Jamie Oliver, 5 Ingredients, Quick & Easy Food Recipes 1/8

foodcheats | 2017 | Kitchen Talk, Recipe Books, Recipes | No Comments

Today was the first episode of Jamie Oliver’s new programme, 5 Ingredients, Quick & Easy Food, with recipes that use just 5 ingredients (if you’ve already got a lot of food stocks and extras in your cupboard!).

I didn’t intend to watch it – Jamie Oliver’s food and cooking isn’t for me. It’s always been just a lot of pasta, dripping in oil, with a smattering of pricey ingredients – and all made to serve an army of people. It also seems to be a lot of “Toss these ingredients into a food processor, tip them out into a cooking dish you’ve not got … and wait, then serve”. So, not my thing at all.

That doesn’t fit with food I like, or the quantities I cook for, but I stumbled across it, almost half way through, and watched it anyway.

Although the programme contained four recipes, I missed the first one, arriving close to the end of the second recipe of the night….

Sizzling Seared Scallops

This was a recipe for king scallops, with some fried black pudding, which then sat on some mashed potato/peas/mint. You can keep that, just mash and peas for me from that!

Egg & Mango Flatbreads

This snack recipe was, in short, a couple of flatbreads, topped with some mango chutney, runny soft boiled eggs and some fresh chopped chilli. He also added some blobs of yoghurt and a splash of extra virgin olive oil to the top. I often eat like that, but I’d use shop bought long life naan breads, so that’s my “food cheats” tip if you fancied what he cooked but CBA to go to all the bother for a couple of flatbreads.

Epic Rib Eye Steak

The next dish was half a cow in a frying pan 🙂 Called the Epic Rib Eye Steak, it involved taking half a cow (600 grams to be precise), then cooking the whole thing in one chunk (adding sea salt and black pepper from your existing cupboard of food) … before frying some rosemary, 4 crushed/chopped cloves of garlic, a pile of assorted mushrooms (of any sort you fancy) and opening a jar of cannelloni beans (I didn’t know they did jars, I bet they’re a bit pricey) – he said the jars of cannelloni are cooked in a stock, which you don’t get with the tins. He then tossed in one of the additional ingredients you’re supposed to have in your store cupboard, a splash of red wine vinegar – and brought it all to the boil. The steak was then sliced at the table.

As I’ve never had a steak, I looked up the price of 600 grams of rib eye – and, having picked myself up from the floor, discovered it’s probably about £15-18 for the lump he had. So that might be a quick and easy recipe if you like steak and mushrooms … but it’s not for me.

Almond Pastry Puff

On to the final recipe, which was a tart. Now, I avoid all almond recipes, I don’t like the taste as I associate it with marzipan, which I dislike. Again, he used the food processor and made a runny paste from 100 grams of whole blanched almonds, added one egg (free range, of course), 75 grams of icing sugar and one tablespoon of double cream. He then cut a block of shop bought all butter pastry into half, rolled each half into circles (between two pieces of parchment sprinkled with icing sugar), before spreading the frangipan paste onto the bottom circle, placing the second circle/half on top, using a plate to cut round to make it neat, sprinkling with more icing sugar, poking his finger in the middle (to dent, not to cut into), then scoring arcs round to create a pattern and baking for 20 minutes at 220C in the bottom of the oven (the bottom will give it a crispier base he said – I suspect in my oven it’d be black before the top’s cooked, so it’d need a trial run to test that if you’re relying on this recipe to work first time). Again, not my thing at all… hate almonds 🙂

I’ll watch episode 2 next week as it’s on at a time when there’s little else on the telly!

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