Quick meals

We’ve had Jaime’s 30-minute Meals book for a while now, but we have never really attempted any of the recipes for the following reasons:

• Preparing a 3-course meal in 30 minutes sounds ambitious
• I was not convinced that 30 minutes flat was all it took without resorting to short-cuts and tricks (I am an “all-from-scratch-cook”)
• The recipes seem “so-so” (sorry Jaime)
• Some of the ingredients in the recipes can be hard to find or just too expensive (not that they are expensive ingredients by nature, but because they tend to be mostly imported stuff, and Thailand slaps a huge import tax on imported items)

Then, Jaime’s 15-minute meal book came along as a gift. One of the recipes includes making a Chinese dumpling or Masala Curry as ONE of the meals as part of the set. Seriously?  Dumpling or curry in 15-minutes flat?!

Bite me. I make stir-fried noodles from instant noodles in 20 minutes!

I became an even bigger skeptic.

But then...Silver Bullet loves to challenge himself just to prove that it may just be possible, and so decided to give one of the 30 minutes meal recipes a go. He whipped up 3 separate dishes consisting of Mustard Chicken, Gratin Dauphinois and Mixed vegetables:

Jaime Oliver got by within 30 minutes with a few tricks and tips to save time (some of which I’m already doing), but other than that, I am convinced that he just happens to have a little bit of Flash’s superhero power in him.  

Silver Bullet did it all in no less than 45 minutes. End-to-end.

All in all, not a bad attempt to beat the time. It was quick-ish, but in no uncertain terms that the 3 meals could have been done within 30-minutes! 

The good thing was, at least, we had food on the table.  I’ll post up the recipes of the above separately.

Watch this space.