I’m looking forward to spending less time in the kitchen after reading Oliver’s new book Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals.
Here are some numbers that might impress us:
75,000 — the number of Jamie’s latest book sold in its first week.
30 minutes — the amount of time that Jamie promises it will take me to create a dynamite meal with side dishes and desert!
Hours and hours — The amount of time that Jamie promises will now be freed up to spend on our family, friends and more important things than food.
Jamie Oliver has now gone stellar with his latest cookery book, which came only second to J.K. Rowling in the vast amount of books shifted in the first week of publication in December 2010.
Philosophy of food
The attraction of his latest book follows on from the lesser but still highly significant success of The Naked Chef books and many others. The unique selling point of this latest one is that here are carefully calibrated menus designed to be made in a total of 30 minutes, the amount of time it might take to do alternatively inept things like ordering and collecting a take-away or heating up a ready meal.
Behind every new cookbook is a new philosophy of food. I’ve looked at a few cookbooks in this column over the last couple of years and found each chef has their own ideology not just of food but of a whole approach to life. Jamie Oliver has become very well known over the last ten years for his healthy crusade on school lunches and on our home cooking. His projects, to name but a few, have helped train dinner ladies use fresh ingredients, turned disadvantaged young people into accomplished chefs and created 3,000 jobs through his direct sales business. He seems to throw himself and his assets into making life better for people and he seems to care on a personal rather than business level. What is he doing in this new book?
Order
The main concept of Jamie’s 30-minute dinners is that it is possible to make a blindingly good two-course meal with at least two side dishes in 30 minutes. It is a missionary call to get organised in the kitchen, to rearrange my worktops with equipment that I will need and to use the microwave in ways that I wouldn’t previously have thought possible.
No page turning is necessary during cooking. The ingredients list and instructions are laid out on the left hand side of the page and a collage of photos of stages of preparation, cooking and final dishes appears on the right hand side. The instructions within the 30-minute cooking blitz are very precise, from when to boil the kettle for the pasta water to when to take the untossed salad to the table.
Everything must happen in the right order, even though you are changing from one dish to another every few minutes. Jamie is clear but firm about following the instructions. You do not deviate from them because they work that way. They have been carefully tested by his team and by complete strangers (who I hope were also complete idiots) and been found to be fool-proof.
Make me look fantastic
The results look gorgeous and original in the photos. Wonderful mixtures blended together and added to normal pasta to make knock-out evening meals, beautiful mini frangipanes and baby mozzarella salads all make the mouth water. If you can pull this off, Jamie will indeed fulfil his promise of making me look fantastic. I daydream of standing in the kitchen airily waving lemon zest over lightly bubbling pasta pans and chatting contentedly to my dinner guests as we all sip our pre-dinner drinks, or of effortlessly dashing off an awesome two-course post-work supper for Nick and I (who presently rarely gets pudding) in between putting the kids to bed and watching the next episode of Prison Break.
Importance of family
The focus that Oliver puts on the importance of family underpins much of how he writes. He campaigns for more meals around the table to support family and friendships and for freeing more time to read to the kids. He is a healthy breath of fresh air in a culture that is preoccupied with just looking good. So putting his recipes into practice will mean focusing on the benefits of healthy, quickly prepared food, rather than gunning for the compliments when it is eaten.
A great deal is said about food in the Bible and when the focus is on the food alone then we become gluttons. If we are cooking to impress, then the people that we will end up eating with will not benefit us spiritually. Remember that Proverb? ‘Better to eat a dry crust with peace of mind than have a banquet in a house of trouble’ (Proverbs 17.1, Good News Version).
