Donal Skehan - Donals meals in minutes : no-fuss fast food

For Noah:

Thank you for teaching us the true meaning of meals in minutes!

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company

Recipes and photography copyright Donal Skehan 2018

The right of Donal Skehan to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

eBook ISBN 978 1 473 67425 7

Editorial Director: Nicky Ross
Project Editor: Natalie Bradley
Copy-editor: Clare Sayer
Nutritionist: Kerry Torrens
Designer: Nathan Burton
Photographer: Donal Skehan
Food Stylist: Lizzie Kamenetkzy
Props Stylist: Olivia Wardle
Production Manager: Claudette Morris

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

In January 2016, my wife Sofie and I moved from our home in Ireland after eight years to Los Angeles, California. A glorious step into the unknown, for sure. Despite knowing we would miss family and friends, the hardest part was waving goodbye to our little cottage in the town I grew up in. You see it was pretty close to our hearts

This was the house that was our first home it had the kitchen where we filmed my first cookery show, the office we worked from, where our neighbours were never short of a big hello, where our dog Max came home to for the first time after being rescued, where we first came back to as a married couple, where we grew veggies out the back all summer long, where the most beautiful cliff walks started and finished and where we cooked memorable dinners and enjoyed the best nights in with friends and family, celebrating birthdays, engagements, babies, anniversaries and more. You get the gist emotions were running high!

The key feature of our little home was my well-used kitchen, filled with every piece of equipment you can imagine, from bamboo steamers to regrettable gadgets (like the popcorn maker that got used once) and kitchen cupboards heaving under the weight of spices and jars collected from around the world, a crowded collection of Asian noodles stored for special occasions and Italian pasta shapes to experiment with on lazy weekends. In one short three-day blitz it was all packed into storage and I was ripped of my cookery comfort blanket. Im aware this all might sound slightly overdramatic but this was the epicentre of my cooking world! My approach to food was about to change completely during our search for and eventually in finding our new home on the other side of the world.

With a few bumps along the way and an ever-changing schedule, our year out of house and home took an interesting turn that meant practically living in temporary accommodation in London and Los Angeles while we continued to look for a new house. We became experts at packing and unpacking! Eight different kitchens in twelve months meant an entirely new approach was required to even attempt to keep to a regular cooking routine, not to mention the rest of our lives being put on the back burner. I guess in some ways all this travel could sound quite glamorous but if Im honest it was a fairly uncertain time; all Sofie and I really craved was a space of our own and a place to create routine again.

After a couple of failed starts and dashed good food intentions on the road, I decided enough was enough. When we finally got settled in a new home in Los Angeles, we realised that our year of uncertainty had taught us clearly that in order to eat well, we had to inject the core element of organisation to our cooking. I feel like my broken record mantra in all my previous cookbooks, that preparation is the key to cooking success, had been properly put to the test. So, clever cooking plans became fundamental in order to avoid the pitfalls of long work hours on the move combined with kitchens that more often than not only had a pot and a pan and little else.

Often the most popular recipes in my books and online are the ones that take little time to cook but give hugely satisfying results it was these that I relied on the most. I pulled out my best quick-cook recipes, simplified the processes, stuck them into meal plans and made shopping lists. This might sound like I was morphing into a fifties housewife but this practice is one of the missing elements of modern home cooking. Sure, we all like nice cookbooks and the food we see on Instagram but how do we make it a tangible part of everyday dinners? The answer might not be glamorous but to me its glaringly obvious meal planning and arming yourself with simple-to-make recipes are the true skills of the modern home cook.

First let me say that I will always find time for weekend baking projects and ridiculously lengthy recipes, requiring trips to Asian supermarkets or local farmers markets what food lover wouldnt? However, the pace of modern life requires a different type of cooking and with my new approach to the kitchen firmly in place, out the window went complicated sauces, fussy stews with long lists of ingredients and difficult desserts requiring an army of mixers and baking tins. Instead, with limited kitchen equipment and only a handful of affordable ingredients picked up from the corner shop, my cooking was transformed, focusing on meals that could be prepared in under half an hour from start to finish, suppers that required one frying pan and little else in terms of equipment and recipes that would take minimal prep before being slow-cooked in the oven or on the hob.

Simple dishes like pan-fried chicken rubbed with a herby paste thats been mashed together on a chopping board, served with instant hummus and shop-bought tabbouleh pepped up with lemon juice and fresh herbs; or honey and mustard pork chops with sweet potato mash and wilted mustard greens, proved to me the point, that although easy to make, this speedy approach to cooking (and at times unashamed corner-cutting) didnt limit the flavour that could be achieved.

In December 2017, we welcomed our first child Noah into the world. Just when we thought we had our new cooking plan down, all the joys of new parenthood swooped in to shake things up all over again. Sleepless nights, complete baby chaos and all the joy of first smiles, gurgles and general squidgy baby loveliness were all part of the fun but the proof was in the pudding keeping up with our meal planning paid off! Just before he was born we filled the freezer (or the nuclear baby bunker, as we called it) with home-cooked meals, which we slotted straight in to our regular meal plan, making life (somewhat!) easier.

My aim with this book is to provide you with dishes that dont take hours in the kitchen, recipes that you can tackle straight after work and food that is worth the effort whatever life throws at you. Our life-changing two years have given me an insight into how people cook in a modern busy world where there is no time for complicated cooking methods. The lessons Ive learned werent new, but they were hidden under complicated cooking and overachieving dishes. This collection of recipes hones in on real, honest, fast food with simple ingredients and clever cooking methods, providing the building blocks for really delicious meals in minutes!