Minimum effort, maximum reward
We’ve all been guilty of passing off a ready meal as our own labour, but you need to get your hands dirty to truly impress. Tom Parker Bowles presents the simplest recipes to wow your guests
Tom Parker Bowles presents the simplest recipes to wow your guests
COME on, admit it—we’re all guilty as hell and there’s no shame in coming clean. Some may call it cheating, but that’s a touch harsh. I’d call it pragmatic preparation, the art of passing off a ready meal (be it Lidl or Fortnum’s) as your own creation, carefully decanting the shop-bought lasagne or shepherd’s pie from plastic container to Emma Bridgewater dish, then stealthily hiding any incriminating packaging at the bottom of the bin.
However, ready meals—even the very best —are no match for home-cooked succour. There’s nothing wrong with a little culinary sleight of hand, but a decent dinner need not involve a few hours’ hard toil.
Now, don’t get me wrong—i adore cooking. Live for it. A few hours spent pounding Thai curry pastes, hand-chopping steak for tartare or browning just about everything for a serious boeuf bourguignon is as therapeutic as a day in a spa—and far more enjoyable, too.
Sometimes, though, you want that quickfix recipe, with maximum reward for minimum effort. Which means no more than 15 minutes’ preparation and no more than an hour in the oven. The king of good fast food is the great Nigel Slater and his classic Real Fast Food an undisputed bible. So, first of all, buy that and get lost in his mellifluous prose and wonderful recipes. In the meantime, here are a few suggestions for four different groups of dinner-party guest.
First, a word of warning. Food allergies are both dangerous and debilitating and should be taken very seriously indeed. The same goes for people suffering from coeliac disease. On the other hand, anyone who writes to tell me, on the eve of coming to dinner, that they’re on some half-witted diet (paleo, alkaline and so on) or think they ‘may’ be gluten/garlic/ dairy intolerant (when they’re simply trying to stay thin or just don’t like said ingredient) can go take a hike. Preferably in the opposite direction from my dinner table. Faddy, fussy eaters are a bore. If you want choice, go to a restaurant.
Rant over. Here’s my own real fast food.
Family gathering
For starters, you can’t go wrong with potted shrimps (Baxters are my favourites), the butter gently melted, served with a great pile of brown toast and a squeeze of lemon.
Baked eggs are one of my mother’s stand-bys. Put some chopped ham in a ramekin, add an egg, double cream, butter, salt and pepper. Cook in a roasting pan filled with water for 7–10 minutes, so the yolk is wobbling and the white just set.
Pot-roast chicken is simplicity personified. Brown a whole chicken and put it into a castiron pot with garlic, rosemary, white wine, stock, lemon, soy sauce and rice wine. Cook for an hour or so, rest, strain the cooking liquid through a sieve and reduce by a third. Cut thick slices of bread, pile high with chicken and drench in that sauce.
Faddy, fussy eaters are a bore. If you want choice, go to a restaurant
Salt-baked seabass not only looks impressive, but seals in all that succulence. Take a large fish, stuff it with lemon, dill and bay and coat it in a mixture of salt and egg whites so it’s fully entombed. Bake for 25 minutes, crack the salt crust and devour.
It’s good served with chickpeas—ideally those bottled ones from Brindisa, but canned are fine—mixed with red onion, chillies, olive oil, lemon juice and white-wine vinegar. Add tuna and you also have a rather healthy stand-alone dish.
Like all of the above, preparation may be minimal, but they sure beat the hell out of the usual supermarket slop.
There’s no need to show off–simply choose dishes to make the belly sing
Couples’ dinner party
These tend to be made up of friends, old and new, so there’s no need to show off—simply choose dishes to make the belly sing. Big dishes to share are best, such as a chickenliver and chorizo salad with a red-wine vinegar dressing. Or one made with crisp, smoked bacon and smoked eel (I love Severn & Wye or Brown and Forrest), all coated in a punchy mustard- and horseradish-spiked dressing.
In the summer, when mackerel is abundant, I cook them on the barbecue or griddle pan, briefly marinated in olive oil, lemon juice, crushed garlic, cayenne pepper, ground coriander and cumin. Serve with a tomatoand-onion or fennel-and-orange salad.
Another early-summer classic is asparagus, either steamed and anointed with melted butter or rolled up in feuille-de-brick pastry (you can buy it ready-made), baked and covered in Parmesan (a recipe from the great Jeremy Lee). Alternatively, you could griddle it and serve with a poached duck egg on toast.
For pudding, rhubarb or gooseberry fool is a classic, with some crushed ginger nuts at the bottom of each glass, soaked in The King’s Ginger liqueur.
Winter calls for more heft: a couple of roast chickens, slathered in butter, with lemons up their bottoms and cooked for about an hour. Leave to rest, then make gravy with white wine and stock.
Good stock is the cook’s great friend. Its preparation is certainly not fast, but a freezer filled with this limpid liquid makes me very happy indeed. There’s no shame in the shopbought stuff, either—just make sure you buy the pots of fresh stock. Add noodles, fish sauce, lime juice, chicken and chillies for a nose-clearing restorative broth. Sweetcorn (frozen will do, if out of season), spring onions and lemon make a soup perfectly suited to the lean, hard winter months. Lots of bread, of course, is essential.
A wonderful veggie dish that will get the carnivores crying for more, too, is purple sprouting broccoli cooked in the wok (or frying pan) with chillies, garlic and anchovy fillets.
Talking of anchovy fillets, there are few things finer than good toast, slathered with an inch of cool butter and draped with those blessed fish. I love the Ortiz ones.
A group of male friends
No, I’m not being sexist. Women are very welcome, but this is Test match/football/ rugby tucker—no-nonsense stuff that will fill the belly and pique the taste buds, too.
Fresh, whole prawns, boiled in heavily seasoned water for a couple of minutes, then served with mayonnaise (Hellman’s is fine), never let you down. Add a couple of dozen oysters—rocks or natives, shucked to order and served with shallot vinegar and Tabasco— and good smoked salmon (John Ross or Severn & Wye), served with generously buttered bread.
Ceviche is a cinch. Get spankingfresh white fish (bass, bream, gurnard), cut it into smallish chunks, marinate in lime juice for no more than 10 minutes, then add diced tomatoes, chillies, red onion and salt. Serve with either deep-fried tortillas or in cos-lettuce leaves. You can’t go far wrong with steak, sirloin or rump, cooked on a white-hot griddle pan. Oil and season the steak (about 2in thick), cook for two minutes on each side and rest for two minutes. Make a Thai salad of mint, coriander and holy basil, add a few sliced shallots, lay the steak on top and dress with a fish-sauce, roasted-chilli-powder and lime dressing. You could also wrap the meat in soft lettuce, with cucumber and coriander, dressed in a lime and fish-sauce dressing spiked with bird’s-eye chillies. For pudding, just melt a couple of Mars Bars in a bain-marie and pour them over shop-bought ice cream. A few lollies (Fruit Pastilles, Twister or Feast) are always greeted with open arms, too.
First date
Congratulations! You’re halfway there, in that the man or woman you rather fancy has agreed to come to your house for dinner. So, what to cook? An excess of garlic is best avoided, for obvious reasons. Chillies, too, as your asbestostongued tolerance may be rather higher than your date’s delicate palate. The answer is to KISS—OR Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Try spaghetti alla carbonara , the proper version. Fry the guanciale (or pancetta) until crisp and set aside. While your spaghetti is boiling, whisk two eggs and two extra egg yolks with pecorino and pepper. Heat the pork-infused oil, add a splash of pasta cooking water, the hot, cooked pasta and the egg-and-cheese mixture. Stir vigorously until each strand is coated with the luscious emulsion—as simple as it is delightful.
So, too, is a rack of lamb. Massage it with oil, salt, pepper and a little chopped rosemary and thyme, brown in a pan, then whack it in a hot oven for 15 minutes. Rest for five minutes and serve with a baked potato and green salad.
My father, who has moved from kitchen clueless to a rather good cook over the years, swears by ‘a simple dish for bachelors and widowers to impress their guests’. Line a roasting tin with foil, throw in two chicken legs and two thighs along with sherry, garlic, salt, pepper and a quartered onion. Cook for 45 minutes, squeeze a lemon over it and Robert’s your uncle.
Another standby is a fillet of salmon or sea trout, wrapped in foil with a glass of white wine, soy sauce, the juice of a lemon and salt and pepper, then cooked for seven minutes (I like the fish slightly undercooked) in a hot oven.
If you’re feeling extravagant, try a whole dover sole, brushed with melted butter and grilled for four to six minutes on one side, then two to three minutes on the other. Serve with peas and new potatoes.