Walking through the supermarket every week, nosy by nature I always look in everyone else’s shopping trolleys. I can’t help but judge people by what they have in their trolleys, especially other parents. I know that makes me a horrible person, but I really can’t help it. The parent is pushing their cart, child(ren) in tow, and all I can see is ready meals and frozen products which require nothing more then switching on the oven. It’s essentially student food and I don’t know why you would choose to eat edible cardboard and tasteless slop, which is famously high in salt, when you could spend less then half an hour in the kitchen whipping up a flavourful meal.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy pizza or fish and chips as a treat, but that is exactly what it should be, a treat!
I’m sure all you foodies out there have had a conversation with someone claiming not to be able to cook. I’m sorry but I don’t buy that crap. If you have the ability to take something out of a freezer and put it in the oven then you have the physical ability to cook.The real reason is laziness!
Being able to cook doesn’t mean spending hours in the kitchen, slaving over a hot stove to create some sort of masterpiece. All you have to do is open a recipe book. There must be a million of them out there, my bookshelf is over flowing with them, and half of them are aimed at those with busy lifestyles without much time on their hands.
Jamie Oliver is by no means my favourite TV chef, but he has some great values. OK, so he gets paid a lot of money to push these values but it’s still worth listening to. Remember when he first started trying to get kids to eat healthier by making the schools take some responsibility? Some mums actually brought burgers to the school gates in protest!! What is that about? Why would you take issue with your child, the most important person in the world, eating at least one healthy meal a day.
One of his more recent ventures has been about how to cook delicious, healthy meals in under 30 minutes. Proving that even the busiest person can find the time to make something other then fish fingers, chips and beans.
Watching Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals TV show, it can seem a bit of a faff as he always makes a main,at least one side and usually a dessert in the allotted time. But the recipe book that coincides with the programme provides a step by step guide on how to get everything ready on time. I however chose not to do everything in the meal description as it would have been just too much food for a weeknight.
Please ignore everything that isn’t on the wooden board!
Photo nabbed from OVguide.com
My apologies for this photo not being my own. It hadn’t occurred to me while dishing up that I should do anything other then eat it.
This is the duck salad. It’s not really a salad though. The duck is rubbed with Chinese 5 spice, salt and pepper and dried thyme, then into the frying pan for around 16 minutes (depending on how well you like your duck cooked) turning every so often. The dressing is a chopped red chilli, chopped mint, a bit of honey and a bit of lemon juice all mixed together. I’m not good with measurements so I just add however much a fancy at the time.
Jamie calls the bread croutons. It’s just sliced ciabatta, drizzled in olive oil, sprinkled with rosemary and roasted with a few cloves of lightly crushed garlic for 16 minutes.
The trick with the ‘croutons’ is to make a circle on a wooden board with them, put the dressing in the middle and sit the duck on top. Slice the duck and mix it with the dressing. As everything moves around, the croutons soak up all the duck juice and dressing. We served this with a rocket salad.
I will be making this dish again. It is so ridiculously easy to make and takes less the 20 minutes. Whats not to love.
All I did was follow a recipe. I didn’t make it up myself, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it was a whole lot tastier than anything that comes out a freezer section.
Annie's Food Affair 