Operation Stop Cooking: Part 2 - More of the Main Bit

The One Big Dish gives you two complete nights off cooking, but it's also the most freezer-space-hungry option and it restricts your choices to one-pot dishes with cooked veg only. So the next trick up your sleeve is to make more of the main bit of the meal, which is usually the schleppy bit. This takes up half the space in your freezer, and then you only have to make the sides that go with it. (The next post or two will be about Lazy Sides and Lasting Salads, so that even there you're streamlining your cooking.)

Spontaneous pasta

This one's a total winner because it's ridiculously fast, hugely variable, pretty damn easy, and relies mostly on store-cupboard ingredients.  I invented it when I was about 27 and living in Hythe Bridge Street, and me, Will, and my housemates got home at about 2 am, all thoroughly trashed, and everyone said they were hungry. And looked at me. Expectantly.

We decided the challenge should be to make the pasta sauce while the pasta was boiling (no extra time) and hence Spontaneous Pasta was born. I pretty much always have tinned tomatoes about, and pasta, and a few jars of olives (the cheap ones in brine, already depipped), that's the store cupboard stuff.  And then there are usually some herbs laying about the place and a chilli or two. And garlic. Always garlic. And really it mostly just gets blitzed up and thrown over the pasta to heat.

I sometimes forget about this for years and then sneer at the notion of it, and then make it again and realise OH HELL THIS IS HELLA TASTY. You don't actually have to make it at lightning speed while the pasta boils, but anything that can be made in ten minutes flat while drunk is fairly easy. And it tastes equally amazing sober.

Vegetarian chilli

A spicy tangy chilli is the basis for tortilla and nachos. My meat chilli takes forever, slowly evolving from a magnificent bolognese through chilli con carne and re-emerging to appear in tortillas and nachos - the veggie one is a lot quicker! Prep time is about 5-10 minutes, cooking time is 40-50 minutes.

A good panful will still give you plenty to freeze, unless you're feeding a very large group - each tortilla only needs about 2 heaped tablespoons of chilli (about 50ml); for nachos, you need about 250ml of chilli per person. This recipe makes about 1.5 litres of chilli - that's about 30 tortillas, or nachos for 6. Or, nachos for 4 and then 10 tortillas, which would feed 4 nicely if 2 of them are very hungry, or feed 10 if they're all me and only want one tortilla each. You get the idea - whichever which way, you probably have enough to freeze some as well, and chilli freezes very happily and is even nicer the next time.

Mushroom and lentil bake

For a writer, I'm pretty rubbish at naming things. My twelve-week writing course was called, for the first four years, "the twelve-week course", before in a fit of uncharacteristic brilliance and after four years of writing emails in which I explained that it covered the key elements of stories, I renamed it "Story Elements". The follow-up course I created at my students' request is now in its fifth year of being known as "the follow-up course". Occasionally, this troubles me.

I called this dish "lentil bake" for years before I had the epiphany to make it sound at least a tiny bit nicer by mentioning another of its key ingredients, so now it's "mushroom and lentil bake". But in my defence, most dishes are named after their ingredients, it just sounds fancier when you're naming them in French or Italian or Hindi or Urdu. So feel free to rename it champignons et lentilles cuits, funghi e lenticchie al forno, masharoom aur masoor kee daal bekd (shoot Google translate, not me), or indeed مشروم اور دال پکایا. (The original recipe is from Rose Elliot's Bean Book, but I can't remember what she called it.)

It's much tastier than its name suggests and it's also a good one for the leftovers list because you could substitute whatever leftover veg you like, in the place of the mushrooms, and it's an absolute winner for using up old bits of hard cheese and even edible rind.

What to do with leftover cream

My friend texted me this morning demanding recipes for leftover cream, so I leapt to it (and out of bed) to gather up a range of options, which also reminded me we have 220ml leftover from yesterday's liver paté. She has 450ml left over and it's hard to find a recipe that uses more than 100ml, though soured cream will do the trick, so here are the options - the coffees, the desserts, the savouries, and the soured cream! Each batch of ideas is arranged easiest to most cookish. Plus it also leads to ideas for how to use leftover clementines, vegetables, and meat!

Baked Camembert supper

Baked camembert is ususally touted as a starter, which is odd, because it's everything a starter shouldn't be: very filling, rich, and satisfying. It doesn't work so well at the end of a meal, either: it's hard to make a main course light enough that people will welcome quantities of gloopy, melty cheese after it, instead of groaning inside at the prospect, trying to swallow enough to be assuage their host's feelings, and then feeling a food coma setting in so fast that they must either take their leave or nod off at the table.

What it does make, however, is an absolutely brilliant romantic supper for two! Or for one, if you're very very hungry, or for more, if you are more, and add additional camemberts. Bizarrely, it's also incredibly healthy - because once you have your splendid Baked Camembert centrepiece, you surround it with fresh raw foods that want to be delved into melty hot cheese, and end up eating more raw vegetables than any usual supper might feature. Plus once the oven's hot, it only takes 15 minutes.

Aubergine sausage and olive stew

I threw this together as one of those random oh-and-we-have-that-too stews and was so astonishingly impressed with it, I immediately scrawled all the ingredients down in the Little Living-room Book of Thoughts. (It's important to have spangly wee notebooks stashed about the house generally, but in the living room especially, because you never know when Doctor Who or Farscape will trigger a major ephiphany, or you'll be struck with a thought about right-angles, or need to jot down a poem or plot line, or, indeed, a recipe.) The main point of amazement, though, was OLIVES! IN A STEW! IN STEW! OLIVES! You can put olives in stew. PUT OLIVES IN STEW.

Nachos to share

A great big bowlful of nachos, dumped squarely between you, eaten with your fingers, oh joy joy joy! Memories of Panchos in Obs, sharing a towering mound of nachos with Nikka, while the Gipsy Kings played... I used to make this loads, then forgot about it for years, and it's burst back onto the menu recently. This is part of the vat of bolognese meal cascade, so if you haven't made a vat of bolognese, you should start here.

Socca pizza: prepare to be AMAZED!

When I'm not eating wheat for whatever reason, the thing I miss most is pizza. Even pizza restaurants can't seem to manage a wheat-free pizza, it's always something a bit soggy and disappointing. My current food hero is Jack Monroe, so when she posted a recipe for socca pizza, made with gram flour (chickpea flour) I leapt to it. It was brilliant! ...ish. Almost there. Not quite... crispy. So I started experimenting. And refining. And tweaking. And obsessively measuring every detail. Happily, Will's fallen in love with it too, so me repeatedly making us pizzas with tiny variations on a theme (science tip: you can't change two variables at once), is fine. And when I burn my hand again, he's very happy to take over, while I sing Aranjuez with my hand under the tap. So: after extensive, tasty research, here's how to make perfect, crispy gluten-free pizza. After the recipe I'll go into all the ins and outs, because not everything has to be perfect all the time, but it can be if you want it to be, and then toppings ideas.

Balti madras

So far on the many marvellous curries list, we've got how to make some major spice mixes (balti and garam masla and green masala paste) and perfect rice, but the only main dish so far is the bright fresh-tasting jalfrezi. And for a true curry cascade, you need many many curries: you need "main" dishes and dahls and vegetable side dishes, all tucked away nicely in the freezer, so whenever you want curry, you only need to make one dish and still serve a curry feast. Or do what I've just done: crawl from a fluey sofa to pull a selection of curry dishes out to defrost, then curl back up with lemsip and a laptop. To muse on Madras.

Lots Lasagne

It's just as easy to make three lasagnes as to make one, so this makes three, each serving 4-6 people, so you can eat one and freeze two, or invite an extra twelve friends around, or turn up to someone's move with enough lasagne to feed all the helpers for a couple of days.

Fresh, lively jalfrezi

This is the best freshest liveliest curry ever. I make large quantities (surprise!) and freeze it in 250 ml batches. That and a 300g bag of frozen prawns = perfect curry for two. For this one, you need to have already made your green masala paste as well as your balti and garam masala. These quantities make about 1.25 litres, which is enough sauce for 5 curries for 2.

Curry Cascade

Curry is its best when you have lots of different dishes - I usually try to have at least the main curry, two sides, and perfect rice:

And even better, several different curries, several different sides. BUT if you try to do all that at once, you end up with insanely complicated prep arrangements like this:

Kedgeree bake

This assumes you've already made a lovely generous kedgeree, and have just defrosted (or pulled out the fridge) about 600ml of it. You're going to mix it up with cheese and egg, pop it in the oven to bake at 180 degrees, and serve it on baby spinach with a good dollop of yoghurt and some veg on the side. This serves between 2 and 4, depending on how hungry you are. Anything left over will reheat very nicely the next day and it's also tasty cold, so will do beautifully for lunch.

Moroccan stew *aka* Beef tagine

Rich, warming, heavy with lighter spice notes, definitely a winter dish - I discovered this recipe last winter, and over the summer dreamed of when the mists would be chill enough (and I well enough) to cook it again. It's one of those dishes that as soon as you discover it, you want to get people round and feed it to them all the time because everyone must taste this. WARNING: You need to spice-rub the meat the night before (or that morning) and it needs three hours in the oven, (after about 10-20 minutes prep time, depending how fast you chop). So if you're not at home in the afternoons, this is a weekend cook, but it makes masses (serves 8, I reckon). It's also part of the cooking-for-one week 2, so line up your 250ml tupperwares to receive! (It freezes like a dream.)

Wonderful tortilla collation

In this wonderful and magical world, which also happens to exist if you're following my cooking-for-one menu plans, you've already made a magnificent bolognese, and then converted some of that into chilli con carne, and saved a couple of tablespoons of that for tortilla. (You only need 1-2 tablespoons of it per tortilla, I know it sounds like nothing but trust me.) So this is really collation, more than cooking. The quantities here will make 2-3 tortillas. I can usually eat one or one and a half. Will usually eats two and the half I didn't eat.

Perfect Sunday roast for one

White haikus

Cream carpets, huge rooms.

I roam through sunlit stillness.

All this space, for me.

*

The generous kedgeree

I learnt to make this kedgeree from the Bhakti Yoga society at university (Hare Krishna society), who offered the magical combination of cooking lessons, a lunchtime meditation space, and free food. They also taught me the basics of cooking with spices: whole spices, then wet spices, then powdered spices. (I'm heading into story time here, so scroll down if you're just after the recipe.)

Cottage pie

This one's a magical collation - if you're coming from the cooking-for-one meal plan, you already have your magnificent bolognese and a handy portion of mash.

Beautiful soothing ratatouille

Another regrettably photo-free post (for now) - I'll add one with photos, but want to get it up so very dear friends following the lovingly hand-crafted cooking-for-one menu plan have the recipes! I find it hard to believe that in all the ratatouilles I've made, admired, rejoiced over, I haven't actually photographed them, but maybe that's also the space they occupy. Slow, private, healthful, retreating, high-sensitivity retreat space. From an exhaustion of high-octane over-stimulation, ladle out a bowlful of warm red-green ratatouille, all the flavours perfectly and gently combined, and soothe...