Resorting to quick and easy

"it's not a time-saver, is it? What time have you saved? You still had to go to the shop, preheat the oven, bang the stuff in; you're still, in all likelihood, going to make a salad and a dressing."

Zoe Williams - The Guardian

I'm not sure I really have a lot to say here, and I've probably said it before - I do have a vague memory of this, but then I'm forgetting somewhat, what I have done. I do know I said some of it yesterday in my post on dump cakes.

Now I know that Coles Magazine is not up there with the all-time great 'serious' cook books of all time, but I enjoy skimming through it and every now there are useful little tips, information about new varieties of fruit and vegetables, and occasionally, really tempting recipes. There are a few in this one - mostly from Curtis Stone. But when skimming this edition I couldn't help noticing how many of the recipes used shortcuts used prepackaged, pre prepared foods. Almost every one, in fact, was obviously aimed at getting you to buy products from their shelves, be it 'Coles RSPCA approved Australian chicken breast fillets' or Uncle Ben's basmati rice. In fact from about halfway through there was an emphasis on cooking things with just five ingredients - at least one of which was a processed product. The five (or four, or three) ingredients thing has been around for a while of course, and the magazine does usually have one section which promotes various products on their shelves. But this editions seemed to have more than usual. They even had a My Kitchen Rules section with recipes - all including some promoted product. I don't watch the program but I thought it was supposed to be about cooking 'posh' food.

Maybe I just haven't noticed before how much advertising goes into these recipes. Maybe it's always been there. But I actually don't think so. So I guess there's a whole post on sneaky advertising there, but that is not really what it made me think about.

What it did do was make me wonder whether I should 'cheat' more myself. Should I not make my own pesto but buy it ready-made? If I'm in a hurry, why not? I mention pesto, because in fact, once I was going to make something with pesto and didn't have any, so thought I would, for once only, just buy a jar. But when it came to seeing the price on the shelf I just couldn't bring myself to do it. So I bought some of their relatively expensive fresh basil myself and made my own. Just as quick almost, and much cheaper.

For the main problem with achieving quick and easy with bought 'helpers' is that it's not cheap. The picture above is from Delia Smith's How to Cheat at Cooking and features various, probably expensive products - gourmet pasta prepared pastry cases, real juice? And this is where the drift of this particular post (for they do drift I know), changed direction slightly by focussing on this particular book and the furore that it stirred up in the UK.

The concept of the book was "a way forward - first for those who are afraid to cook, and secondly, for those who are short of time." Not every recipe, in fact, uses something processed in some way - it might just involve a quick, cheating way of making something - like hollandaise sauce. But yes she does use specific products. Very specific, which is why I find the book slightly frustrating because we don't have all of the same products here, (what is Heinz Frito?) and why she copped a lot of criticism. For this was the book that heralded 'the Delia Effect' whereby if Delia Smith says it's good, then the product's sales increase hugely. It persists today. Delia herself says she was not paid at all:

"We debated long and hard whether to mention products but at the end of the day this book is for people who are either in a hurry or are afraid to cook. The more information you can give them the easier it is" She explained that she had never undertaken any paid promotion work of any products, saying that "I've never done any advertising because I feel I am in a position of trust, and that has been very liberating. I'm mindful that if you start getting paid, that is sometimes harder."

I think I sort of believe her - although when she was patron saint of Waitrose later on I would imagine she would have been paid for that. But I am not here to debate the virtues or evils of Delia Smith - the point is that the products she promotes are mostly not your average processed stuff - they are expensive and full of 'real' things and no additives. As one article pointed out - not the sort of thing that the poor buy or that is even available in the supermarkets in their part of town.

So is it wrong to use off the shelf products such as sauces, frozen vegetables and tinned meat? Well no I don't think so. We all use some things that are processed as a matter of course - dried pasta, tinned tomatoes in the winter, jam, Dijon mustard, soy sauce, vinegar, olives.... In The Robert Carrier Cookbook, Carrier has a lengthy section on what you should have in your store cupboard in case you have to whip up a quick meal for friends. It included things like tinned fish, tinned tomatoes, pasta, rice, tomato paste, olives, tinned pimentos. He was certainly no snob about it. Even Elizabeth David didn't preserve her own olives, and salt her own anchovies. We may all buy classier or less classy versions of these things though. Olives for example:

"if purchased in a delicatessen to make the consumer feel closer to the product, they will have been imported in huge white plastic tubs, before being carefully displayed in earthenware. Either way, the olive is a processed food - and thank god for that. It saves us oodles of time and effort to be able to buy ready-to-eat olives in stores around the country." Justine Brian - Spiked

So where do you draw the line?

"You wouldn't, if you had a friend coming round, open a bag of salad, a packet of grilled chicken pieces, splodge some Caesar dressing over it and serve it up, not unless you were trying to make some point about how busy/charmingly inept you were. But at what point does it count as home-made: when the dressing is yours, but the rest isn't? When you washed your own baby spinach? When you grilled the chicken yourself? Who cares who grilled the stupid chicken?" Zoe Williams - The Guardian

So, to take examples from Delia's book - at one end of the spectrum you have spanakopita pasties - made with bought puff pastry - I mean who makes their own puff pastry? - and at the other you have 'Good old shepherd's pie', made with tinned lamb mince, ready chopped vegetables and frozen mashed potato. This is the recipe that she really copped flak for. And I can see why, because it really isn't difficult or time-consuming to make Shepherd's pie with 'real' meat and 'real' potatoes.

And again, not cheap.

Nevertheless we really shouldn't be snobby about short cuts. Because that's what we are really talking about isn't it? Even I, who am retired and have all the time in the world, feel lazy sometimes. And if I was a working mum with hungry teenagers, I would be taking many more shortcuts than I do now. Indeed when I was, I'm afraid I resorted to chicken and chips from the chicken shop a few times. I should have just used Delia's book. For:

"Food is sometimes sustenance, sometimes pleasure, sometimes an exquisite combination of time, place and matter (that perfect meal with friends, for example). The contemporary debate on food suggests these shades of grey don’t exist. Everything is black and white - pure and good, or adulterated and bad." Justine Brian - Spiked

Every now and then I do stray into using things like curry pastes. I mostly use individual spices but not always. As you can seem from the picture at left, Coles had a section on curries - starting with this delicious looking red chicken curry as part of its 5 ingredients section - one of the ingredients being the curry paste which is the bulk of the flavour. Of course if you do this all the time then your food will taste the same all the time. There are only so many different curry pastes on the shelf. But every now and then I think this is OK.

Should I feel ashamed? Certainly there is a section of the food media that thinks I should.

"Convenience itself is frowned upon by today’s food fanatics – being quick and convenient means people aren’t paying homage to the process of cooking and eating in the way that many celebrity chefs and food writers would like them to."

I don't think my favourite food writers would though. Maybe Elizabeth David, but I think she would be the only one. And the health food freaks might - but then think of all the processed foods that that particular section of the market promotes. 'Ordinary' health food fanatics don't make their own muesli.

Really the trick when you are tired is to focus on the simple. Don't try to do anything complicated. A steak, a piece of salmon, an omelette, pasta and tomatoes - the possibilities are endless. One of those English writers who wrote about Delia thought that the ultimate quick and easy was her recipe for Gnocchi Carbonara which used bought gnocchi, a bought fresh carbonara sauce and pancetta. You seem to be able to buy the sauce from Coles. Not sure I would go that far though - they look a bit gluey. The sauce is a step too far for me I think - which is a bit two-faced, considering I'm OK with curry pastes.

“Endeavour to play easy pieces well and with elegance; that is better than to play difficult pieces badly.” Robert Schumann, Advice to Young Musicians