There are times when real rice pudding is what’s wanted, but it can take a good 3 hours to make one. It occurred to me that you could proceed along the lines of a risotto—turn the rice in butter and then add hot liquid, ladleful by ladleful, until it’s creamily absorbed. I did, and it worked—the perfect rice pudding for one. And all the stirring kept me occupied (without eating) until it was ready. This takes about half an hour. You need to give it about 10 minutes longer than the usual risotto, as you want the rice rather less al dente.
RISOTTO-INSPIRED RICE PUDDING
3 cups milk
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract or 2 tablespoons vanilla sugar
1 heaping tablespoon unsalted butter
2 tablespoons superfine sugar if not using vanilla sugar
¼ cup arborio rice
2–3 tablespoons heavy cream
Heat the milk in a saucepan that, preferably, has a lip. When it’s about to boil (but don’t let it), turn off the heat. (Or give the milk 4 minutes or so in a wide-topped plastic measuring cup in the microwave.) If you’re using the vanilla extract, add it to the milk now. Melt the butter and 1 tablespoon of the plain or vanilla sugar, if using, in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. When hissing away in a glorious pale caramelly pool, add the rice and stir to coat stickily. Slowly add the milk, stirring the rice all the time, letting each quantity of milk—about ½ cup at a time—get absorbed into the consequently swelling rice before adding the next. Start tasting at 20 minutes but be prepared to go on for 35. You may want to add more milk, too. (And if the rice tastes cooked before all the milk’s absorbed, don’t carry on adding it.)
When the rice feels as it should, thick and sticky and creamy, take it off the heat and beat in the remaining sugar (taste and see if you want yet more) and as much of the cream as you like. Think of this as the mantecatura, the final addition to a risotto, to thicken and add fat-globular volume of butter and grated Parmesan; indeed, just add butter if you haven’t got any cream in the house.
Eat as is: no jam, no syrup, no honey, no nothing. Serves 1.
Fast Food
For the past few years I have written an annual roundup of cookery books and, putting aside fashions and fads, it is the subject of fast food that has recently begun to dominate. The reasons are understandable enough—we seem to have less time for cooking as we have more interest in food. Women have been traditionally the producers and providers of food in the home, but now that we go out to work, there’s no one to spend all afternoon making tonight’s supper. But the disinclination to spend hour upon hour in the kitchen every night is not sex-specific. No one would want, after a long day in the office, to come back and start on some elaborate culinary masterpiece. Cooking can be relaxing (although it’s interesting that it’s men rather than women who tend more often to cite its therapeutic properties), but not if you are already exhausted. And as the working day seems to get ever longer, why would you want to be cooking a meal that isn’t going to be ready for two and a half hours? What we all want is to eat something good and simple and soon.
POINTS TO REMEMBER
* * *
• Don’t take shortcuts with dishes that ought to be cooked slowly, to infuse and blend, to be cooled and added to. Choose instead food that is meant to be, has to be, cooked quickly, such as liver, fish, or meat scallops.
• Remember to think not just in terms of actual cooking time in the oven but of the amount of effort it will take you to put dinner together. I like shopping for food and I don’t work in an office; but on days when I’m really fraught, it’s the shopping, not the cooking, that finishes me off. And when you’re really exhausted, the easiest thing to cook is a roast chicken; it takes a while in the oven (see page xviii) but demands a minimum of interference and energy from you.
• Quick, last-minute-assembly food can be the most stressful cooking of all. Its popularity is in part due to the influence of restaurants on our culinary imagination and repertoires. Restaurant cooking has to be quick; food has to be made fast, to order; chefs and their minions have to conjure up the finished dish within minutes. The constraints of cooking at home are entirely different—what makes life easier for a chef can make life hell for the domestic cook.
• I shy away from recipes that, however quick they may be to cook, require too much detailed attention in the preparation. Stir-frys are an example. In delicate moods, the idea of having to shred finely, dice, mince, and slice into julienne seven different sorts of vegetable—even if the dish takes a mere three minutes to cook—could reduce me to tears.
• If you hate cooking, don’t do it. You can certainly eat well enough just by learning how to shop. You can buy food that you don’t need to cook—picnic food, cold food, things to heat up. Of course, trimmed vegetables and packaged salads are pandering to laziness and inviting extravagance on a ludicrous scale, but be grateful for them. If they taste good, don’t worry about it. No one has to be made miserable over cooking.
• Make use of your pantry and fridge. You can rely on bought pasta sauces, on cans of white beans, anchovies, and good tuna (in olive oil only) as well as small glass bottles of tapenade, green olive paste, and goat cheese in oil. Bacon is the easiest thing for the quick cook; grilling a piece of bacon is hardly cooking, and a few salty shards crumbled over or chopped into a pile of mashed potato, or mixed with beans and spinach or chickpeas and chili-fried tomatoes and topped with a poached egg, make a better dinner than anything more elaborate and expensive from the freezer case.
REMINDERS OF AND IDEAS FOR HASTY IMPROVISATIONS
SALAD
You don’t need to be reminded how to open a package of designer lettuce leaves. But if you’re in a hurry, salad can be useful, either as a starter to keep people quiet while you get other things ready, or as a main course if you are putting together a bought picnic supper (fruit, as well as cheese, good bread, pâtisserie). However, some lettuce leaves can be just a little too flabby; you need texture, too. So get a romaine lettuce, tear it into large, crisp chunks, and add it to any bought salad package (or mixture of packages). The quickest way of making a dressing is, at the last minute, to grind some salt over and then to drizzle some good olive oil and add the scarcest spritz of lemon (see also page 23).
To frisée or escarole, add hot, fried, diced pancetta or bacon lardons. Make a dressing by adding Dijon mustard, more oil, and some red wine vinegar to the bacony juices in the pan. Then, onto the warm tossed salad, shave some Parmesan or other hard cheese and toss very lightly again. The Chestnut and Pancetta Salad on page 326 is a slightly more solid variant. And you can substitute warm, just-cooked chicken livers, too.
To packages of baby spinach, add hot bacon and raw sliced mushrooms. Or make a spinach, gorgonzola, and pine nut salad. Cut the gorgonzola (or whichever blue cheese you happen to like best) into crumbly cubes (don’t worry about uniformity, size, or even shape, or you really will have a nervous breakdown) and toast the pine nuts in a hot dry pan until they begin to turn gold and fragrant.
To watercress and mâche—arranged on a plate, not in a bowl—add some sliced, just-cooked-through scallops. Better still, fry some bacon first, then fry the scallops in the bacon fat. Chop the bacon finely and sprinkle over the scallop salad.
If you’re in Germanic mood, then make a mustardy dressing for chicory—adding a stiff spoonful of crème fraîche—and buy thick slices of good ham, cut them into thick strips, and mix into the salad. You could do the same with warm potatoes, too, in which case you should really go whole hog and add, instead of the ham, thickly sliced frankfurters, though please don’t even think of using the flabby adulterated sort too often available.
A huge green salad, no funny stuff, with a walnut oil dressing and a good cheese selection, is one of the loveliest dinners I can think of. Have a tumbling mass of grapes, too, plus good bread, thin and thick crackers, and, if you can ever find ripe pears, then make sure you have a dish of those, too.
SOUPS
PEA SOUP
; The quickest and best soup you can make is to cook 3 cups of frozen peas in 2 cups of vegetable stock made with a good-quality bouillon cube. When the peas are tender, purée in the food processor or blender. Add some olive oil (preferably basil-infused, see below) and season to taste. Serve Parmesan to sprinkle over.
You can improve on this; if you’ve boiled a ham previously, then freeze the ham stock it’s made and use that here. Also, if you’ve stashed any hard, unyielding rinds of finished Parmesan in the freezer as you go along, then salvage one now and throw that into the soup as it’s cooking.
TOMATO AND RICE
SPINACH
Just as easy is a tomato and rice soup (see page 422, too), which you can make by adding water to a good, bought tomato sauce to make it liquid enough for rice to cook in. Bring to the boil. Throw in some basmati rice and 10 minutes later you’ve got soup.
Spinach, because you can buy it frozen and ready chopped, makes a good basis for a quick soup. Chop and fry an onion first, then add the spinach and, when it has more or less thawed, add 2 cups or so of chicken or vegetable stock made from cubes. After about 5 minutes, add a good squeeze of lemon and, if you want to make it richer when it’s off the heat, whisk in some light cream beaten with an egg yolk.
PASTA
BUTTER
CREAM
PARMESAN
TRUFFLE OIL
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 supermark
et 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.
How to Eat Page 22