Category: Cooking

Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals #3: Cheat’s Pizza
This was our third official cooking/blogging attempt from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. It’s been so hot in Sydney this week that we wanted to choose a “cooler” meal, something with lots of salad. We settled on Cheat’s Pizza with 3 Delish Salads, Squashed Cherries & Vanilla Marscapone Cream. It actually worked out pretty perfectly, as we had a surfeit of tomatoes and basil from our weekly veggie box, and cherries were on special at the grocery store.

Quick verdict: This was the first recipe where we didn’t substitute anything; we had it all. This was also our FASTEST attempt yet! Elapsed time: 38:26. That’s pretty damn good! I think you could easily get this one down to 30 minutes once you had the recipe memorised. (There’s also a step we’d eliminate if we did it again; more on that in a minute.) Overall I rated it 9/10, while the Snook judged it 8/10. Read on for a photo essay of the preparation.Pre-start prep: We got out all the necessary ingredients, tools, and cooking vessels. This week we also needed the food processor and the blender. The kitchen was clean (well, as clean as it gets) and everything wiped down and ready go to. The grill was turned on as high as it would go and the frying pan was on the stove on low heat.

First up are the ingredients for the pizza. The dough was just self-raising flour and tepid water. There’s also: salami, buffalo mozzarella, red wine vinegar, canned tomatoes, garlic, fennel seeds, red chilli, and parmesan.

Next up are the ingredients for the tomato salad: a variety of “interesting” tomatoes, basil, balsamic vinegar, garlic, chilli.

Two more salads’ ingredients here: a packet of rocket and a lemon for the rocket salad; buffalo mozzarella, pesto, basil, and lemon for the mozzarella salad. (Note: Rodd actually made some homemade pesto recently and froze it into an ice cube tray, which is why our pesto looks weird here!)

Dessert ingredients: marscapone, cherries, icing sugar, an orange, milk, vanilla.

Here’s our frying pan on the stove. We didn’t have an ovenproof one as big as the recipe required, so we took Jamie’s advice and made two smaller pizzas instead.

Our crappy food processor. We’re going to get a new one soon, I swear.

And a newcomer to the stage: the blender! (Or “liquidizer” as Jamie refers to it.)

The tomato salad was the first thing to do. The Snook got to work chopping up all our weird organic tomatoes.

Really, the salad prep was so quick. We added in finely chopped chilli and garlic, torn up basil, and the balsamic vinegar. Then a seasoning of salt & pepper and a drizzle of olive oil, and it was done!

Time to get the pizza going. Here’s the Snook whizzing up the dough (flour, water, oil, and salt) in the food processor.

Next he turned it out onto a floured board…

Kinda lumpy and wet, “like a scone dough” he says.

Here he’s divided it in half and he’s rolling it out into a circle roughly the size of our frying pan.

Meanwhile, I got to work on that sauce. The blender has tinned tomatoes, basil, garlic, red wine vinegar, olive oil, and salt in it.

The whizzed up sauce. Frankly, this is a step I’d leave out next time. It annoyed me that it only uses a third of a can of tomatoes. What the heck am I going to do with the rest? And it’s a pain to clean a blender. I found myself thinking – why not just buy one of those little tubs of pre-made sauce?

Time to assemble the pizza! Here’s the dough going into the frying pan.

At this stage it’s got my sauce on it, along with torn up buffalo mozzarella and a grating of parmesan.

The final additions: salami, fennel seeds, and chilli. Then it went under a hot grill for 5 minutes!

Meanwhile, Snookums got working on the rocket salad. It was pretty simple: just rocket, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

The pizza is done! (We let it cool for a minute before putting it on a rack and then assembling the second one in the same pan.)

I was busy with the mozzarella salad. Basically, it’s torn up mozzarella covered in pesto, basil, lemon zest, pepper, and olive oil. (Note: real buffalo mozzarella is HELLA expensive. The two lumps we used cost us $16!)

The dessert was the weirdest part for me. First, I don’t get why you have to put the cherries in ice water. It didn’t seem to really make much difference. Secondly, why such a tiny amount of marscapone? The recipe called for 125g, which was half my little tub. Even padded out with milk, icing sugar, vanilla, and orange zest, that doesn’t amount to much when you divide it among four people. Here I’ve divvied it up as if you were serving to four.

The finished meal! In terms of leftovers, we have a whole second pizza and plenty of salads for lunch tomorrow.

Here’s the dessert after I decided to just dump in the other half of the marscapone cream. That made a much nicer portion size.

Tasting notes: The Snook says the pizza was as good as could be expected given that it was made so quickly and didn’t include yeast. It browned up nicely on the bottom, but it was mostly bready and not that crispy (except around the edges). Snookums also doubted the inclusion of fennel seeds, which I actually liked. The tomato salad was excellent, and I think it actually brought out the best in our ragged tomatoes. The other two salads were good as well. In retrospect, buffalo mozzarella is probably overkill for the pizza in terms of the price, but it sure made a nice little indulgence. The dessert was very tasty; we just thought the recipe amounted to some very meager portions! Overall this was the perfect summer Italian meal and that nicely highlighted produce that’s in season. Will definitely be repeating this one.

Stay tuned next week for another recipe from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals!

Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals #2: Summer Veg Lasagne
This is our second cooking experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. We had about half a dozen episodes saved on the DVR, so we skimmed through them today looking for a suitable one. (We reckoned that if we could watch the episode first, we might stand a better chance of reproducing it.) We settled on Summer Veg Lasagne, Tuscan Tomato Salad, and Quick Mango Frozen Yoghurt.

Quick verdict: We couldn’t find any frozen mango cheeks, and fresh ones are just way too expensive right now. So we subbed in frozen berries for the dessert. Everything else was according to the recipe, pretty much. It was FANTASTIC. We rated this one 9.5/10. Our elapsed time was 60 minutes. That’s why we’ve taken off half a point. We feel that with more practice we could maybe shave off 15 minutes, but there’s no way we could get this one down to 30 minutes total. Still, the taste made it all worthwhile! Read on for a photo essay of the preparation.Pre-start prep: We got out all the necessary ingredients, tools, and cooking vessels. The kitchen was clean (well, as clean as it gets) and everything wiped down and ready go to. The grill was turned on as high as it would go.

First up are the ingredients for the lasagne. It used: spring onions, anchovies, garlic, asparagus, frozen peas, frozen broad beans, mint, cream, lemon, veggie stock, cottage cheese, fresh lasagne sheets, Parmesan cheese, and thyme.

Next, the ingredients for the Tuscan salad. It used: ciabatta (we had Pane di Casa instead), fennel seeds, oregano, capers, anchovies, basil, red peppers (we left these out as Snook doesn’t like them), garlic, tomatoes, red wine vinegar, and Parmesan cheese. (We also got the Balsamic out since Jamie used it on the show, but it’s not mentioned in the book.)

The cooking pans, ready go to. The big pot is for the lasagne filling, and the roasting pan was for toasting the bread and then cooking the assembled lasagne.

The first part of the lasagne filling preparation. This has chopped up asparagus and spring onions, and all sorts of lovely bits in it.

Here I’m tossing hunks of bread with olive oil, salt, and fennel seeds. (We tore some by hand before resorting to the knife. Efficiency won out over rusticity.) This then went into the oven under the grill to toast.

The next stage of the lasagne involved adding in the frozen peas and beans along with mint, cream, and lemon zest.

The hunks of bread have successfully toasted!

Now we could reclaim the roasting pan for lasagne assembly. We finished off the filling with stock and cottage cheese, then sorta mashed it as best we could. Here’s the Snook laying down the first layer of filling.

On top of each layer of filling went fresh lasagne sheets and then cheese. We didn’t have quite enough Parmesan, but on the actual episode Jamie said that cheddar would be a good substitute. So that’s what we’ve mixed in here.

Once you put the final layer of lasagne sheets on, you cover it with more cottage cheese, the asparagus tips, olive oil, fresh thyme, and more cheese. Then this goes into the hot oven.

While Snook worked on the bread salad, I started the dessert. As I said, we couldn’t find frozen mango so we went with mixed berry. The only other change I made to the recipe was adding a bit more honey to compensate for the tartness of the berries. (Man, our food processor sucks.)

The Snook’s completed bread salad. We didn’t seem to have quite as much liquid in ours as Jamie did. Maybe we didn’t use enough tomatoes? At any rate, our bread didn’t get a chance to soak up much juice.

By now my dessert had finished churning. I put it straight into a tub into the freezer.

Our lasagne took a little longer to brown up than Jamie’s. We think it’s because we had our shelf set slightly farther away from the element. But it browned up nice in the end.

A better shot of the completed lasagne. Note: this was HUGE. It easily makes 8 generous portions.

And here’s the completed meal! We had it with white wine, as suggested.

And lastly, dessert! The pink part is the Quick Raspberry Frozen Yoghurt I made above. (We didn’t bother with cones.) The green is actually pistachio gelato that the Snook made earlier in the weekend. The raspberry stuff was good… but the pistachio was AMAZING. I guess the lesson is that you can make decent ice cream quickly, but the good stuff takes a lot longer than 30 minutes!

Tasting notes: We both loved the lasagne. We’d had a lot of worries about it – would the pasta be cooked? would the mint be weird? would frozen broad beans be nice? – and they all turned out fine. Seriously, this dish alone was 10/10. The Tuscan bread salad was, as Rodd pointed out, basically a deconstructed bruschetta. We didn’t have quite enough juice to really soften the bread, but the crunchiness made a nice contrast to the lasagne. (For those worried about raw anchovy in it – as I was – it’s fine. No ickiness or fishiness at all!) The dessert was probably the weak point here, but frozen yoghurt was never going to set the world on fire. I’d really like to try it with the mango though, if we can find some frozen mango cheeks. This meal is a DEFINITE one to repeat!

Stay tuned next week for another recipe from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals!

Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals #1: Mustard Chicken
As promised a few weeks ago, the Snook and I have decided to cook and blog our way through Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals in its entirety. We got the book this week (thank you Booko!) and picked out a hopefully-easy recipe to start with: Mustard Chicken with Quick Dauphinoise, Greens, and Black Forest Affogato.

Quick Verdict: We experimented a bit with the dessert but the other three components were prepared exactly as specified. Both of us rated this one 8/10. With a few small tweaks, it could’ve been even higher. Our elapsed time was 50 minutes, but that was mostly due to capacity of our frying pan. Read on for a photo essay of the entire preparation.Pre-start prep: I got out all the necessary ingredients, tools, and cooking vessels. The kitchen was clean (well, as clean as it gets) and everything wiped down and ready go to. The oven was turned on to 220C and the kettle was boiled.

First up are the ingredients for the Quick Dauphinoise. I should mention that I have never been able to cook a very good gratin, so I was interested to see if Jamie’s version would work. It used baking potatoes, a red onion, cream, thyme, parmesan, anchovies, bay leaves, and nutmeg.

Next the ingredients for the Mustard Chicken. We got four skin-on chicken breast fillets, but they’re actually a fair bit larger than the size he specifies. This may have affected the final dish a bit. (More on that later.) We also have leek, garlic, mustard powder, wholegrain mustard, cream, and rosemary (not in the picture because I had to run out and pick it).

The Greens were pretty simple: a bunch of silverbeet, a package of baby spinach, and a lemon.

The cooking pots, ready to go. The roasting pan was for the potatoes; the frying pan for the chicken; and the sauce pan for the greens. This is where I’d do things differently next time. The frying pan wasn’t actually large enough for all four of our chicken breasts, so we had to do some juggling to cook them in stages. Make sure your meat fits! And my silverbeet only just fit in the saucepan.

Assembling the Dauphinoise. Most of the ingredients are in the roasting pan here and the Snook is mixing it up with his hands. Jamie has you cheat a bit by cooking the mix in the roasting pan on the stove for a bit. It was a bit tricky for us, as our cooktop is induction and our square roasting pan doesn’t fit nicely on the round induction zone. So it probably took a few minutes longer than necessary to start bubbling away.

Check out those monster chicken breasts. They’ve been “massaged” with chopped rosemary, mustard powder, salt, pepper, and olive oil. That’s when we realised we had a size issue happening with the pan. We decided it was best to cook them two at a time.

The Dauphinoise is bubbling away now so it was time to add in more parmesan and thyme. Then it goes into the oven! (That freed up a burner so we could get the other chicken going in a separate pan.)

I didn’t document much of the Greens preparation since it was so simple. I chopped the ribs of the silverbeet first and tossed them in the pot of boiling water. After a few minutes, I added the roughly chopped leaves. When they were cooked, I drained it by pouring it over the baby spinach in a colander in the sink. Then the whole lot went back in the pan with olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Simple but delicious!

The Dauphinoise bubbling away in the oven and getting nicely brown…

Here the Snook has turned the chicken over and added leek, garlic, and white wine to the pan.

Meanwhile, I started some prep on the dessert. Instead of “Black Forest” Affogato, we decided to go with Raspberry since we had some homemade raspberry gelato in the freezer. I’ve crumbled a couple shortbread biscuits into each glass and then topped them with frozen raspberries and bits of 85% Lindt chocolate.

The Dauphinoise as it came out of the oven. It was still a little liquidy, so we think it probably could have cooked a big longer. But we were hungry and everything else was done. (While we ate, it continued to suck up liquid and I think the leftovers are going to be pretty nice!)

Here’s the completed meal! After finishing the sauce with cream and wholegrain mustard, the Snook spooned it over the chicken breast pieces. (Note: We have plenty of potato and greens left over, along with the other two chicken breasts.)

And now for dessert! The Snook brewed up a couple espressos while I scooped some gelato into the glasses. Here he’s pouring the coffee over the ice cream.

And now the finished dessert, garnished with more raspberries and grated chocolate.

Tasting notes: The Snook thought the chicken itself was a bit ordinary (though the sauce was great). I argued that chicken breast is pretty much always tasteless protein anyway, and the fact that our breasts were larger and thicker may have diluted the flavour a bit. The Dauphinoise was the highlight of the meal, and we think 5-10 minutes more cooking would have made it divine. The Greens were a nice, simple complement to the richness of the potatoes and the strong flavour of the mustard. The Affogato ended up being a little bitter, but that may have been due to our coffee maker or to the fact that we changed up the recipe. It was still yummy.

Stay tuned next week for another recipe from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals!