A date with Sarah-Kate; Kate’s home truths

Sarah-Kate’s five ingredients to top nosh

Oh, woe is me. The Ginger has got a big, fat work contract, meaning long hours away from home, thus messing most horribly with my meal plan. It’s just not fair to have him making me three meals a day while he’s slaving for 12 hours somewhere else.

Breakfast he can manage, obviously, because he’s making his own in the early hours before he leaves so why not throw a second one together and leave it on the kitchen bench for when the princess gets up? And lunch I can scrape together myself. It takes no skill to get a homemade (not by me, I might add) chicken soup out of the freezer, heat that up and toast a bit of Vogel’s.

But dinner? I don’t make dinner. My dinners suck. My dinners end up in the bin or in the dog because whatever it is that foodie people have that makes them able to throw things together and have it taste delicious, I lost in a fire. A tea-towel fire.

And, for your information, even the dog turns up his nose at my cooking. It could be because my dinners are not made with love. They’re made with fear and anger, and usually too much salt because I love salt.

Anyway, there’s no getting around the fact that I now have to pull finger in the kitchen department or starve, which is not an option.

And so I took myself off to that rarest of gems – a bookshop – and availed myself of Jamie Oliver’s new 5Ingredients. (Said availing cost $65 which, while we’re at it, adds up to quite a lot of takeaways, but there you go.)

Anyway, the theme of Jamie’s latest offering is dishes that don’t require more than five things, even if some of them are a bit fruity like lime pickle or rose harissa. But every recipe has a picture!

I can’t abide the cookbooks that only have the boring old ingredients and method, and don’t give you anything to slobber over. And this book even has pictures of the ingredients just in case you don’t know what a chicken looks like (come on, even I’m not that daft).

So far, I’ve done a lot of slobbering, and a lot of collecting lime pickle and rose harissa, but I have mastered only one recipe: Flaming Rum ’n’ Raisin. To be honest, it’s not really a whole dinner, but it is totally amazeballs. Crush up some ginger biscuits, lob on a scoop of vanilla ice cream, then torch a bunch of sultanas and raisins in a pan of spiced rum, and when the flames subside (hopefully leaving you with eyebrows still intact), pour that over the ice cream.

This pudding is a triumph, if I do say so myself, but then I should know because I’ve had it for lunch twice since nailing it the first time and seriously considered it for breakfast this morning too. I’ll move on, eventually, to things with pasta and fish ... Maybe.