Autumn is my favourite season. I love the still warmish days and the crisp, cold mornings. And I love how it’s cold enough for the heater and an extra snugly blankie when it comes to bed time. It’s almost time to pack away the barbeque tongs and start looking at delicious casserole recipes again. Although the Bloke is not a big fan of the casserole type things, I do get a lot pleasure from looking at the recipes.
There’s something about autumn that makes the idea of cooking up a big, hearty meal much more appealing than trying the same thing in summer, though. Somewhere around the end of March, I start to drag out the cook books and have a look through and see what inspires me. I am a big fan of Jamie Oliver – I like how the recipes turn out how you expect them to turn out, and I like how he’s not prescriptive when it comes to following the recipe or measuring things out exactly. And I also like how he uses fairly ordinary ingredients. His risotto is MY risotto! What I DO NOT LIKE, however, is his tendency to use every single solitary dish in the entire house to make one meal!
For Christmas last year, I got my paws on one of the few remaining copies of Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals that were in existence anywhere (it’s back in stock everywhere now, though). I’d read a few reviews of his cook book where people complained that it didn’t take 30 minutes AT ALL – it was more like an hour and a half; and that you needed all this specialised equipment and you had to trek around for special ingredients and they were all experienced cooks and stuff and that (some people will whinge about EVERYTHING). However, I wouldn’t call myself anything more than a fairly normal household cook – and I have virtually EVERYTHING on the list… I don’t have a griddle pan – but it’s on my birthday list; my non-stick pans don’t have lids (but my saucepans do) and I don’t have an oven proof frying pan or a fine grater (although my box grater has a fine side, so meh to the whingers. Improvise!) I had better confess right about now that I adore kitchen gadgetry, but seriously folks – there is NOTHING all that out of the ordinary that you wouldn’t expect in a normal kitchen on that list!
I pored over the cook book for days and days and finally selected the first meal I wanted to try… I had a willing panel of testers at the ready, and the pizza joint was on speed dial just in case… all bases were definitely covered. I made the Peri Peri chicken with dressed potatoes and rocket salad followed by Portuguese tarts, and can I say that it all was absolutely magnificent. I wasn’t really expecting it to come together *in* 30 minutes. But I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised… but in saying that, it was 30 minutes of cooking time and probably a good 10 minutes of getting all my equipment set up and the ingredients lined up ready to go before I started. I did have to go and get a couple of ingredients before I started – puff pastry sheets, because I had none and a bunch of basil (again, because I had none – although I had dried). See, nothing weird there at all.
The only issue I had with the end result was more to do with the bodgieness of my oven and nothing to do with the recipe at all; in fact, the only notes that I made on the recipe was to whoa up on the basil (obviously an Australian ‘bunch’ is a little more generous than a British ‘bunch’) and to cook the tart cases longer (my oven’s problem, not the recipe). It tasted magnificent, and was completely cleaned up by the panel of testers, and there were no leftovers either.
Oh, and the DISHES!!!
There are a LOT of dishes, and when one has a small kitchen and no dishwasher… Lordy, Miss Maudy! I am the kind of cook that is big on the ‘clean as you go’ brought on by the lack of bench space and teensy sink at my house. However, the nature of this kind of cooking is that it’s a very bang-bang-bang get everything done at once kind of thing; which isn’t conducive to the more leisurely ‘clean up as you go’ method I normally employ. When we’d finished eating, there were dishes EVERYWHERE and it would have taken me near as long to clean up as it did to cook! NOT happy about that!
I have subsequently made a couple of other things from the cookbook, and have been absolutely delighted with the result; although I haven’t made an entire “meal” since the first effort. But can I just say that the simple pizza dough recipe in the book now means that it’s quicker to MAKE pizza than dial one! And I have it on Very Good Authority that the frangipane tarts are rather good, too.
The cookbook does have a nice selection of recipes, including a decent number of vegetarian ones, and a couple of meaty ones that could be de-meatified quite easily. And while the cook book is presented as a selection of “meals”, it’s easy to pull out and make one course as a standalone dish. There are at least a dozen more recipes I would like to try, and maybe half a dozen meals that I would also like to make.
So that would be two thumbs up from me for Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals! (And two thumbs up each from each of the Archer Test Kitchen Tasting Panel, too.) The only real criticism I have (and it’s quite petty, when one has the joy of Google at one’s fingertips…) is that there is the odd ingredient or two that requires translation from British to Australian, and perhaps a list of substitutes for those less obvious ones like elderflower cordial, for example.
