| I have been cooking for some 20 years, whilst working long hours. Although I now have a lot more time to spend on trying things out, I still can’t, mostly, be bothered with anything too complicated - for instance, recipes requiring food constantly to be taken in and out of the pan it is cooked in, or needing split-second timing, or productive of a lot of washing-up. I only ever measure anything where it’s crucial, and I like to chat, listen to music and drink whilst cooking. The recipes are adapted to this approach - hence the Slothful Cook. I reckon there are a lot of people out there with the same view of cooking. If we read a recipe with too many steps, or needing a lot of specialist shopping, we get turned off. Slothful Cooking is an alternative to falling back on supermarket cook-chill. It could just as well have been called the 80/20 Cook except it sounds too corporate. 80% of the effect comes from 20% of the effort. Better 80% nice home-cooked food than another Tesco curry. I don’t think that many TV chefs and food magazines understand this point. Their efforts to simplify often involve no-cook (whereas cooking in itself is not the problem) or fewer ingredients (but still including ones you can’t find in Tesco with your eyes shut). Or else they think “simple” is the same as “it takes forever and half the equipment in your kitchen, but you almost certainly can’t mess it up if you concentrate because there aren’t any really tricky bits”. I recently made (or sort of made) a recipe from Jamie Oliver’s new book, “Jamie’s Dinners”, called Simple Baked Lasagne. It was very nice, but it involved added pre-cooked butternut squash and the ragu had belly pork in which they don’t sell in supermarkets and took about 3 hours to make. And it does that cheating thing of having in the ingredients list “400g shin of beef or stewing beef, finely minced” ie theoretically you’re meant to mince your own not just buy mince. Very Tasty Rather Trendified Baked Lasagne a la Jamie, maybe. Simple, either as to execution or effect, no. Slothful Cooking produces nicer average results if you have a well-stocked store-cupboard and possibly freezer. This is particularly important for me as my nearest food store of any size takes the best part of an hour and £8 in diesel to get to. Stock control only takes about half an hour of list-making a month so it’s pretty slothful. Here are my suggestions. Apart from the recipes, I have been trying to buy a new cooker recently, which was more difficult than you would think possible. Here is some background for anyone about to attempt the same feat. | |
