Cooking's sometimes hard enough, but do I have to wash up also?

The short answer is yes... unless we use banana leaves to serve and eat with our fingers and stir with sticks (not really a bad idea...)

but we can keep the cookware down, which often includes the grottiest implements to wash.

ONE POT WONDERS

Roast Chicken and Char-Grilled Vegetables. 

Bake the whole thing in one pot!!  

This is also a good pantry dinner (not much from the fridge)

Turn the oven on to about 180/350.

Throw together 6 slices of bread (cut off crusts and cut into little squares); a jar of roasted char-grilled vegies (drained), one shredded BBQ chicken and some spinach leaves.  Stir it together IN the dish you're going to cook it in, you don't have to go overboard, just so the chicken isn't all on one side and the spinach wont turn into a black mess in the corner.

Whisk up 6 eggs with about 1 and a bit cups of milk and pour it over the chicken/vegie mix.  Leave it to swoon a bit while you tidy up the little tiny mess in the kitchen.

Grate some cheese over the top of the goodies in the dish and place it in the oven in order for it to consider how it can warm the cockles of your heart.  You should give it at least 35 minutes thinking time.

The bread becomes golden when it comes up with an idea and miraculously the eggs set at about the same time.

Eat it!!  Sometimes it looks like this - but the bottom of the dish couldn't possibly be this clean if you've just taken out a slice.  If it is, all power to you - your washing up is going to be even more minimal.  If it's not, it's because you just BAKED in it, which is how things should be.

Sometimes there's just no time to cook

I know this, you know this.. suddenly it's food o'clock and there is no food being dished out: there is no aroma tantalising your tastebuds: you haven't even entered the kitchen or opened the fridge.

Is it time to opt out and dial-a-dinner? Absolutely not! (unless you feel like dial-a-dinner, in which case go right ahead...).  There is another way that doesn't necessarily mean inordinate amounts of time spent cooking, or for that matter cooking at all.

I want to know who said we have to have dinner at dinner time?  I've yet to get the name and number, or even era of the person who said dinner must be hot and substantial (probably somebody who had their meals cooked for them).

I have 2 healthy grown sons - both over 25.  Solid, strong and both keen on their food.  I'm going to let you in on a secret:

Sometimes we didn't eat cooked dinners.

Sometimes we didn't eat uncooked breakfasts either, but that's another story.  What I'm concentrating on here is the need to ingest hot food in the evening.  There isn't one.  We do it out of habit.  

so before you resign yourself to cook something when your heart's not in it, or worse - to buying take away, here is a list of uncooked meals that will sustain you and your family throughout the evening, and well into the next day and breakfast time:

Chopped up fruit (yes, really truly) & Yogurt served with Couscous or rice (anything you pay over $14 for in a cafe has to be ok for dinner)

Go all hog and give everyone 2 mangoes each.  That's so decadent! Make out you're stranded on a tropical island.  Add some bananas, pawpaw and mint.  Put some sultanas and chopped apple or pear in, and this fruit salad has just won an award for its looks alone.  No washing up!!  Still not sure about it?  Check these out:  

Groovy Fruit Salad

Ingredients 

• Diced avocado, banana, grapefruit, orange, papaya, and Pear
• chopped, crushed mint leaves
• 1 cup grated coconut
• Sugar (optional) - because it's dinner, perhaps we should opt out of this ingredient
• honey (optional)

Directions 

Peel and remove seeds from the fresh fruit as necessary, cut fruit into bite-sized pieces. Combine all fruits in a glass bowl. Add the mint leaves, some sugar and water. Stir gently. There should only be enough liquid to coat the fruit.

Cover the fruit salad and allow it to stand for a half hour before serving. Top withgrated coconut immediately before serving     

Pankcakes:  I know - it's almost cooking (ok, it is.. but such little cooking). With pancakes the world is your oyster:  You can go sweet or savoury; plain or wildly exorbitant.  Ocassionally we contest each other in our kitchen to see who can put the most added extras in the pancake mix and still be able to flip it!  Try flipping a savoury pancake with nuts, bacon and zucchini in the batter mix! or a sweet pancake mix with a whole packet of Trail Mix* dumped in the batter.  That's just the batter, you then get to add a filling - from jam or chopped fruit & cream for a sweet filling through to asparagus spears or shallots and sprouts (with or without any sauce you feel like).  Pancakes should never be slotted into daylight hours alone.  They were always the perfect evening snack when you had run out of chocolate or ice cream.

Here is a link to the perfect savoury pancake recipe starter....

http://www.nibbledish.com/people/Laynie/recipes/savoury-pancakes#blogthis_toggle

I'm not finished with my notions of uncooked and semi-cooked dinners. There is no end to this notion of what to eat when you don't feel like cooking:  I will come back to this as I move along and add them as they come to mind (and stomach)

Clean out the bottom of the Fridge Pasta

You can use ANY vegetable and ANY pasta:  Trial and error will tell you whether it's a good combination or not.  Besides, you're cleaning out your fridge, you must be hungry.
The essentials are:  Pasta, Bacon & Cream

I started with these:

I pulled out my trusty camping cookware, just because I love it - and it's great for bacon and sloooow cooking.  I used the billy because it fits all the Fettuccine into it.  By the end of the cooking process proper, the frypan wont be big enough, but that wont stop the end result of the meal!

Let's Cook:

Fill the saucepan with water and a pinch of salt.  While you wait for the water to boil (for the Fettuccine or other pasta) chop up the vegies and strips of bacon (you could use pastrami, salami, chicken or ham...)

 Because I used bacon - complete with fatty bits and all, I did not use butter or oil, I just added it to the pan, stirred it round and round and when it started to sizzle, turned the flame right down and talked to my daughter for a while....

If you want your bacon dead and buried, cook it till it's just under charcoal before adding the vegies.  I like it to still have a bit of form for this dish so as the fat on the bacon became translucent and the edges of the bacon looked a bit redder than the rest of it, I added the vegies

this is a tricky timing thing now.  By this time the water should be boiling for your pasta and you've thrown the pasta in and cooked it according to the directions (normally 10 minutes on rolling boil).

Keep the vegies and bacon sizzling and slapping each other at a temperature you'd normally fry an egg at:  Low heat and watch the goings on,

In the meantime, grab at least 3 eggs and say half/three quarters a cup of cream (sour cream, fresh cream... all the same in this pot) NO SALT IF YOU'RE USING PIGGY PRODUCTS!!.  As we are cleaning out the fridge, your eggs may not be the happiest of foods.  Perhaps you've lured them out of a dark corner where they have been forgotten for a while.  If your eggs are looking a bit sad, make them happy before you beat them, cook them and eat them.

mix them up with cream, till it's a sloppy, thicker than scrambled eggs mix

.

add it to the bacon and vegie mix

Stir, stir, stir..  you don't want an omelette.  Just as the mixture thickens around the edges TURN THE HEAT OFF

give it a few moments to itself so it can think about things .  It may not look exactly appetizing, but believe me it will taste superb.  There's always an interesting twist to a 'clean out the fridge pasta'.

Meanwhile, your pasta should be ready... drain...leave it draining for a moment (only a moment - any longer, you best put some butter or oil on it because pasta, like most things that are not at their best on their own, tends to get clingy...)

Clingy, co-ey, pasta remnants:  has one good time with a saucepan and wont let go!

I did mention that the frypan was going to be a tad undersized

And there you have it.  No matter how un-sensational this looks, I know from experience and thirty years of el-cheapo cooking, that this particular dish rarely makes it to the table before it gets shoveled into hungry mouths.  the smell is amazing, the taste is delicious and though it has a poor reputation for glamour, it's a great 'night before shopping' meal and 'slap together at the last minute.  Goes great wit broccoli, peas, zucchinis (courgettes) snow peas, asparagus, chicken... ah heck, just empty your fridge into the pan!

Moist - emphasis on moist - Orange Poppy Seed Cake

I still haven't got around to explaining the purpose of this blog.... bear with me. Perhaps if you read and see my madcap way of cooking, it'll dawn on you.  Nobody has to be a good cook in order to cook

I love this cake, but although it takes minutes to slap together, the "boiling oranges" bit can take a fair whack of time (and the 'boiled orange' is where we get the moistness of this cake - you can choose not to, but you'll just have an orange poppy seed cake then, not a moist orange poppy seed cake).  

But I just found out I can microwave the oranges!!!  Never one to shirk a good nuclear blast, I currently have my oranges in the microwave for 8 minutes (that's a long time to be nuked).  

HOW TO MAKE THE CAKE 

I turned the oven on.  You know - the usual moderate oven thingy

170deg C/350F.    

I also readied my cake tin.  I have recently upgraded from my tiny little, rusty-round-the-edges cake tin, to a high-top spring form pan.  THIS IN ITSELF TRANSFORMS YOU INTO A COOK WHO KNOWS WHAT THEY'RE DOING.  The cake tin needs to be oiled/buttered OR... my personal favourite: spray the crap out of it with cooking oil spray - IT DOESN'T MATTER which oil.  It's just to stop it sticking.  You can, if you want (and it always looks good) cut out a circle of baking paper the same size as the bottom of your cake tin.  Put it in the tin - no point cutting it out and putting it anywhere else.  It too will aid in the smooth transition from tin to cake cooling rack after it's holiday in the tropics of the oven. 

Don't worry yourself over your cutting out abilities.  I have never had a cake complain.

The actual cake recipe:

2 oranges – boiled twice with fresh water for 15 minutes OR microwave as below.  Then roughly chopped, skin & all (boiling it twice with fresh water takes the acid taste away - which will be interesting to see if the microwave version can eliminate that taste..)  185g butter, melted or 1 cup of vegetable oil  3 eggs  1 cup castor sugar  1 ½ cups self-raising flour - it doesn't matter if it's Gluten Free or 'normal'  2 Tablespoons poppy seeds

YOU CAN'T STUFF UP SOUP, CAN YOU?

I don't always love food, but when I do we are a good team in a strong relationship and somehow symbiotic, even though one of us ends up eaten.  

I remember my early forays into the chemistry of food.  Yes, yes, I am from the era when "Cooking" subjects were not only mandatory for girls but they were transitioning to "Home Economics" in order to help us better understand our worth.  But really, we just cooked.  My first cooking class at Springwood High School (after the mandatory 'go out and buy all these things' class and having made an apron in 'Sewing' class), was "How to Make a Banana Sandwich".  No kidding.  

Truth be told I actually learnt something.  

Firstly, she told me to butter the bread right to the edges after spying my splodge of butter quite evenly centred on the two slices in front of me.  Having grown up in a margarine household, butter remained cold and untamed to me: any attempt at getting it to behave was met with a nasty gash in my bread.  

Patience was my second lesson: Nothing of worth was rushed.  I was taught to wait for that sweet spot when butter was at its most spreadable; or when the oven had preheated; or the required chemical reaction had occurred - which required timing and order, long before I could venture further to discover the elusive art of perfectly timed Baking.  

The last lesson of the Banana Sandwich involved the correct ingredients: Prior to my Cooking Class Guru's intervention I included sugar on the list.  When she came to check the contents of our sandwiches I thought I had done a disservice to the world of gastronomy and female intelligence by the look of complete horror on her face.  I covered the blight as quickly as possible with the perfectly-timed, room-temperature-buttered (right to the edges) slice and shoved it ever-so-indelicately into my mouth.  It was lunch time after all.

I was made to redo my sandwich, with scraps of leftovers from the perfectionists sitting either row of me.  I was told I was never to put sugar on a sandwich of 'any kind' ever again, lest I forfeit "Home Economics" altogether and would be made to repeat a grade.  I didn't believe her exaggerated threats, but having tasted the subtle yet newly sweet taste of fruit over refinery, I also found it relatively easy never to put sugar on any sandwich I ate again*...

*fairy bread being a different matter altogether 

(photo courtesy of Indulgy)

From correctly-buttered banana sandwiches to a 10 course Italian meal for 28 people with nothing but a regular household stove & oven, I have battled my wits and energy against food.  I became a vegetarian through financial choice when I left home (back in those days I think we all lived on weekly wages of something like $70 a week).  I'm no longer a vegetarian (so all you carnivores can keep reading), although I choose vegetable meals more often than those with meat of any kind.  Being a vegetarian - for whatever reason - meant really thinking about your meals, which I mostly enjoyed.  I pored over recipe books borrowed from libraries and bought at St Vinnies.  At 10am I would be thinking about dinner at 6.30pm, by midday I had the books out, reviewing each for taste, simplicity and available ingredients, by 2pm I had a recipe in mind and would need to walk across the road to the fruit and veg shop to buy all the yummy components for the Roullade or Quiche or Nut Loaf.. If anything involved pulses, well.... I'd actually have to start that meal the day before!  Yep... vegetarianism and a certain Cooking teacher whose name I can't recall, but whose lesson I never forgot taught me the fundamentals about cooking: stretching everything right to the edge, using the right ingredients* and patience.

** there are no right ingredients

Having learnt my cullinary lessons over forty years, I reckon I can cook the really good stuff now.