30 Minute Meals Revisited - Bloody Mary Mussels

30 Minute Meals – have you tried it? Obviously, it’s been around for a while (not just in the library – it was published in 2010) and I have been a little slow on the uptake. 

I like Jamie Oliver. The Naked Chef came out the year we were married –  1999. After our wedding in February, and 3 days in Barcelona on honeymoon, the Husband went out to Bosnia for 6 months. I stayed in London, then on his return, we moved into married quarters down near Salisbury and I began commuting. 2 hours each way if the trains ran on time, I’d get home, knackered, the Husband would have cooked, and I would fall asleep on the sofa. 

 

You can see why the lifestyle Jamie, Jools and their mates were offering appealed - the gorgeous trendy flat that some location monkey had tracked down, the scooter, the mates, the effortless socialising with cool food served up to a chirpy Britpop soundtrack...

We remained loyal through the Return of the Naked Chef, and Happy Days. A version of one of his pasta dishes involving savoy cabbage and bacon will forever be 'Jamie pasta' in our house. I have Jamie’s Dinners, and Jamie’s Italy – all of which I use, but as the Husband and I grew up, our aspirations changed. We followed the school dinners campaign, and Fifteen, but having moved out of London, our tele-visual destination of choice shifted to the Dorset/Devon border in the company of Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall, and if I needed a fix of something urban, well I preferred the company of a certain glamorous brunette with a penchant for eating noodles on a London bus (when she wasn’t raiding the fridge in a silk dressing gown...)

So I hadn’t really been aware of 30 Minute Meals, or its fundamental premise, which is to put a whole meal on the table in less than 30 minutes. “Not just one dish, a whole spread of beautiful things”. Sounds good?  It did to me, but as I read through the recipes, I became more and more nervous of actually trying it out. The use of words like ‘efficiency’ and ‘choreographed’ and orders to ‘Sort out your equipment...Arrange it sensibly...Clear as you go’ are pretty much anathema to me.

Do these look like the cupboards of an efficient cook? 

No? 

Didn't think so...

When I first got it out of the library, and read the recipes, I felt exhausted. I planned a 30 minute meal a couple of times into our weekly meal plan during the initial loan, but couldn’t quite bring myself to take the 30 minute challenge (as I’d mentally come to think of it). In the end, I made the Portuguese Custard Tarts and left it at that.

To be fair, I am probably not 30 Minute Meals’ target audience. I do cook from scratch most nights anyway, and working from home gives me slightly more time in my day to prepare things in advance. I am not the person dumping the shopping bags on the table after staggering home on the tube to start cooking, but on the other hand, I am finding more and more that time is at a premium. 

Fast forward to last week and I saw it again on the shelf in the library. It called to me, so I decided to give it another go. The Husband and I have been trying to take at least one evening a week to cook and eat together, so I decided to schedule the 30 Minute Meal in for last night – Friday night – after a week when we have been in and out and hardly seen each other. In the interests of forcing the issue, I decided to go for something that would be difficult to deviate from, so chose the Bloody Mary Mussels followed by Rhubarb Mille Feuille. I ordered the mussels from the local butchers, so no turning back. Unfortunately, I rather over achieved on the wine front on Thursday night for a friend’s birthday and mussels were really not what I was wanting to eat. As I crawled my way through the day, I really did wonder about chucking in the towel, but we are out this evening, and the mussels – well, they needed to be eaten.

Well, I am really glad that we gave it a go because the meal was absolutely delicious. The mussels are cooked in a fiery bloody mary mix (but of course), served with a lovely herby salad – the tarragon and dill really set off the flavours of the mussel dish. The pudding was equally lovely – we had a slight malfunction in that the puff pastry didn’t puff, but once it was dolloped with custard crème fraiche and rhubarb, well, that was never going to be a problem.

Puff pastry, rhubarb stewed with ginger, 

custard and creme fraiche - what's not to like??

The meal does rely on a few ‘shortcut’ ingredients – passata, jarred horseradish (as a result of shopping list fail, I didn’t have any but found a jar if hot horseradish sauce at the back of the fridge) bagged salad, readymade custard and puff pastry (although I am unlikely to have made my own puff pastry for this – or anything in fact). This is the one thing that makes me shy away from the book - not so much the passata and jars of horseradish, but the recipes do rely a lot on the quick fixes meat wise - chicken breasts particularly, which thanks to Hugh F-W I have come to regard as one of the scourges of the meat aisle - they are so expensive, and I rarely buy them these days.

 

In terms of the instructions, well there is a lot of jumping around between pudding, mussels and salad, but actually, it’s just a sensible approach. If I’d sat down with the 3 recipes separately, I’d have probably worked out that the elements had to be prepped/cooked in that order, but not until I’d already realised that the pastry should have been in the oven 10 minutes ago... You definitely need to read through a couple of times to do it ‘right’, and it would have helped if I’d done that!

And 30 minutes? Really? Well, probably not quite. The actually cooking time was just less than 30 minutes, from the moment we cracked open the pastry to sitting down with the steaming bowls of mussels, and a bottle of exceedingly alcoholic Belgian beer (as specified), but I had spent some time during my afternoon potter in the kitchen digging things out of cupboards. I’d given the mussels and extra soak in some fresh water just to make sure, and I would have been nervous of cooking them without. Finally, because I could, I had made my own bread (a plaited white loaf which I was rather proud of).  

I’d also spent some time trying to create the clear, efficient workspace that Jamie demands. 

Reader – I failed, but I did try.

Bloody Mary Mussels – serves 2 with lots of soupy sauce

1kg of mussels, cleaned and debearded

300ml passata

1 heaped tablespoon of hot horseradish sauce (you can tone this down to taste)

1 small dried chilli

3 stalks of celery , finely chopped

4 cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped

A good glug of port

An even bigger glug of vodka

1 lemon, juiced

Bunch of flat leaf parsley, chopped

Soak your mussels in a large sink’s worth of water for an hour or so, then drain.

Put a large pan (with a lid) on the hob on a medium heat (yes, really, I was worried the house would burn down too, but it didn’t).

Mix together the passata with the Worcestershire sauce, horseradish, crushed up chilli and garlic and the chopped celery. Stir in the port, vodka and the juice of the lemon along with freshly ground salt & pepper.

Make sure the mussels are closed – if any are open, give them a tap. If they do not close, they are dead so chuck away. If you’ve bought them fresh and from a reputable source, you should only lose one or two. Put all the good mussels into the large pan, tip in the bloody mary mixture, put the lid on and give the pan a good shake. Increase the heat and leave the mussels to steam. Give the pan a shake every now and then. They probably only need 3-4 minutes – enough time to make a salad and get your mille feuille pastry out of the oven according to Jamie. 

When the mussels have opened, remove them from the pan with a slotted spoon and leave the tomato sauce to bubble away a bit on a high heat to thicken and reduce. While this is going on, check for any mussels that didn’t open during the cooking process and throw them away – again you shouldn’t lose many this way. Pour the sauce over the mussels and scatter with the chopped parsley.  

Serve in big soup bowls with crusty bread and a salad, and some extremely alcoholic Belgian beer.

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Fajitas and Flapjack

Compared to last week which was a veritable feast of vegetables, this week’s menu has so far been far more functional. Last week, I managed Veg nearly every day. On Wednesday, working his way rather laboriously through Hugh’s stir fried sesame cauliflower (served with noodles as a main course rather than a side dish) Blue asked, rather accusingly, if I was trying to turn us all into vegetarians. Poor Blue. He’s not a fan of cauliflower, and we did have rather a lot of it last week. Fortunately I was able to tell him that the next day it was going to be African Chicken (out of ‘Kitchen’ by Nigella –  one of my recipes at the moment). “Yyeessss!” he said, but quietly. He knows when he’s treading on dangerous ground!

African chicken aside, we ate mainly out of Veg Everyday, and the Husband and I certainly enjoyed it. The kids were less convinced, but they enjoyed the twice baked potatoes, and Pink loved  all the cauliflower. My favourite so far was the leek and chestnut risotto that we had on Friday evening. Very delicious. So pleased I over ordered on the chestnuts at Christmas!

This week, however, has been a bit more hectic and so far, less veggie. The kids were out for tea on Monday and the Husband wasn’t due back till late – and after a 4 hour drive back from Wales, during which pies were likely to have been consumed, I really couldn’t be bothered. I spent most of the day eating toasted sourdough bread and nutella (it’s cold, OK – I need the extra plumage), and then decided that as I had all the ingredients, I would make some soup. I went back and redid Hugh’s Fennel and Celeriac delight – this time with the orange zest that I didn’t have when I made it the first time. It does make a difference. We had chilli on Tuesday and fajitas this evening. It did cross my mind to make the tortillas myself, using the recipe out of the River Cottage Bread Handbook, but I managed to retain a grip on reality (and my sanity). I noted the mention in the recipe of sticky dough. The alarm bells rang and I heeded them. Trying to knead sticky dough with the kids milling around as well as trying to put away the Sainsburys delivery, and also, cook the rest of the tea, could well have resulted in serious injury to someone – possibly the Sainsburys delivery man on this occasion – and reason prevailed. It’s not often this happens.

I’d obviously decided that life was too easy though, because, seeing how the oven was on anyway to warm up the (recently delivered) tortillas, how about I just make some biscuits? Fortunately, Short & Sweet just seemed to fall open at the Marmalade Flapjack page. Now, I’m a sucker for a good flapjack and am always up for a new recipe. So far my favourite one is in the Camper Van Cookbook. Somehow, all others that I’ve tried either crumble up (which is lovely on breakfast but not so good when you want something with your cuppa) or so completely rock solid that not so much as a jackhammer would break it up – although I have had some limited success with Nigella’s ‘Soot’s Flapjacks’ out of Domestic Goddess. Anyway, back to Dan. It’s a quick melt, stir, bake recipe, and apart from soaking the raisins in boiling water for 10 mins, needs no prep. It uses treacle instead of syrup, and dark soft brown sugar, and I did wonder if it would be a bit ‘dark’ generally, given that

Recipe Junkie’s 2011 vintage marmalade is also on the dark side. But I needn’t have worried. Very delicious flapjacks indeed. A little on the crumbly side, but Dan does flag it as a possibility, so I was watching, and definitely edible. They may be a little on the dark side for Pink, but Blue, who likes nothing more than a piece of good dark gingerbread or fruitcake, is going to love it!

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A new bread guru (I'm so fickle)

For this week’s bread, I decided to leave Dan and go back to Hugh – well, to the River Cottage Bread handbook (number 3 in the River Cottage Handbook series). I have been reading Daniel Stevens’ bread-making philosophy for the last few days and was ready to give it a go.

The overall method is much more what I’m used to, and what I like about this Handbook is that there’s a big chapter about the different stages of bread-making, what each is for, and then he gives a basic blueprint recipe referring back to the ‘foundation’chapter, followed by a number of variations. To be fair, Dan Lepard does the same, but in slightly less detail.

I feel like I’m not a novice baker, so took the opportunity to fiddle around with the recipe, using half and half strong white and wholemeal flour. The last batch of Dan L bread I made, I followed the half sponge method for his farmhouse tin loaf, but used half spelt flour and it worked pretty. I am determined to go back to using more wholegrain flour, it’s just a matter of making bread that isn’t completely dense and bricklike with it.

So back to Dan S’s philosophy. In his blueprint recipe, he lists a number of optional extras including a ladleful of sourdough starter. My starter has been languishing at the bottom of the fridge, without so much as a feed, since the Husband broke his tooth on a piece of crackling before Christmas. Neglected and unloved, I thought the chances were slim, but to my surprise, it seems to have survived. I added some as instructed, and then gave the rest of it a feed. I’ll keep it out of the fridge for a few days and see if I can pep it back up.

Rather than using my trusty Kenwood dough hook, I have been hand kneading my bread recently, and I took care to give my bread today a good 10-15 minutes which it seemed to knead. The instruction is to leave the dough to rise wrapped in a bin bag – this I did not have but a plastic carrier bag seemed to do the trick. I followed the instructions to the letter, letting the risen dough rest before being shaped, and then I followed his instructions for shaping what he calls a ‘stubby cylinder’. I left the 2 shaped loaves, coated in oats, to do the second rise wrapped in a floured tea towel, covered again with the plastic bag, and then baked according in a hot oven for 10 mins followed by 30 mins at 180. He gives some helpful cooking guidance for ditherers like me – “Hmm – looks done – has it had enough time? – I’m not sure it’s had enough – may be I should take it out – maybe I should leave it in” and is very supportive about trusting your instinct. I like this.

And was it all worth it? I think it probably was. I am truly thrilled with my loaves. I’ve never got wholemeal rising so well  - even a half and half dough like this batch. How exciting.

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