'Simple' 1 - short on time
"With your ingredients in the house, your knife sharp, the oven on and the decks clear, these recipes will take less than 30 minutes to get on the table." Yotam Ottolenghi
So he says. Now, as yet I haven't really tried anything from my new book, so I can't really say. So often these cooks say it is super fast to make and you watch them on the videos. Jamie Oliver is a whiz at making everything look fast - chop, chop, chop, chuck it in the pan, give it a stir and hey presto - a gourmet meal for four. And he's not alone in this - there are endless recipes and books out there for food that is ready in less than 30 minutes - or even less. And honestly it is possible, but I have to admit that my food preparation lets me down in the speed stakes. As a friend remarked as I was cutting up onions for something we were about to eat, "you're not speedy at cutting up onions are you?" No I'm not, but I'm not that slow either. Anyway the point is that even though chefs claim that something will be finished in 10 minutes, I find it realistic to double it. They are just so much faster at organising themselves and also at cutting up those onions.
Fast food is a mantra of the times. Fast food can mean anything from stopping off at MacDonald's on your way home for dinner to whipping up a delectable stir fry or pasta at home. They're the two extremes aren't they?
Fast food has a bad name, because of the plethora of unhealthy options available to try from the said MacDonalds and its competitors, But do we opt for the commercial fast food options because we really have no time, or because we don't want to cook dinner?
“Time is a created thing. To say 'I don't have time,' is like saying, 'I don't want to.” Lao Tzu
So even the ancient Chinese were out of time to do things. Busy, busy, busy - can't cook dinner, no time. But Lao Tzu is right - it's not really a question of time, because Ottolenghi and his ilk are right, in that you really can prepare a delicious meal in a very short space of time. Lately we have had that wonderful Chicken Caesar Salad, Green Peppercorn Steak with Petits Pois à la Française an omelette from leftover potato salad and yesterday's paella kind of dish - again from leftovers. You just need a good recipe book perhaps, some interesting ingredients in your fridge and some good ideas. You could even, probably just chuck all of those interesting things in your fridge into a wok, splash them with something tasty like soy sauce or balsamic vinegar, stir for a few minutes and voilà. Dinner.
Really it's just a matter of wanting to do that. And I must say that back in the day, when I came back from a day's work, having picked up my teenage boys on the way, with no husband at home that day, it was easier to stop and buy chicken and chips than to cook something. Which I could easily have done. The fast food options are wide and if you're feeling tired it's easier to opt for one of them.
And then there are the people who really don't enjoy cooking. I find it a bit hard to understand, but then I hate sport and I know my husband can't understand that - he's good at it, I'm not.
Ottolenghi devised six meanings for the word 'simple' in his latest book - made up from the letters in the word. The first letter is 's' and he has chosen to use 's' to mean 'short on time'. Why are we so short on time? Are we? Is this a new thing or have people always felt that they had no time? Well Lao Tzu was obviously aware that some people thought they had no time. And they probably didn't. People worked very long hours back then, long, hard hours. Only the rich had time on their hands. A bit like today really although these days it tends to be those in high paying jobs who work the longest hours.
Today we have all manner of labour and time-saving devices, designed to theoretically make everything simple. To save us time. My mother and all the mothers before her, used to dedicate almost an entire day to doing the washing. Now you can just throw it in the machine, turn it on and hang it on the line - or you don't even have to do that. You could just throw it in a tumble dryer. So where has all the time saved from the day that she spent, largely on one task, gone? Why do we still have very little time, not just for cooking, but for all manner of other things - spending time with your family, tending your garden, writing letters to family and friends, going on holiday? Even we oldies who should have endless time on our hands seem to think sometimes that there are too many things to do. Mind you on a daily basis we do really have endless time - i.e. no job to go to, no children to tend to, but on a whole life scale, then time is definitely running out, and so we are, in fact, short on time. They do say that the less time you have the more you do, and that if you want something done ask a busy person. There are lots of old people running around the world catching up with the all the places they have never seen and doing all sorts of things they never had time to do before.
But this is a long way from short on time cooking. As Ottolenghi says, pasta, fish, even some meats and anything raw, is quick to prepare and cook - or not cook as the case may be. I dipped into the book and picked out three examples of what he thinks you can prepare in less than 30 minutes. I was going to say that the first one might not be enough for a meal - but when you think about it, it is really. All your major food needs are met - with bread to soak it up as well that is.
Hot charred cherry tomatoes with cold yoghurt - Now doesn't that look pretty and yes it would be very quick and simple. But so today. 'Charred' - when did we start using 'charred' as a description of trendy food? Cherry tomatoes. They didn't exist in my youth, and for a while they were just that - tomatoes the size of a cherry - but now they come in all sorts of sizes and shapes and colours. It uses Greek style yoghurt - when did that become the kind of yoghurt that we use rather than just plain natural yoghurt? And it also contains cumin (unknown in our youth) and Urfa chilli flakes - unknown to me still. You can use ordinary ones though. There are twelve ingredients including the salt and pepper, so not simple in that sense. But virtually no preparation. But you must have the tomatoes hot and the yoghurt cold.
"One of the beauties of this dish lies in the exciting contrast between the hot, juicy tomatoes and fridge-cold yogurt, so make sure the tomatoes are straight out of the oven and the yogurt is straight out of the fridge. The heat of the tomatoes will make the cold yogurt melt, invitingly, so plenty of crusty sourdough or focaccia to mop it all up is a must alongside" Yotam Ottolenghi
I found one blogger who had made it and thought that once you had made it once you would be making it over and over again.
I see the Guardian version of this calls it a salad, but the book doesn't and it doesn't appear to be served cold, or even warm. In the book he uses trofie or fusilli pasta but on the Guardian site it's pappardelle or tagliatelle and the quantities of the various ingredients are a tiny bit different, all of which goes to show that he doesn't remain stuck on an idea but tinkers with it. It's basically a pasta and pesto recipe - it's just that the pesto ingredients are a tiny bit different, and there are some mange tout (sugar snap) peas in it as well to add a bit of protein.
"For an extra twist of colour and flavour, stir through some oven-dried tomatoes." Yotam Ottolenghi
Bridget Jones's pan-fried salmon with pine nut salsa - a homage to a line in a film which said the dish was an Ottolenghi one. Apparently not, but he has now invented it. Salmon is always easy and so, so tasty and nowadays, thanks to aquaculture so available. By the kilo it sounds expensive, but you don't need a big piece, so it's quite economical too. Salsas are a thing of today too aren't they. Something green, something nutty, something sweet, something sour and there you are. Brilliant.
I think the really great thing about these dishes is that they are indeed super easy, - well today. In times gone by, without a food processor that pesto would have taken more time and considerable elbow grease as my father used to say for hard work grinding things. Not much time involved in any of them. But can you imagine anyone from the battler classes, as the politicians like to call them, cooking any of these things? They could - easily. They might even like them and the pasta at least is not expensive, neither is the tomato dish really. So how do we get them to give it a go? After all they don't even have to buy the book. It can be borrowed from the library for free, downloaded on to your iPad (I bet they have iPads) or mobile phone (they definitely have those), for less than the printed book or the odd recipe just gleaned from the net here and there. But then I guess you have to have time (and inclination) to do that.
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." Bertrand Russell
That's for the oldies.
