How to Eat (31 page)

NUTMEG

You need to wait for the water to boil, but you can lessen the overall time for cooking pasta by buying fine egg pasta, which doesn’t take very long to cook. Some butter, cream, Parmesan, and a few drops of white truffle oil make a wonderful sauce. Or don’t even bother about the truffle oil. People shy away from cream and butter so much that, when they taste them, just as they are, warmed by a tangle of slippery-soft pasta, it comes as a surprise how transportingly good they are. And don’t get anxious about the artery-thickening properties of such a sauce: you don’t want to drench the pasta, just lightly cover it. I sometimes think that butter alone, with a grating of fresh nutmeg, is the best dressing for pasta.

And, finally, bear in mind Chinese egg noodles. They need a scant 5 minutes cooking, and a sprinkling of sesame oil.

FLAVORED AND INFUSED OILS

I have come to the conclusion, having abominated them for ages, that infused oils, purchased or homemade, are among the most important allies of the quick cook. I use basil oil mixed with lemon juice to make a quick, scented dressing for salads, or just as it is to anoint waxy boiled potatoes or peas or poached or fried meats. I have made a basil-rich version of the pea soup above by frying a chopped onion first in basil-infused oil, then adding some more of the basil oil at the end.

I habitually have an effort-free spaghetti aglio olio by just dousing the cooked pasta in 2 tablespoons of garlic-infused oil. I use it for frying and marinating chicken pieces and coat diced potatoes with it before roasting them. I use it to warm through cans of cannellini beans, which I then let steep so the garlicky oil penetrates the soft interior of the grainy beans, before sprinkling the beans with chopped sage or parsley or both. In short, I have become a complete flavored-oil convert, with all the evangelical zeal that implies.

CANNED BEANS

Canned beans and other legumes are obviously useful for fast-food preparation. You can just heat them up, but they will need some help. Just put onion, garlic, a stalk of celery, parsley (I don’t even bother to remove the stems), and some bacon or pancetta in the food processor, blitz, and throw the green-flecked, fragrant mound into a pan with 1–2 tablespoons olive oil.

When this mixture is really soft (remember you’re not going to cook the legumes, just heat them up), stir in white or cranberry beans, lentils or chickpeas. If I’m using lentils (which aren’t quite as satisfactory as other canned beans) I add a carrot to the pulped mixture; chickpeas can take the fierce rasp of a dried or fresh red chili. And if you have lying around herbs other than parsley, then use them; rosemary and sage work particularly well with cannellini and cranberry beans, but you will need, especially with the rosemary, to make sure the herbs are well minced.

When the beans are warmed through, add more chopped fresh parsley and olive oil and, having tasted, probably quite a bit of salt. Beans and other legumes are best at room temperature and taste all the better having sat around with the herbs and garlic and olive oil seeping stickily into them, so do them first thing when you come in from work and leave them, reheating as necessary later.

MEAT AND FISH

Providing you don’t leave them lying around to dry up and curl at the edges, scallops—thin slices of meat or fish—are probably the best bet for the quick cook. They need about 2 minutes each side in a buttery frying pan (add a drop of oil first to stop the butter burning).

SALMON PORK VEAL SCALLOPS

You have several options for finishing them: you can deglaze the pan with lemon juice, red or white wine vinegar, or a teaspoon or two of soy sauce to which you’ve added twice the amount of water and a pinch of sugar, and pour this over, or simply squeeze over lemon or lime juice and serve. Salmon and other fish scallops are perhaps at their best treated this way, but pork and veal benefit from this approach, too. For pork or veal try also a final deglazing with a glug of Marsala, white wine, vermouth, or sherry, with or without a dollop of cream.

Calves’ liver scallops taste wonderful in a buttery Marsala puddle. Dredge the slices first in some flour into which you’ve grated some nutmeg. This makes the sauce more velvety. Breaded slices are also worth remembering. If you’re in a hurry, you might not want to bother with bread crumbs, however. And I wouldn’t get the boxed ones; buy instead some matzo meal. Dip the slices in egg, then in matzo meal, let them stand for a while to dry, and fry each one for 2 minutes or so in sizzling butter with the customary drop of oil.

If you’re cooking these for more than two, leave meat slices as they are; otherwise, snip each into three 1½-by-2½-inch pieces before serving. These will look better, more inviting, piled on a big plate.

CHICKEN

OLIVE OIL

LEMON

GARLIC

Chicken, especially the breast, needs to be paid quite lavish attention to keep it interesting, and I speak as someone whose favorite food is roast chicken. But when you’re trying to get something together quickly, be careful. Everyone likes the idea of breast portions, but they can easily be bland or desiccated. If possible, let chicken breasts marinate for as long as you can, but at least 20 minutes, in olive oil and lemon juice and some peeled, knife-flattened garlic cloves. For each portion of chicken breast, work along the lines of 3 tablespoons olive oil, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, and 1 garlic clove. But this is just the loosest of guides.

Lay the chicken in the lemony oil, cover with plastic film, and turn at half-time. To broil the chicken, preheat the broiler while the chicken’s steeping. The cooking itself is quick enough, about 6 minutes under the broiler each side; sautéing is even quicker, about 4 minutes a side. Let stand at the end to allow the heat to seep through. Sprinkle with herbs, adding more lemon juice and some sea salt.

PESTO

If you don’t want to bother with marinating, then consider adding fat while the chicken’s cooking. Make any mixture of herbs and butter and, having slashed the chicken cutlets with a knife, smear this over. Or, very easy, mix some good bottled pesto with some softened butter (about 5 tablespoons of butter and 3 tablespoons pesto should do for about 4 chicken cutlets) and dollop this over both sides, making sure you press well over the slashed skin so the mixture permeates. Cook for 10 minutes a side, but you may find you need a bit longer; you don’t want the pesto mixture to burn too quickly (it will blacken slightly; that is part of the plan, so don’t panic), so cook with a less fierce heat.

Leg and thigh portions take longer than breast, and for that reason are perhaps not ideal for the quickest of quick cooking. The answer is just to get the butcher to cut up the meat into smaller portions. Chicken cut up already and swathed in plastic wrap from the supermarket is tasteless. It annoys me that so many people prefer the white meat. The dark meat is better, and particularly so when cooked in portions.

WITH VERMOUTH PARSLEY

You can make bland chicken pieces more memorable by serving them with salsa verde. It doesn’t take long to poach chicken pieces. Take some skinned and boned chicken breasts, preferably free-range, and poach them in some stock (and I feel relaxed about some liberally diluted cubes here) mixed with white wine or vermouth, into which you put some parsley sprigs, a drop of soy sauce if the stock isn’t already salty enough, some celery, and 2 bay leaves. Poach gently till just done—10 minutes or so should do it. Serve with the salsa verde on page 181, a spoonful or so drizzled over, the rest in a jug or bowl with a ladle, to the side.

DUCK

GINGER AND SOY

HONEY AND ORANGE

Duck breasts are always worth bearing in mind when you have to get something together quickly. Follow a proper recipe, as below, or just slash the skin side diagonally at about ½-inch intervals, douse with strained ginger marmalade that you’ve made runnier with soy sauce, or honey mixed with orange juice (the sharper the better, and if you cook this in January or February, you should try to get hold of Seville oranges), or grainy mustard mixed with a drop or two of pineapple juice and a pinch of brown sugar. Roast, skin side up, in a hot oven (450°F for about 20 minutes). I work on an allowance of 1 (½ whole breast) per person if I’m slicing them up. The meat is rich and you somehow taste the duck better, get the sense of its flavor and feathery-velvety texture, when it is sliced. I’d just carve the breasts into diagonal, thin but not wafer-thin slices and spread them out on a large plate for people to take what they want themselves. I wouldn’t give people their own little portion of fanned-out slices on an individual plate. Of course, you can just serve the duck breasts whole, as they are, in which case it might be safer to cook 2 extra per 4 people in case some want seconds; overcatering is always better than not accommodating people’s greed.

Don’t worry about having leftovers. What could be nicer the next day than cold duck, thinly sliced, stirred into warm rice, doused with soy sauce, and studded with just-hot sugar snaps? Or just eat it as it is, with a fat clump of Japanese pickled ginger and waxy, warm new potatoes.

DESSERTS

The first thing the quick cook can dispense with is cooking the last course. No French person would consider apologizing for buying something from a good pâtisserie, and neither should you.

ICE CREAM

AFFOGGATO

STEM GINGER

CHOCOLATE

Otherwise, think along the lines of good, bought ice cream eaten with good, bought cookies or splodged with easily-thrown-together sauces. Warm some honey, pour it over, then sprinkle with toasted flaked almonds, or substitute maple syrup and pecans or walnuts. Throw over a cup of espresso to make what the Italians call an
affoggato
(or use rum). Spoon over stem ginger in its oozing, golden, throat-catchingly hot and sweet syrup. Or, as in one of the suggested menus below, just grind some good dark chocolate to powdery grains in the food processor and sprinkle over the ice cream.

FROZEN BERRIES

CREAM

MERINGUE

And, as mentioned in Basics, Etc., in regard to the freezer and how it may usefully be stocked, keep a ready supply of frozen berries—raspberries, blackberries, mixed. Use as they are—removing all strawberries from the mixed bag—only add sugar. You can also add some glugs of liqueur, some finely grated orange zest, a few mint leaves, or some orange-flower water. Serve with crème fraîche or ice cream, as you like. Just before serving, sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar or ground pistachios. You can make a creamy, red-splodged mess by whipping up some heavy cream, crumbling some store-bought meringues, and stirring in a package of thawed, sweetened berries. I think this is much better than using the meringues whole and going in for nest-like effects.

It is worth always bearing in mind the confectioners’-sugar-and-strainer trick. Somehow, giving any bought or hastily-thrown-together dessert a smart dusting of the sugar makes it automatically look like the loving product of hours-long labor in the kitchen. I don’t suggest you ever pretend something bought is homemade. Nor do I advise forays into cheffy fiddling in general—I am not a garnish girl—but this small degree of finish pleases me.

A BRIEF NOTE ON EQUIPMENT

The microwave is the usually cited without-which tool for the time-pressed kitchen survivor. But consider, rather, the pressure cooker. Newfangled models don’t explode, don’t hiss or honk or emit clouds of threatening steam, and they cut cooking time, on average, by a third. And—by way of even more dramatic example—you can cook dried, unsoaked chickpeas in them in 35 minutes. Another very useful piece of gadgetry, if you’re going to be having people round for supper often when you haven’t really got the time to cook for them, is an electric rice cooker. You’d be surprised how much food can be eaten with rice; and the whole after-work kitchen flurry is much reduced when you’re not dealing with potatoes, too.

QUICK AFTER-WORK SUPPERS FOR FOUR

Individual recipes that take under 30 minutes to cook are dotted throughout the book (and are listed as such in the Index; after all, in the normal course of cooking we all mix food that can be rustled together quickly with that which takes longer or needs more care or attention. But there are times when anything that can’t be done fast and without fussing is out of the culinary question. If you don’t get back from work till seven and have got people coming over at eight, you need to get moving. And bearing in mind that planning—the sheer effort of exhausted thought required—can sometimes feel just as burdensome as the preparation, I’ve drawn up a list of quick and easy two-course after-work suppers.

Nothing here takes more than half an hour to cook; most dishes don’t even take 10 minutes. And all recipes feed four.

RED MULLET WITH GARLIC AND ROSEMARY

GOOEY CHOCOLATE PUDDINGS

This menu exemplifies my ideas for fast food: the fish itself takes a bare few minutes; the puddings you mix together when you get in and then just leave until the moment, more or less, you want to eat. You can thus appear the very model of serenity in the kitchen, however late or in whatever stressed state you actually got back.

The red mullet—sometimes referred to by its French name,
rouget
—is fragrant, light, beautiful. (You can substitute baby trout fillets if you can’t get red mullet.) The chocolate puddings, which are really Patricia Wells’ recipe for chocolate gourmandise in
At Home in Provence,
provide a harmoniously voluptuous counterpoint: chewy and cracked like macaroons on top and on the base, with a thick, glossy goo of chocolate sauce in the middle.