What to watch
Jamie’s Quick & Easy Food CHANNEL 4, 8.00PM
For many of us, being faced with a recipe that comprises a sprawling list of ingredients is enough to leave it forever uncooked. Even the “quick and easy” recipe books and TV shows can be prone to exaggerating their selling point. This eight-part series is Jamie Oliver’s entry into the genre and he’s adopted an unusually simple format: each dish contains only five ingredients. First up is an delicious-looking meal of scallops, black pudding, mint and mashed peas and potatoes. “Scallops are brilliant when you’re in a hurry because they cook so quickly,” he tells us. Indeed, there are some genuinely useful tips here. Did you know that you can make flatbread using just self-raising flour, yogurt and olive oil? You don’t even have to knead it for long before rolling it out and placing into a dry frying pan. He tops it with egg and mango chutney before moving on to a rib-eye steak and an almond pastry puff.
The opener is as zippy and stylish as we’ve come to expect from Oliver. And his energy is as boundless as it was the day he bounced onto our screens in The Naked Chef in 1999. But, more importantly, these are recipes that actually have a hope of being recreated in viewers’ homes. Catherine Gee