As I suspect plenty of people do, I buy massive bags of pasta from the supermarket. Most of it gets cooked quickly and eaten even more quickly when we arrive home either late or starving.
Pasta often gets degraded to a ‘there’s not enough time to cook anything’ convenience food, but that really doesn’t do it justice at all.
This is a fairly quick and easy carbonara, with peas, sage and pancetta. It took about fifteen minutes to cook from start to finish, barely longer than it takes to crack open another jar of Dolmio.
Get the pasta going first, enough for four. Typically, you’d use a spaghetti or tagliatelle or some other long, thin pasta, but there are no rules. I don’t need to describe how to cook pasta, surely?
Now heat a large frying pan and add a good glug of olive oil and 150g of pancetta or bacon lardons. Eight or nine rashers of streaky bacon will do, but the robustness of the lardon gives the finished dish a lot more backbone.
Give the pancetta or bacon about three or four minutes so that it starts to crisp, then add a finely chopped clove of garlic and fry for another minute.
Next add 300ml of double cream to the pan and bring it quickly to the boil before turning the heat down to let the cream simmer and thicken for about five minutes. More this way…
Bill Granger has a particularly attractive way with food.
His new book is a collection of unfussy, stripped down classics, aimed at providing a comprehensive guide to cooking some of Granger’s best dishes at home.
Granger’s food is hard to describe properly. It’s homely and comfortable, but the influence of the Sydney restaurant scene screams through, with South East Asian standard sat surprisingly comfortably alongside European standards.
It’s this mash-up of styles that makes Granger’s food, and this book, a success. This is cooking that isn’t limited by convention, and it’s the way more and more people choose to eat, picking the best from whatever cuisine takes their fancy. It’s a very enlightened way of cooking and eating, and there should be much more of it. Read more….
I’ve started to eat a lot more porridge, as an alternative breakfast to my usual couple of slices of toast.
The benefits have been enormous. Porridge is a slow-burning food that provides fuel for the body over a much longer period of time than bread. I don’t feel hungry until much later in the morning, and I also get a much needed hit of calcium from the milk.
My day-to-day porridge gets three minutes in a microwave (I know, I know…a microwave…), but this version is on a different plain. It’s cooked for a long, long time, time that transforms the oats from something a little every day and dull into something quite refined and almost elegant.
This is for winter Sunday mornings.
Preparation is easy. Nothing more than two minutes worth of weighing and measuring and an hour in the oven.
The other weekend, I had a bit of an adventure with a couple of crabs.
It ended badly for the crabs.
Their fate was to be picked over at great length and eaten with bread and a quite superb mayonnaise. The fact that the mayonnaise turned out quite well, or was edible at all, came as quite a shock to me.
The recipe came from that most dependable of sources, Norwich City’s chairman and sometime cook, Delia Smith.
Delia and me have such a tortured relationship….
She taught me the basics, and she taught me well. Her Complete Cookery Course has got me out of many a fix over the years.
Yet I’ve never really clicked with her style.
Too motherly and prescriptive for me. And then she spent ten minutes lecturing me on how to boil an egg and started to pass rubbish ingredients off as ‘shortcuts’, and it all turned sour between us.
But even after all that, I can’t deny that her recipes are first class, and this simple but characteristically precise way with an egg yolk and a bottle of oil is a solid example of that.
has got me out of many a fix over the years.