I think the biggest time constraint with cooking in the week is when you cook for a lot of people - chopping anything takes so long as there’s so much to chop.
For one or two people, there are plenty of meals which are great, fresh, and can be cooked and prepped in less than half-an-hour.
They don’t take half-an-hour for more people simply because the prep takes longer.
Books like Nigel Slater’s 30 minute cook book are great.
He’s got another book where the recipes are even quicker: Real fast food.
Of course the negative side of cooking from scratch every night, even if the meals are quick, is that there’s always more washing up than there would be opening a Tupperware container.
To me recipes are giving ideas - sometimes with really unknown meat or veggies also details on how to or how long. For my first ever roast beef the other week I needed a recipe to tell me about the temperature I had to aim at. Also for combination of food or spices I didn’t think of.
Recipes with too much cream or butter are usually the ones that want to make sure the beginner gets the taste “right”. It’s just like with baking; recipes always demand about twice or more the sugar necessary.
Often cooking too much I started to make a sport out of using the left overs for as many different meals as possible.
The same if I buy too big amounts. Simple example minced meat: first menue can be meatballs while making a sauce bolognese at the same time. So the next day it’s Spaghetti. The third meal can be omelette with the rest of that sauce rolled into them.
Here’s the other night’s 15-minute dinner: a pile of bärlauch gnudi topped with crispy buttery sage leaves and bacon, steamed asparagus, and cherry tomatoes. By the time the gnudi water boils, the asparagus is done, and it’s 2 more minutes to the table. I don’t remember salsa season starting so early. We had a BBQ dinner last night, with Saturn white peaches, coriander, red capsicum, scallions, lime juice, and creamy slices of Hass avocadoes. Sweet and just the right balance of acid. Today’s salsas are the same Saturns with cucumber. Our regular visitor is a gorgeous seal-point Siamese whose owners couldn’t care less about her…
Well, that’s the thing with sour-dough. It holds up well even without being in my bread-box for several days. And the scald helps putting even more liquid into it.
It’s too wide anyway to put in my bread-box until I’ve eaten from it for a couple of days.
That said, you need a healthy stomach to digest it.
Here’s another 15-minute dinner: Gyoza/pot stickers stuffed with prawns, both in paste form and in small chunks, with chopped water chestnuts and chives. 500g of prawns and 300g of wrappers makes around 40, and they freeze beautifully. Cook from frozen, first pan-frying, then steaming, and serve with dipping sauces. Super-quick, and they are fun to make.
