venta | *munch*

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munch

Quite often I find myself in the situation of only having around half an hour to cook and eat my tea when I get in from work. So, realistically, I want to be able to cook whatever-it-is in 15 minutes or under.

I'm not really a huge fan of microwave meals - they're usually insubstantial and/or tasteless. I have no objection to instant-style things so long as they're nice (a current stand-by is Ainsley Harriott's instant cous-cous mix... the Moroccan one in particular. Takes around five minutes, and makes a reasonable snack meal).

However. I'd rather cook stuff. Quickly. And (here comes the crunch) I want to use moderately non-perishable ingredients, because I'm never together enough to have worked out what/where/with whom I'm eating in time to have done the requisite shopping. Our house is usually reasonably well off for standard vegetables so they're OK, but fresh meat/fish is right out. Tinned stuff is OK. So is dried. Things which live in jars full of olive oil and pretend to be fresh are very much approved of :)

So, last night was a mushroom and artichoke heart omelette. Took under 10 minutes to cook, and was made from things which were hanging about in the cupboard/fridge.

Anyone got any suggestions ?

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And cooking things which take a while in advance and freezing them.
Pasta sauces, stews, casseroles that kind of thing.

Grabbing handfulls of leaves from around the garden and making herb salad is nice as well.

Put pasta (or noodles if you're really pushed for time) on.
Chop a small onion and start to fry it in a small saucepan.
Add tuna/a couple of chopped mushrooms
Add some tomato puree/passata/0.5 tin chopped tomatoes

Heat until pasta is ready, serve.

Optional, pepper, salt, that EPC very lazy garlic.

Noodles are your friend !

Useful things:

* Good quality dried noodles or 'wet' noodles in vacuum packs (expensive, but makes stir fries quicker by 5 minutes or so).

* Garlic paste (much quicker than 'real' garlic, fairly cheap and almost as good no matter what certain snobs say).

* Chickpeas, black eyed beans etc. in cans. Unlike most vegetables, these are best out of cans anyway and keep forever.

* At least 3 types of curry paste. I use the Patak's stuff, typically Korma, Balti, Tikka, Madras and Garam Masala.

* Jar or two of white sauce (sometimes misleading labeled as being for lasagna). Useful for those days when you're not in the mood for yet another tomato-based sauce.

Do I need to fill in the blanks ? Grab a random selection of vegetables from your collection, stir fry them, chuck in the sauce ingredients du-jour and the whole lot's ready in 5-10 minutes (depending on the vegatables).

Oh, and in case you haven't got into the microwave trick yet: Microwave mushrooms, brocolli, carrots, babycorn and anything else which doesn't need to be crispy in a big jug with a bit of water. Much faster than other cooking methods and doesn't require supervision of any kind, meaning you can do the rest of your prep at the same time.

Oh, and in case you haven't got into the microwave trick yet

I haven't :(

I persistently fail to use the microwave for anything more complicated than a bit of reheating. I think only about a quarter of my cooking life has been spent in a house with a m/w, and I'm slow on the uptake :)

Well, since I totally live on the type of cooking that you describe I'm sure I can come up with a few examples.

Pasta and sauce: easy, boring.

Veggie stir fry: Apply vegetables to wok. Fry. Apply noodles to pan of boiling water. Cook until bored. Add whatever sauce you feel like

Leek and potato bake (requires a food processor): Render leeks (onions if you have em), potatoes into very very tiny pieces. Stir fry them until they aren't poisonous any more. Whilst they are frying, cook a white(/cheese/mushroom) sauce. Apply the two to a pyrex dish and bake until bored or the cheese on top (if you added it) looks yummy.

Oniony Chickpeayey cheesey mix: Fry onion. Apply tin of chick peas. Add cheese until bored. Optionally, add lots of interesting spices.

Lentils: Cook in about 5-10 minutes, can add any sauce and any carbs and any veg that you feel like. I like spicy tomatoey lentils with pasta.

Pizza: Get pizza base, add pasta sauce, veggies, cheese and bake until bored.

Generally, I just pick a source of protein (lentils, chick peas, cheese are good), pick a source of starch (if you picked lentils or chick peas you've got a head start here, otherwise pasta and couscous are good ones to pick, as is a microwaved potato/sweet potato), pick some vegetables (whatever you've got to hand), pick some source of fat (cheese, olive oil), pick a source of flavour (sauce, tomatoes, spices, onions, mushrooms etc) and apply them to one or more pans in whatever manner seems appropriate.

Couple of quick questions ?

(1) With the Leek & Spud bake - doesn't the cooking time make it too slow ? How long d'you cook it for, 'cos I'd normally go for at least 20m ?

(2) Pizza: What kind of bases d'you use given that "ingredients don't go off" is one of the requirements ? Or do you just freeze the fresh bases ? I've never got that to work well... (they come out very crispy).

1)Hmm, yes, it probably is over the time limit, but it is one that I've cooked, got myself ready to go out and eaten the meal in about 35 minutes or so, so it's probably still worth a mention. The baking part is more of a "Finish it off" part rather than a "This is the part that turns the ingredients from being raw to being cooked part". So, 5-10 minutes or so in the oven. (And as someone else said, microwaves are another great way of getting food to the nearly-cooked stage)

2)I use the foil wrapped ready-made pizza bases rather than the fresh ones. Sainsburys put them with the sauces (well last time I was there).

That'll teach me to reply without the whole thread in front of me ;-).

Here's the recipe I use for quick-and-easy pizza base. Being fresh it's nicer than the pre-packed things, which I find a bit dry, but it takes literally five minutes to make.

8oz self-raising flour
small handful of grated cheese
4 fl oz milk or water
4 tblsp vegetable oil
pinch of salt
pepper to taste
optional sunflower seeds.

seive flour into a bowl. Add the salt and oil and rub in. Add the grated cheese, seeds and pepper. Lob the milk/water in and mix (knead if you're feeling ambitious) to a dough.

Shape on a baking tray or shallow pie/flan tin. Top with pasta sauce from a jar, lots of grated cheese and other toppings as required.

Cook for about 10 mins at gas 7/200C.

Eat.

Argh.

Having issues with LJ this evening. Maybe it's time I went to bed. Sorry for multiple posts/deletion.

Nigel Slater's "Real Fast Food" is the one you want. Really, really good recipes, and very fast. (And I *hate* celebrity cooks, so this is a strong recommendation.

Top tip: Buy whole chickens, joint them, and freeze each of the bits separately to be defrosted when required.

Risottos are quick and easy, as are soups, pasta dishes (although you need a good 2 hrs to make a proper red sauce, but), you've even got enough time to make mashed potatoes, or bake small things like saltimbocca.

How are you cooking risotto if you have time to eat it as well as cook it in half an hour? It always takes me half an hour to make it!

Oh, and I'll second the Nigel Slater recommendation. In fact, I can lend

venta a copy if she wants to assess it before committing herself.

I find I can do small quantities in 20 minutes, but you have to have quite heavy pans to prevent the rice sticking and burning, because you need to give it quite a lot of heat.

Course, the real crunch is the washing-up... :-)

Oh, and I'll second the Nigel Slater recommendation. In fact, I can lend venta a copy if she wants to assess it before committing herself.

Oooh, yes please. Dunno when I'll see you, though. Do you (and

smiorgan) want to come round and be cooked for sometime ? I'll even cook something for longer than 10 minutes :)

Hmm, let me see... I get to evangelise about my favourite cookery writer and have nice food cooked for me...? That's a tough one, but on balance, I think it sounds like a wonderful idea ;-)

have nice food cooked for me

You're making all kinds of assumptions there :)

Oh, I don't know. In the course of this thread, I think you've given quite a lot of evidence that you cook yummy things!

saltimbocca

Who ?

Here

Although I typically make mine with supreme of chicken, since it's hard to get decent veal now I'm further from the Italian butcher in Holborn. And I roast, rather than saute, since it holds together better like that...

Oh aye. I do that sometimes, but I call it chicken-breast-with-prosciutto-round-it :)

Having read the recipe, it recommends using instant polenta. Can you get instant versions which are nice ? Last time we tried it, it came out somewhere between a bad roux and angry semolina.

:-) It's the sage thats the essential thing: everything else is variable. (I make mine with serrano ham rather than parma, since the former's darker and richer)

RecipeSource recipes are very variable: a lot of them are totall shit, and some of them contain bad elements. Like instant polenta...

But that might just be my feelings towards polenta: it's pretty nasty, unless you make it very thick, so that you can slice it and grill it with a ton of olive oil... Angry semolina is an accurate description of the wrong sort of polenta! :-)

Last time we tried it, it came out somewhere between a bad roux and angry semolina.

But was it sexy, angry semolina ?

;-)

No.

Or not in my view, anyway. I'd hate to appear to be passing judgement on all the semolinaphiles out there.

If you have a freezer, then you can keep pieces of fish or chicken breast around. Try flash fried salmon with a cajun seasoning and lime juice.

Eggs are also very nice and quick, particularly poached ones as they keep a defined shape but aren't hard or greasy. Remember to add a dash of malt vinegar to the boiling water.

Couple of very nice combo recipes:

1: steam cous cous; boil puy lentils, add tomatos from a can, anchovies if you like, worcester sauce, tabasco and anything else; cook a couple of poached eggs. Serve with the cous cous on the bottom, the lentil mixture on top and the eggs in the middle.

2: Fry a chopped onion and some bacon/lardons/pancetta. Add garlic and herbs if you like. Pour on 1/4 bottle of wine (keep cheap screw top wine or party dregs for this purpose) in and allow to simmer a bit, then add a bit of cornflour to thicken the mixture. Meanwhile put toast in the toaster and poach some eggs. Serve the wine/bacon/onion sauce in a bowl, with the eggs in the middle. When the toast pops, rub with garlic for instant bruschetta and serve the lot. Eat with a spoon, slurping noisily to irritate housemates (optional). Burgundian recipe. Makes a nice starter.

If you have a freezer, then you can keep pieces of fish or chicken breast around.

This is one thing which repeatedly confuses me. I'm capable of freezing things but never remember to take them out of the freeser with sufficient time to defrost.

Apart from risking nasty food poisoning defrosting stuff in the microwave, it completely destroys the texture of the food...

How does anyone else get round this ?

Poached eggs is something worth bearing in mind. I always forget I like eggs.

2 sounds great. I'm presuming you mean red wine?

Farfalline pasta. It's really tiny bow-shaped pasta usually used for soups. Takes 4 minutes to cook, can be bought in Tesco. I eat it with tomato and cheese, or tomato and tuna, or stir-fried mushrooms and soy sauce and something like peas or broccoli. Fabulous. I shove frozen peas into the pasta water to cook just for the last few minutes.

We have salmon and rice when we are in a hurry.

Set rice going (you can use the quick cook varieties).

Then chop up an onion, fry it.
Take a can of salmon, drain it of the oil and remove backbone and skin, then add to the pan.

When this is warmed through, add the oil from teh fish and mash it all together. Add tomato ketchup and salt and pepper.

Then make a bed of rice and place the salmon and onion mixture on top of it.

I find ringing the chinese/pizza on my way home (insert time gap depending on your distance from work/etc to home) pretty satisfying..

The only problem is that it can't be done all the time since its not tremendously healthy, so not for use on a monday.

As an uber foodie (with a professional foodie mum) I have to agree with Tom that Nigel Slater is the man to go for. Not only do his recipes work consistently (unlike Nigella's, which all need tweaking), but he also writes beautifully about food.

But I digress. Risotto Pronto by Gallo (or Risotto Gallo by Pronto, I can't remember) is sold in Sainsbury's with the rest of the rice, and cooks in 12 minutes. The four cheese one tastes gorgeous, but smells foul when it cooks, and the wild mushroom one is lovely. And non-pungent! And the boxes keep for months.

My other speedy tip is soup. Filling, quick, and good for you! Especially Covent Garden Soup Company. *drool*

Make more time in your life for cooking?

I do that too, on other days :)

Instead of pasta, you could always cook gnocci.

They are little potato dumplings that you cook by putting in boiling water and when they float they are cooked.

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munch

Being organised..

Tuna in onion and tomato sauce with pasta

Noodles !

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Microwaved veg

Pizza base...

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