This is our 8th cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. We decided this week to move our “Jamie meal” to Saturday nights which gives me a lot more time to put the post up on Sunday. The goal for this particular meal was to CARB-LOAD in preparation for today’s long run. With that in mind, we picked out “Pregnant Jools’s Pasta, Crunchy Chicory & Watercress Salad, and Little Frangipane Tarts.” We saw the corresponding TV episode a couple months ago, so we had a good idea of the preparations.

Substitutions: We couldn’t find red chicory in any of the shops – it must not be in season – but we did find a bag of mixed salad at the farmers’ market that had red chicory in it. We only made a half-recipe of the dessert. It was supposed to use “golden” caster sugar, but we couldn’t be arsed buying it specially so we just used plain. The Snook ground his own almonds (just because he objected to the price of pre-ground at the grocery store) and we used cherry preserves instead of raspberry jam. Everything else was as-written.

Quick verdict: Yum! This is the quickest and easiest recipe in the whole book, I bet. The frangipane tarts are really impressive considering how quick they are to make. The sausage pasta is just good, filling comfort food that would please any picky-eater. The Snook found the simple salad a little too bitter for his taste, but I thought it was a nice contrast to the sweetness of the pasta. We both rated it 9/10. Our elapsed time was 35:23, but the last 5 minutes were just standing around waiting for the tarts to finish baking. If we’d have been quicker getting them in the oven, we’d have easily made the 30 minute mark. This is a great recipe for any beginners who aren’t super confident in their cooking ability!

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This is our seventh official cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. We picked this recipe because we hadn’t tried a fish recipe yet, and because we happened to have the corresponding TV episode saved on our DVR. (As before, we noticed that on the show Jamie does some things differently than the book. I’ll try to mention those as we go.) Historically I haven’t been a very big eater of fish, so these dishes are definitely going to be more challenging for me. This wasn’t my favorite of the Jamie meals we’ve made, but it did get me to eat a big piece of salmon… which is fairly momentous in our house.

Substitutions: Our salmon fillets were slightly bigger than the ones called for (250g instead of 180g), and the Snook had to remove the pin bones himself. (We didn’t count that as part of the cooking time.) He also had to spend a few minutes removing a few scales the fishmonger had missed. We had to settle for canned mango instead of fresh, and we used snow peas for the broth instead of sugar snap. We used some of the Snook’s duck stock instead of a stock cube.

Quick verdict: We both weren’t that impressed, to be honest. Personally, I thought this was my least favorite so far. We both rated it 8/10. It was somehow less than the sum of its parts for me. The Snook thought the dessert was “kinda meh.” Our elapsed time was 39:59, but a lot of that was extra fish prep time. (Twenty minutes had elapsed before we got it into the oven.)

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This is our sixth official cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. As we did last week, we picked this one with the idea of going to the Eveleigh Farmers’ Market Saturday morning to get any necessary ingredients. There are always a couple vendors there with duck. When we got there, we worked out pretty quickly that four duck breasts were going to cost us close to $30. The Snook persuaded me to get two whole ducks from Coles instead (for $40 total), which would also give us legs and fat for confit, and a carcass for making stock. Sounds like a plan! So earlier today he carved up the ducks so we could get started. I was running a pretty serious caloric deficit for the day thanks to my long run, so I was excited for such a big, healthy meal.

Quick verdict: We followed it pretty much exactly (except for actually making homemade rice pudding in the rice cooker rather than buying expensive pre-made stuff). Elapsed time was 39:52, but we think this is one you could easily get down to 30 minutes once you have it memorised. There’s not much to it, really! In terms of presentation, this was the best one yet. If you served this at a small dinner party, people would be in awe! We both rated it 9/10 for taste (but we may have overcooked our duck a little bit).

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This is our fifth official cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. Hey, we’ve made it through 10% of the book! I had plans to go to the Eveleigh Farmers’ Market on Saturday morning, so I figured we should find a recipe that uses ingredients I can get there. We settled on Oozy Mushroom Risotto, Spinach Salad, and Quick Raspberry & Lemon Cheesecake. For most of my life, mushrooms have been my most hated food, but I’ve been working to get over that in the past few years. I figured this would help. But I wasn’t going to use just any old crap button mushrooms from Coles. There’s always a stall at Eveleigh selling fancy mushrooms (“The Fun Guy”), so that was my first stop Saturday morning. Let me tell you: 500g of fresh exotic mushrooms is NOT cheap. Neither are dried porcini. I’m glad I suffered the expense though, as the resulting meal was well worth it.

Quick verdict: No substitutions on this one; we followed the recipe pretty much exactly. Elapsed time was 43:07, which wasn’t too bad. In terms of taste it was fantastic, and we both rated it 9.5/10. I would have never thought such a quick risotto would turn out so good! We did come up with a couple things we’d do differently next time though.

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This was our fourth official cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. The weather this weekend has been cooler, so we thought something warming was appropriate. We also had some pumpkin and carrots to use up from the veggie box, so one recipe leaped out at us: Curry Rogan Josh, Fluffy Rice, Carrot Salad, Poppadoms, Flatbread, and Beer. (I love that Beer is in the meal title!) No dessert with this one, but it made a huge feast’s worth of food.

Quick verdict: The only substitution we made was using Kent pumpkin instead of butternut. Time-wise, we were worse than last week with an elapsed time of 48:02. There are definitely things we’d do to save time next time though. Overall I rated it 9/10, while the Snook rated it 8.5/10. (Personally, any recipe with two whole bunches of coriander/cilantro is A-OKAY by me!) However, we both agreed that the lemon pickle SUCKS.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals – Chicken Pie
Okay, so are you guys watching Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals? They started airing it here recently and we’ve been recording each episode. We really like it! I like the concept of showing how to prepare a whole meal (complete with sides and desserts), and how he gives you the whole order of operations (which I always suck at). Last week the Snook was inspired by the Roast Beef episode to make us a Roast Pork dinner. He did the carrots, potatoes, and Yorkshire pudds as per the show, but changed up the beef fillet to pork and made his own gravy. It was fantastic.

This week it was my turn, and I decided to tackle the “Chicken Pie, Smashed Carrots, and French Peas.” (The recipe’s not online but my friend Josh has the book and shared it.) I’d read some complaints that the “30 minute” thing is a cheat, so I decided to time myself as an experiment. We already have homemade ice cream, so I skipped the dessert. We decided that having to read the recipe was a likely hurdle, so the plan was to have the Snook shouting out instructions like a rally co-driver. (I read through it myself ahead of time.) I got out all the ingredients and utensils. I did all Jamie’s suggested prep: put a wet towel under the cutting board, plug in the food processor, boil the kettle, turn on the oven, and get the pans heating up. And then WE WERE OFF.

The first part was deceptively easy. I cut up my chicken breasts and got them going in the pan. Then I was meant to slice my mushrooms and green onions in the food processor. Within the first five minutes, I hit a major road block: our food processor SUCKS. It’s too small, and the blades are really crappy. The mushrooms went through okay (if a little minced), but the green onions gave me major trouble. Instead of slicing through nicely, they jammed between the blade and the lid and wrapped themselves around the axle. I ended up having to quickly chop the last bits by hand. Eventually I got them into the pan though and added the other stuff for my pie. This is when I started to realise that our big frying pan was going to be a tight fit. It was impossible to stir quickly or I’d slop gravy over the edge. But whatever, the pie mix was cooking. I was still trying to be calm, but things were getting crazy.

Next was the carrots. Again, you were meant to slice them in the food processor. Again, disaster. They kept getting wedged and I kept having to take the lid off and pull bits out. Carrot juice and bits flying EVERYWHERE. Again, I ended up chopping the last bits myself. Finally got them in the pan with the other ingredients and the lid on.

Then it was time to assemble the pie. I dumped the filling into a Pyrex baking dish and then turned to my puff pastry. I was using up a couple sheets from the freezer that had been broken, so I tried to “Frankenstein” them together into a coherent sheet. It was a bit sloppy and messy, but not too bad. Pie went into the oven. I knew I was running way behind at this point.

Finally the peas. I made up a thickened chicken stock in the same pan I’d cooked the pie filling in and then got my peas into it. I was supposed to run the lettuce through the food processor, but BUGGER THAT. I quickly sliced it by hand. That went in, along with the other ingredients. That’s when I realised I didn’t have a lid big enough for that pan. BUGGER BUGGER. I just turned it down and let it cook.

Then the last step: the carrots got drained and then smashed with a potato masher. That went okay. Then it was plating up time! The pie looked better than expected and smelled great. The peas probably got a bit overcooked, but they were still tasty. The carrots were good. (I’m not a huge fan of carrots, and I ate these happily.)

Final verdict: The elapsed time (since I started cutting up the chicken) ended up being about 45 minutes. I was way stressed out and actually sweating by the end of it. My kitchen was a disaster. But you know what? It was still worth it. The meal was excellent. Clean-up actually only took a few minutes since you only really use three pans. And I did WAY better than those crappy Guardian cooks. I also learned some really valuable stuff:

1. Preparation is key. Get everything out and ready to go. Make sure your salt isn’t hiding in the living room (like mine was). Make sure the pepper grinder is full.
2. Precise measuring is overrated. Instead of measuring out 2 teaspoons of this and 1 heaped tablespoon of that and 300ml of stock, I just eyeballed it. It was fine.
3. You don’t need to peel carrots or trim button mushrooms. Really. Just give ’em a wash.
4. If you really want to take advantage of the food processor, IT NEEDS TO NOT SUCK. (Yeah, we’ll be getting a new one.)

The book is sold out in most places but we’ve got it on order. (Tip for the Aussies: Use Booko to find the cheapest price.) The Snook said as we were eating: “When it gets here, you want to cook our way through the whole thing?” Sounds like a plan!