Slater - Real fast food: 350 recipes ready-to-eat in 30 minutes

PENGUIN BOOKS

Real Fast Food

Nigel Slater is the author of a collection of bestselling books including the classics Real Fast Food and Real Cooking, and the award-winning Appetite. He has written a much-loved column for the Observer for over a decade. His autobiography Toast: the story of a boys hunger, won six major awards, including the British Book Awards Biography of the Year. His latest book is The Kitchen Diaries.

Also by Nigel Slater:

Real Fast Food
Real Fast Puddings
The 30-Minute Cook
Real Cooking
Nigel Slaters Real Food
Appetite
Thirst
Toast: the story of a boys hunger
The Kitchen Diaries

NIGEL SLATER

350 recipes ready-to-eat
in 30 minutes

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Michael Joseph 1992
Published in Penguin Books 1993
This re-set edition published 2006

Copyright Nigel Slater, 1992
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

EISBN: 9780141904450

For Michael

This is a book of ideas for everyday eating. A collection of recipes for simple food that is easy to prepare and quick to cook. It is written for anyone who enjoys good food eaten informally, and should particularly appeal to those who lack the time to cook it. Most of the recipes are based on fresh food with as little as possible done to it. There are no complicated procedures, no dithering around with affected arrangements on oversized plates, and no effete garnishes. It is a set of straightforward recipes for fast food with bold flavours, cooked in minutes and served without pretension.

There are three types of fast food I think worth eating. Firstly, there is street food, such as the crisp Indian samosas, sold hot from their pans of crackling fat, or the robust and smoky Greek souvlakia, grilled over charcoal and wrapped in comforting pitta. Then there is take-away food, some of which can be very fine indeed. What can beat a crisp-based and deeply savoury Italian pizza or a fillet of fresh fish fried in light, rustling batter with home-made chips?

Thirdly, there is fast home cooking, the sort of food you throw together when you come home tired and hungry. At its worst this can come from the 101 ways with condensed mushroom soup school of cookery, or be a bland ready-made supper chucked in the microwave, but at its best fast home cooking can mean fresh food, bright flavours and relaxed eating. That is what this book is all about.

The recipes are easy and within the grasp of all but the most ham-fisted of cooks. While most of the recipes included here are fast, I make no claims for five-minute feasts or ten-minute dinner parties. I think that good food can be measured only by its flavour and freshness, not by a stop-watch. That said, most of the recipes in this book can be completed in under 30 minutes, which is, after all, the time it takes a supermarket cook-chill supper to heat through. Many of them take just half that time. The ingredient lists are short and most of the recipes require only one or two fresh ingredients that can be bought on the way home. I like the idea of buying one ingredient that looks particularly good, then mixing it with some storecupboard staples and seeing what happens.

The ideas behind the recipes are a hotchpotch of the original, the borrowed and the stolen. It would be an arrogant writer indeed who suggested that all his recipes were his own. Many of the recipes here are classics whose origins are obscure, if not totally lost, to all but the most thorough of food historians. Some of the recipes are mine (whatever that may mean), some have been adapted from others, and a few have been previously published in another form in marie claire.

There are a few indulgences. I stand accused of using some things to excess: extra virgin olive oil, Parmesan cheese, garlic, basil, olives and bitter salad leaves. I will accept criticism too for my overuse of berries, fruits and soft fresh cheeses, and I might as well admit addictions to anchovies and to dark, bitter and absurdly expensive chocolate, though thankfully not together.

If there is one thing I hope will emerge from this book it is that fast food is not just about pizzas, hamburgers and noddles, good though they can be (and they are all here); fast food can also mean a slice of truly ripe Charentais melon eaten with a hunk of salty Feta cheese and a few black olives, or perhaps a juicy white peach sliced and dropped into a glass of chilled deep yellow wine.

Think of a piece of chicken brushed with aromatic herbs and lemon, then char-grilled and stuffed into a crisp roll slathered with garlic mayonnaise, or a comforting bowl of porridge with blackberries and heather honey. Imagine shredded peppery basil leaves stirred into buttery mashed potato, a slice of pork pan-fried with fennel or a plate of purple-yellow muscat grapes and ripe figs. All this is fast food.

Whether it is Mrs Davids immortal omelette and a glass of wine, a hot bacon sandwich when you return from the pub on a cold night, or a plate of pasta with slices of soft white goats cheese and leaves of pungent fresh thyme, there is nothing like real, fast, food.

Most of the recipes are enough for two. I know this is slightly unusual, but I am certain that more people eat this sort of food in twos than in fours. Although four is a popular number for dinner parties, it is less practical for everyday eating, with different members of the same family eating at different times. But it is easy to double the recipes in order to serve four. Those traditional complicators of recipe multiplication, such as gelatine and cornflour, have no place in this book. I also believe that many of us eat alone, particularly the young and elderly, and it is easier to halve a recipe successfully than to quarter it.

The dietary balance of the recipes in this book is based on the World Health Organisations recommendations; the bulk involve fresh vegetables and fruit, and most main dishes are accompanied by a salad (the WHO suggests we eat 400g [14oz] of these per day). A good number of the recipes include starches in the form of bread, pasta and potatoes. (The WHO recommendation is that they should provide 5070 per cent of our energy.) The remaining recipes using red meat, cream and high-fat cheeses should provide no more than 30 per cent of your daily food intake. Over two-thirds of the recipes are suitable for non-meat eaters, and the majority of them are distinctly frugal in meat quantities.