Delia - Cheating at Cooking

As someone who's posted a few times about Lazy cooking I guess I should have a view on Delia's controversial new show and book. For those who haven't been following the controversy, or for those overseas, the issue is that she's using convenience foods, and even goes as far as to name brands in her book.

I've been thinking about what to write, but once again procrastination bore fruit and the Guardian ran an article where they cooked some of the food and tried it. Now, I haven't read the book and I've only seen the first episode of the TV show but my impression was that the food was going to be pretty shit, and hardly worth doing because if you are using crap ingredients like that you might as well just have a ready meal which is miles less work, and much quicker to make. Especially these days when you can get really very good ready meals. In fact the article makes all these points, and much better than I do. Go read it.

The Guardian article basically seems to back that up. You don't actually save much time and what you make tastes like shit. So it's a Boo to Delia. Stick with her earlier "how to cook" books if you want, they are still solid if a bit boring.

Crumble

Right, as promised the crumble review. I got slightly hindered by stopping for a few beers on the way home, this also prevented any power tooling by my girlfriend, but the crumble still turned out great.

Simple Apple Crumble

Shopping difficulty: Easy.
Amount of washing up: Almost none, and it's easy.
Time from start to eating: 40 mins
Equipment: Some kind of baking dish.
Cost: £2.50 ish
Feeds: 4



Ingredients

Apples (get big ones, we had silly small apples and it's more effort to peel and chop them)
Pack of Shortbread
Sugar
Custard
Optional:
Cloves
Cinnamon
Brandy


Peel and chop your apples and stick them in your dish. How many you need depends on the size of your dish. Put the apples in the dish as you go, so you know when to stop.
Generally booze makes puddings better so add some brandy to the dish with the apples, and if you want some cloves and a stick of cinnamon. (count them in, you want to remove them later).
Add some sugar, you don't need much. With a crumble unlike an apple pie, the sweetness comes from the topping not the apples. I added a little sprinkling of dark brown sugar, but any sugar is fine. You could leave it out entirely if you wanted.
Cover the dish with foil and stick it in the oven for 20 mins at 180C/350F/Gas 4.

Whilst the apples are cooking away you need to turn your shortbread into crumble. You can put it in a plastic bag and bash it with a rolling pin, which is quite fun, or you can do it the easy way and stick it in a food processor.

After 20 mins, take the apple out of the oven, it should have softened and the sugar should have dissolved, but you still want the apples to look like chunks of apple rather than apple sauce.

At this point, remove any cloves or cinnamon sticks you put in the apples, nicer for people if they don't eat whole spices!

Leave to cool for a few minutes, then pour your crumble onto the top of the apple, spread it so it covers the whole dish and return to the oven for another 10 minutes.

Serve with custard. I just bought some ready made custard from the supermarket and microwaved it. You could theoretically serve it with cream or even ice cream, but that would be totally wrong, an offence against desserts. Why even think it you pervert!

Heston vs Nigella

BBC2's new schedule features 2 cooking shows in consecutive 8:30pm slots. They couldn't be more different. On Monday we have Nigella Express, Nigella Lawson's show that claims to show you how to cook very quick and easy recipes. Now, Nigella is no trained chef but her 'sexy' style has won her a lot of fans.

On Tuesday Heston Bluhmental's show, In Search of Perfection, takes classic dishes and uses the latest in gastronomic science to try and elevate them to the highest possible level that you can achieve in a home kitchen.

Now, on paper I'd expect Nigella's show to be more suitable for the LazyView reader, the concept of very quick easy recipes to make when you've got very little time is just what I need on a day to day basis. However, there is one major flaw, and it's not Nigella's ridiculously over the top flirting to the camera or her conveniently ethnically diverse "friends" who pop over for a surprise Sunday lunch. (although who does that? Who randomly pops over at the last minute and expects to get given a roast?) No. The problem is a combination of finances and a complete detachment from normal life.

In her last show Nigella got a phone call from 'the girls' who were going to pop over that evening for a drink. Nigella fancied a quiet night in but, of course, being the perfect hostess she says "sure, come over!" and because she's cooking the express way she hops in a taxi to her butcher and buys what must have been about £30 worth of lamb loin. Excuse me? I'm lazy, but I wouldn't get a taxi to the fucking butcher! (and I'm sorry to say if you pop over for a snack with your wine, you won't be getting prime cuts of lamb on a salad either... I might make an awesome cake though). Once she gets the lamb home she puts it together with a few bits and pieces she finds in her walk in pantry, which is organised geographically so if you want some south east asian flavours you just walk down to that section. I've seriously seen less well stocked specialist delis.

So yeah Nigella, it is easy to throw a meal for 4 together in a few minutes if you're going to throw £60 worth of ingredients and taxi fares at the problem but your average Joe like me considers a tin of tomatoes or some butter to be a store cupboard staple, not a packet of north african spicy sausages!

Heston on the other hand is one of the best and most creative chefs in the world. His restaurant, The Fat Duck, has been in the top 2 in the world for the past 6 years. Along with Ferran Adrià at El Bulli he is generally seen as at the forefront of experimental cooking. In his show he spends 6 months experimenting in his lab and traveling to the best restaurants and food science centres of the world, trying to perfect a series of what seem to be the most mundane of dishes, this week he tackled the mighty burger. Easy? Well, have you tried getting the perfect bite sized bun? Making cheese slices at home? Perfecting the blend of meat for your burger? I doubt it. Last week he spent a lot of time trying to achieve an oven temperature of 350 degrees c (gas mark 25) ina way that people could achieve at home. He was trying to replicate the heat of a Tandoor oven.

Heston's recipes are intensely complicated and the product of tens of hours of research, I doubt anyone will actually ever make them at home BUT you do learn a huge amount from them. Not only the science but little tips of the trade. eg. Star anise has a chemical in it that reacts with caremelising onions to produce a chemical that give you the Umami (meaty) flavour, in a similar way to monosodium glutamate, so if you put star anise in with the frying onions when you make your bolognese sauce it'll taste meatier.

LazyView verdict: Heston wins by miles.

Heston's show is brilliant, interesting to people who like cooking or science and despite his lofty credentials and the fact he's cooking at a level that most people will never even eat let alone be able to cook to he's totally in touch with real life. Watch his show and you'll learn something. Nigella's show is smug, annoying and completely out of touch with a normal person's reality. As a lazy person her show professionally offends me. Avoid.

Lazy Cooking - Cake

There is a show on TV at the moment called Take on the Takeaway where top chefs try and cook a takeaway style dish that's quicker, cheaper and tastier than the equivalent takeaway. Genuinely lazy watchers will realise it's slightly misleading because the 'speed' part of the test doesn't take into account either the shopping time or the cleaning up time.

Still, cooking can be quick and easy, you can get supermarkets to deliver your shopping to your house and you can stick your dirty dishes in your dishwasher, if you are lucky enough to have one. Or in my case just leave them for my girlfriend to do. So maybe I'll add some easy/quick recipes on here, but I'll try and include the useful lazy info like how much special shopping you need to do and how much washing up needs doing.

With winter closing in it's getting darker and colder in the evenings and even though I don't have a very sweet tooth I've found I've wanted more sweet stuff to eat, so yesterday I decided to make a cake. Mmmm. Cake.




Basic Victoria Sponge

Shopping difficulty: Store cupboard stuff you can find in every supermarket and most local shops.
Amount of washing up: You need quite a few bowls and a cake tin.
Time from start to eating: 30 mins if you use the oven, 15 mins if you use the microwave
Equipment: You need something to bake it in if you are using the oven, and some bowls to mix stuff in.
Cost: Less than £1

Ingredients

4 Oz Self Raising Flour
4 Oz Caster Sugar
4 Oz Unsalted butter
2 Eggs

This is a scaleable recipe. You have equal quantities of flour, sugar and butter, and for every 2 ounces of each of those you use, you use 1 egg. The cake I made had 4Oz of butter, flour and caster sugar and 2 eggs. an 8Oz cake would use 4 eggs. Flour should be self raising, or add a level tsp of baking powder per 2 Oz of flour.

You can either cook this in the oven or in the microwave. The oven is much nicer, but the microwave is much quicker. If you are using the oven preheat it to 180C/350F/Gas 4 before you start mixing. (thanks to the interweb for the conversion)

Weigh your sugar, flour and butter out, stick them all in a bowl, add your eggs and cream it all together. The butter should have markings on the packet to help you guestimate the correct weight. This means stir them hard with a spoon until it looks creamy, you can use an electric mixer but it's more washing up and this doesn't take long, I reckon it's less hassle beating by hand than washing up the mixer. If you leave your butter out of the fridge to soften first it's much easier I normally don't bother. Some recipes say to mix the flour, sugar and butter together first, then add the eggs but I don't bother. Once it's all creamed together scrape the mixture into a cake tin, or a nice big microwave safe dish.

Bake in the oven for 20 minutes or microwave on high for about 4 minutes. The cooking time in the oven is the same for any size of cake. In the microwave it's going to depend on the power of your microwave and how big the cake is.

Easy.

I melted some fancy chocolate to put on mine, but you can cover it with anything. Just stuck some posh chocolate in a bowl above some boiling water (in a jug, no need to wash that up if it's only had boiling water in) added a bit of butter and icing sugar and poured it on the cake. Mmmm.