I have most of the equipment.  There are only 3 things I need and only one of any significance.  I do not have a liquidizer, I have always managed with my food processor and stick blender.  I do not have a 2 tier bamboo steamer, although I do have a kinda, two tier steamer, which is really a proper pasta pan, but it has also adequately served the purpose of being a steamer as well.   I also do not have a medium sized ovenproof frying pan, I only have a large and a small one. It seems some shopping is in order.  This looks like the right excuse to get the liquidiser I have wanted for a long time, but never been quite able to justify. No doubt I’ll buy one or two other things along the way as well. 

The pantry ingredients were a bit of a different matter.  The list of ingredients runs to 114.  There were 2 things I had to look up to see what they were.  Of that I had about 35, and also was very low on a further 10 or so.  In all I needed 92 things. Late Friday afternoon was spent working out what I had and what I needed and then about 2 hours spent in Sainsbury’s, the large proportion of which was spent in and around the herb/spice section.  I managed to get 77 of the 92 ingredients I needed.  It cost me £102.15.  In fairness there were a number of things I usually have, but had recently ran out of and I hadn’t got round to replacing.  I think the girl at the till thought I was weird buying all the different types of pasta and rice.  I think she thought I was very weird taking a photo of the items on the belt.  I have a feeling that doing this project is going to turn me into a bit of a weirdo, taking pictures of my shopping baskets. A trip to Tesco managed to get me two of the missing ingredients.  I didn’t have my list and these were the only things I could remember. Asda got me another 3 ingredients, Marks and Spencer got me 1 more and a “health food” store supplied a further 2.  I use the term “health food” advisedly because half the store genuinely was.  It had grains and seeds and dried fruits.  The other half of the store was filled with over sized plastic jars, with ugly labels, filled with potions/powers? which seemed aimed at either building muscle or loosing weight.  Using a potion to achieve either of these outcomes seems far from a healthy approach to life, perhaps I’m wrong.  Anyway in all I have spent £116.63 and I’m only now missing 7 ingredients. 

I have also had a bit of a tidy up of the kitchen and a bit of an organise to help make the cooking process a bit smoother.  A boring but necessary task, the fridge cleaning exercise was long over due anyway. 

The book came out today. 

I hadn’t intended buying it today.  I knew it would be a very long day at work, and I knew there was no chance it would be on sale in the village I work in.  But with a bit of late night shopping in the supermarket I did buy the book.  So I made an assumption that this book would be very like 30 Minute Meals.  It is.  But 30 Minute Meals had 50 recipes (meals) in it.  I had assumed that 15 Minute Meals would be similar.  It is not.  There are about 115 recipes (meals) in it.  A few are v small meals (like breakfasts) but there are 115 nonetheless.  So I had aimed to do about 2 a week and assumed that it would then take about 6 months.  In my mind, I had wondered if I could finish by my birthday (that seemed like a good deadline) which is 5 months away.  Could I still do it? We’ll see. 

So I suppose it would be good to set out some rules, or at least parameters.

• I will cook every single meal

• I will try to cook at least 2 meals a week, more if I can, but if I can’t do any at all one week so what!

• I will follow all the recipes exactly and I’ll only do a substitute if I genuinely can’t get a particular ingredient.

• I will try to cook for others as much as possible (but I may do the odd meal on my own, which will mean I’ll have tomorrow’s lunch and dinner sorted).

• I’ll cook all the meals myself, without assistance from others.

I don’t intend to cook through the book in order.  If the book is like 30 Minute Meals it will be separated into sections (pasta, meat, fish, vegetarian etc) and so a bit of variety would be nice. By the way I am making an assumption here because while I write this, the book is yet to be published.  

I don’t mind where I cook.  Although I suspect I’ll cook most of them in my house, I very often cook with and for friends at their houses and I see no reason not to do that for this project. Having friends round for dinner will help as they can be the photographers and leave me to beat the clock.

Oh and I’ll let you know how long it takes to make (it wouldn’t be as much fun if I didn’t time them). I’ll also let you know how much each meal costs as well.

By the way, when I have done other projects with self imposed rules I have invariably broken the rules.  I am however (too?) honest, so if I do break the rules I’ll let you know. Also I’ll try to, no, I will, add a photo of each meal (and may be a few of the cooking process).

————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Ok, so I’m about to embark on a new project.  I’m not entirely sure of the sense of this, because life is pretty busy and a new project probably isn’t what I need, but …

I own a lot of cook books.  At a guess I would say I have about 3 or 4 dozen.  A few years ago I got to the point where I started to feel guilty about buying new cook books.  For a while I stopped.  Or nearly stopped.  There were a few gifts from people and I think I may have brought the odd one or two myself but I cut down, a lot.  I realised that I had probably only cooked a small percentage of the recipes I had.  It wouldn’t surprise me if it was as low as five percent, less maybe.  Actually I know The Silver Spoon cook book has around 2000 recipes in it so it will be much less than five percent. So I decided that rather than buying new books I would cook more recipes I had never attempted from the books I already owned.  I had some success with this.  But the vast majority of the recipes I own remain uncooked.

Lately I have gotten over this guilt and started buying cook books and cookery magazines with, at least, the same regularity as I used to.  I get as much pleasure from reading the books as I do from cooking with them. In fact I probably get as much pleasure from just looking at the pictures.  I treat some of these books as coffee table books and just have a quick browse every now and then.  I have decided that even if I don’t cook a single recipe from a book, if I’ve enjoyed looking through it then it was worth buying.  I know we all, or at least those of us lucky enough to have a bit of spare money at the end of the month, have those things that we are prepared to spend money on, and spend it a little irrationally.  We also all have those things we begrudge spending money on.  For me, for example, I don’t spend money on cars.  I have never brought a new (or even vaguely newish) car.  I have only ever brought cars out as an absolute necessity.  I have owned four cars in my life time and only bought two of them, I was given the other two.  I was given my current car four years ago, and each year that it still goes through its MOT with relative ease (just one £3 part this year) is another year I don’t have to buy (or acquire) a new one.  I will however, buy cook books when I don’t need them.  I could probably cook a new recipe every night for the next twenty or thirty years and not exhaust my collection.

 While I may have gotten over the guilt of spending more money than is reasonable on cook books, there was something that I wanted to achieve during my book buying moratorium that I didn’t achieve.  I didn’t even come close.  For a long time I have wanted to cook through an entire cook book.  I have wanted to cook every single recipe in a book.  Before now I haven’t even really got down to the business of seriously choosing which book I will cook my way through.  Some books are so big and have so many recipes, some of which some would be very expensive, that the task is very daunting.  The first time I seriously considered doing this was when Jamie Oliver brought out his 30 Minute Meals.  Now I should add that 30 Minute Meals came out whilst I was on my book buying moratorium.  I did not buy this book.  It was bought for me (as it was for many people) as a Christmas present.  This book, is probably uniquely placed to be easier than most to cook your way through.  Each “recipe” is an entire meal.  You don’t have to look through your chosen book and find the main part of the dish (the meat for example) and then find the bits that supplement the main bit (the vegetables say) from elsewhere in the book.  Most books have a section of starters and puddings as well.  So you need to pair (or trio) dishes together that work.  Now at the beginning this will be easy for any vaguely competent cook.  But as you work your way through the book, it will get harder.  You may run out of some types dishes and then what do you? Do you repeat a vegetable dish you have already cooked, or are you free to dip into another book or make something up?  And also what happens if a recipe for a main dish suggests a side dish to go with it, but the book itself doesn’t contain the recipe, where do you go?

 Ok so I know I’m being really pedantic and it would be possible, more than possible, easy in fact to cook your way through any number of books.  And there is really nothing to say that you can’t add in a recipe from someone else, after all the purpose of the exercise is just to cook every recipe in a book and not to only cook from that book.  The point I’m making, in a wafflely way, is that 30 Minute Meals made it really easy, all the decision were made.  All you had to do was buy the ingredients, get a few buddies round, and cook.

 So why didn’t I do it? There were a number of reasons.  Even though the nature of the book gave the project a relative ease, it is still quite a daunting task.  All the meals are really nice and quite big meals.  They are not really meals that you would cook on a Tuesday night as a quick meal for the family before you all go about the other tasks that you do on a Tuesday night.  They are meals that you may be able to cook quite fast (with a bit of practice I would argue), but they were meals then to be enjoyed.  They have something of an occasion about them.  They’re not super special occasion meals, but like I’ve said they’re not a quick Tuesday night with the family kind of affair either.  I would be happy to present any of my friends and family with any of the 30 Minute Meals and have confidence that they were being given something a little special.  In its self this isn’t a reason to not cook through the book as a project but it makes it a more daunting, at least longer, task.  There are 50 recipes in 30 Minute Meals.  At the rate of 1 a week that’s a year long project.  With how my life is, I doubt that I could realistically achieve more than 1 meal like that a week on average.  Also, although not a massive issue, some of the recipes do work out to be relatively expensive.  So, while this may not stop you cooking through the book as a project, it does make doing several recipes a week more problematic.

 So I think that 15 Minute Meals is a good candidate for the reasons I never actually took on the project of cooking through 30 Minute Meals.  I am confident that these would still be meals I would be happy put in front of my friends but at the very least I should be able to cook through the book relatively quickly.  There are other reasons that I am particularly keen to do this project with this particular book.  I’m a pretty ok cook.  But I am best at cooking for other people and best when there is at least a small sense of occasion to it.  By this I mean a Sunday lunch type affair rather than a quick meal on a Tuesday night before I go out for the evening.  I really am not that good at cooking quick meals.  I live on my own, and I have done for some time.  This has made me a worse, or at least a more lazy, cook than I used to be.  I only really make an effort when I cook for other people and of late it’s got pretty bad.  If no one’s coming round for dinner then the food I’ve been cooking, is barely cooking at all, and sometimes it definitely isn’t cooking.  It’s been straying into the something on toast (or just toast, or just bread and a bit olive oil and vinegar) territory for too long now.  So the appeal of this book is that it is aimed at helping you do those quicker, but good, meals.  If I’m honest I don’t have all that many of those in my repertoire.  So I hope that this will make me a better cook in that kind of way.  The very act of doing this project will also get me to cook more than I have been doing lately as well.  Also I’ve got a bit slack at having people over for dinner lately and so doing this should get me back to cooking for people more often again.