Most TV chefs, even the blessed Delia, I find hard to watch. I want to move Nigel Slater's fringe out of the way and tell him to get a bloody move on; cannot stomach the egos of Gordon Ramsay and Nigel Rhodes (have yet to hear a good word said about the latter by anyone who has met him either); Jamie Oliver has too many annoying mannerisms to list, plus I learned how to fry stuff ages ago anyway; and the popularity of the Two Fat Bikers and the surviving Hairy Lady defies my comprehension.
And finally the 'but'. I find HFW very watchable, and likewise Rick Stein. Maybe it's a cultural thing, they are both well educated for a start (but then so is Nigella Lawson, and I can't stand her cream and cleavage frenzies). Or the fact that green issues are at the forefront of their thinking. Anyway, I watched Rick Stein's programme on Mumbai this week and was inspired to cook a curry. Now the house has an all-pervading smell of curry spices (especially fenugreek).
Unsurprisingly given that it is the food of more than a billion people, most very poor, the curry is a great weapon in the austerity cook's armoury. Last night's was actually a prawn curry, so £2.50 for the king prawns, but the plentiful rice was for pennies, I bought the tin of coconut milk for 50p from the exotic shelves at Sainsbury's, added a basics red pepper and a couple of chopped onions, so pennies there too, made quickfire dal with a 79p tin of lentils and some garlicky spiced butter, and we had our fill for not very much. The spices again came from the 'ethnic' shelves, good-sized bags a fraction of the price of pretty Schwarz bottles, and JS naan breads at 80p were about half the price of Sharwood's.
The inspiring thing about Mr Stein's curry was that it was made quickly without in any way being thrown together. I didn't follow his recipe, though I did take his tip of frying my spices more than I would normally have done, with some liquid to hand to prevent burning. No complaints, and next to nothing left, so I think it was a success. When we are in Cornwall this summer if I bump into him in Padstow - we will definitely eat at one of his places - I will shake him by the hand.
A note of praise for Sainsbury's: a week ago I tried to make dal from yellow split peas. Soaked for 32 not 24 hours, they were boiled for the requisite 10 minutes, then simmered for 30 more; then another 30; then another 20, by which time we had waited for the rest of the meal long enough. The peas were bullets, utterly useless. I took the pack and some evidence next day as I was so annoyed, and they gave me my money back and a £5 voucher for the inconvenience.
Showing posts with label Jamie Oliver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jamie Oliver. Show all posts
Wednesday, 26 June 2013
Sunday, 11 November 2012
One Flame Cooking Part Deux
The post on my experience as a student in France, where I had one Calor Gas burner and a kettle as the only means of cooking, has generated some traffic, so maybe the topic is one of specific interest. I wonder if at this time of year students new to university and now coping with the colder weather are having minds turned towards culinary survival strategies? Whatever, I thought another idea I used at that time would be of potential value.
With the one burner and the need to minimize gas usage or face high costs a dish I developed was a quick soup. Not cuppa soup - though I did at times add one of those to the pot - but a proper soup rapidly cooked. The logic behind this is the same as for stir-fries - if things are cut small they cook quickly and retain good flavour. A pot of soup is also cheap and generally nutritious, and offers the chance to incorporate interesting ingredients, though when I lived in France my version varied little.
The basic idea was a potato, a carrot, an onion, garlic, and maybe a mushroom or two, all cut into tiny dice - really tiny, just 2mm or 3mm across. That takes time, but not too much, and I still find chopping veg to be therapeutic - when I worked in industry the more stressed I was the smaller the onions were cut. The tiny veg - and if you are cooking for one as I generally was you don't need much - are fried briefly in butter or oil, then a cup or two of boiling water from a kettle poured over them (my electricity was covered in my rent then, the Calor Gas I had to buy, and a kettle anyway costs about 1.5p to boil). A stock cube was added, or on occasion a cheapo cuppa soup packet, the lot simmered for a couple of minutes until the potatoes were done (no problem if the onion or carrot has a bit of toothsome resistance still). A sort of (to echo 10CC for those of us old enough to remember) mini-mini-mini-minestrone.
It was nicer than a packet of soup, promised freedom from scurvy, and importantly made a great partnership with heavily buttered French stick. These days I'd hope to use my own chicken stock, though only saints never reach for a cube, and would cut the dice a bit chunkier, simmer the soup a bit longer. And when I did a variation on this the other day I added spag broken into tiny lengths and the still good remnants of a white cabbage cut very small.
One of my culinary heroes, Edouard de Pomiane whom I discovered much later, suggests something very similar to the bedsit soup in his Cooking in Ten Minutes, a witty and clever book written decades before Nigel Slater, Jamie Oliver et al got onto the same topic.
With the one burner and the need to minimize gas usage or face high costs a dish I developed was a quick soup. Not cuppa soup - though I did at times add one of those to the pot - but a proper soup rapidly cooked. The logic behind this is the same as for stir-fries - if things are cut small they cook quickly and retain good flavour. A pot of soup is also cheap and generally nutritious, and offers the chance to incorporate interesting ingredients, though when I lived in France my version varied little.
The basic idea was a potato, a carrot, an onion, garlic, and maybe a mushroom or two, all cut into tiny dice - really tiny, just 2mm or 3mm across. That takes time, but not too much, and I still find chopping veg to be therapeutic - when I worked in industry the more stressed I was the smaller the onions were cut. The tiny veg - and if you are cooking for one as I generally was you don't need much - are fried briefly in butter or oil, then a cup or two of boiling water from a kettle poured over them (my electricity was covered in my rent then, the Calor Gas I had to buy, and a kettle anyway costs about 1.5p to boil). A stock cube was added, or on occasion a cheapo cuppa soup packet, the lot simmered for a couple of minutes until the potatoes were done (no problem if the onion or carrot has a bit of toothsome resistance still). A sort of (to echo 10CC for those of us old enough to remember) mini-mini-mini-minestrone.
It was nicer than a packet of soup, promised freedom from scurvy, and importantly made a great partnership with heavily buttered French stick. These days I'd hope to use my own chicken stock, though only saints never reach for a cube, and would cut the dice a bit chunkier, simmer the soup a bit longer. And when I did a variation on this the other day I added spag broken into tiny lengths and the still good remnants of a white cabbage cut very small.
One of my culinary heroes, Edouard de Pomiane whom I discovered much later, suggests something very similar to the bedsit soup in his Cooking in Ten Minutes, a witty and clever book written decades before Nigel Slater, Jamie Oliver et al got onto the same topic.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)