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.

Everyone Loves Noodles

I was going to call this post something like 'a quick supper', which the dish was, but that would have been too Nigel Slater - good ideas, prissy-fussy writing style.

Those nearly straight to wok noodles - softened in boiling water for a minute or so - are a godsend when you need to get food on the table quickly. Work had kept me from preparing anything, and both Joe and I were hungry, so a noodle dish was the simple solution. Or as Nigel would write: Work had kept me at my desk facing a pale antique-ivory screen, looking out over the trees shedding their leaves of medieval gold. Both Joe and I were hungry. So a noodle dish made a quick and comforting supper. At this time of year noodles call to me etc.... And we're back again.

Quick tends to mean with little or no meat, thus cheap-ish. In this case I defrosted a bag of tiny prawns for the protein component, so not for pennies but still economical. Chopping veg into matchsticks in order that they cook at the same speed is easy when they are peppers and carrots, but onions are trickier, a case for judgement - you want a bit of browning, thus thin half-moons here. A red chilli cut into fairly wide slices perked the dish up, and added a touch of colour.

Thursday and not a lot of fresh veg in the kitchen, so I defrosted some broccoli florets (top bargain by the way and these were not mushy as I had feared when buying as an experiment) and when drained added them to the stir-fry that with soy sauce and a dash of sesame oil had a touch of braise about it at the end. Not a scrap left over.