Kelly - Quick And Easy Meatless Meals

The Lazy Cook

Book 1: Quick And Easy Meatless Meals

Susie Kelly

blackbird

For Rob

Contents

A Note From The Publisher: To quickly find any recipe, go to the Table Of Contents on your eReader and click on the little arrows pointing to the R in the relevant section. The arrow will then point down, opening up the list of all the individual recipes which you can then click on.

Introduction

Well hello, and welcome! Im so pleased you could make it. Do sit down and make yourself comfortable tip the cat off the chair.

I apologise for the state of the kitchen; Im a messy cook.

I hope I can show you that we eat very well despite not eating meat, and you wont find any nut roasts or soya substitutes here. Just because we live in France, we dont eat exclusively French food. French country cooking is generally meat-heavy cassoulet, coq au vin, boeuf bourguignon . We like food with strong powerful flavours like Parmesan cheese, garlic, truffles (not the chocolate ones), capers, and spices, so Mediterranean and Indian cuisines are favourites. When I have spare time Ill happily spend all day in the kitchen creating multi-course meals, but those occasions are rare, and more often than not I look at the clock and think, oops, nearly lunch time, what shall we have? With my butterfly mind one minute trotting off to prune the lavender, the next deciding to do the ironing, write a few chapters of a new book, phone a friend or play with the dogs, when mealtimes arrive I like recipes I can put together with a minimum fuss no spun-sugar domes with pink smoke and silver bubbles floating around in it, and no smears, blobs, jus or foams (as somebody remarked once, it looks as if chef has spat on the plate.)

This collection is the accumulation of decades of scribbled notes on backs of envelopes, tatty exercise books, recipes given to me by friends and vague recollections. I am always losing track of things, so I thought it was time to put everything in one place where I could find it quickly instead of hunting through drawers and cupboards. This is my personal collection of fail-safe quick and easy recipes for friends and family, which you are welcome to share. None of them require very much time or skill to prepare, and they make no claim to be haute cuisine, just wholesome recipes that anybody can follow.

There are numerous variations of most of them. I enjoy watching foodies and chefs giving a new twist to old favourites, and I enjoy trying them, but sometimes I think they go too far and the originals lose the identity that I loved in the first place. For me theres a great deal of nostalgia connected to the food we eat.

I have never turned a vegetable, nor am I ever likely to. For a start, it seems so wasteful, and secondly because I probably could not if my life depended upon it. I am not cut out to do fiddly food. Im far too impatient to whittle carrots into scale replicas of the Orient Express orto peel and stuff grapes. I am hopelessly ham-fisted and fiddly doesnt suit my modus operandi. Neither do recipes with multiple columns of ingredients covering two pages of instructions. When we want to eat high-end food, beautifully presented, we go out and let the professionals do the hard work.

When Im really short of time, fast food in our house is beans on toast, cheese on toast, Welsh rarebit or fried egg sandwiches. If you want to invite me for a meal, feed me a baked potato, with crispy almost-burned skin, served with a knob of butter or covered with melted cheese and Ill be ecstatic.

Except where specifically mentioned, the quantities given are not written in stone and do not require atomic precision. A little more or less of most ingredients wont make an enormous difference to the finished result. If theres an ingredient you dont like, then unless it is essential leave it out, or substitute something else. Im one of those people who believe that fats are good for you, so Im generous with them. You can always reduce the quantities to suit yourself.

I have indicated whether each recipe is vegan and/or gluten-free for the benefit of those who arent certain, and have flagged up a raw egg warning. Its quite disheartening when you think you have carefully prepared a meal for somebody with an intolerance or allergy, and discover at the last minute that youve accidentally included an ingredient that they cant eat. Of course, you can always substitute margarine or oil for butter in most recipes, although it will alter the taste somewhat.

To simplify measurements, Ive converted Imperial and metric measurements wherever possible into cups and spoons. I find a set of stainless steel measuring cups and spoons, which are as cheap as chips and take up almost no space, more practical and quicker than weighing everything on kitchen scales which Ive found to my cost in the past to be not always reliable.

Flours differ; egg sizes differ; oven temperatures differ; spoon sizes differ. What is under-seasoned for one person is too salty for another. If something doesnt turn out quite the way you hope, its always worth having another go and tweaking the recipe to see if theres a solution.

How I Began Cooking

Being brought up and living for many years in Kenya, I was spoiled by a wonderful African cook who could give any Michelin-starred chef a run for his money. He cooked traditional British food from full English breakfasts to Sunday roasts including the lightest, fluffiest, puffiest Yorkshire puddings as well as superb, authentic Italian and Indian dishes. He was truly passionate about cooking and sang, whistled and hummed happily to himself in the kitchen where I was completely surplus to requirements. Moving to live in England was a shock, coming home from work to not only do my own housework, but also cook for a family of four. For a while we ate pot noodles reconstituted with boiling water, tinned pies, frozen meals cooked in the microwave, and powdered desserts whisked into milk. I had no idea how to prepare food from scratch.

I started thinking about nutrition seriously the day I saw tomatoes for sale that were advertised as Grown for flavour. Well, what a novel idea! And I began looking at the additives in the processed products we were eating, and wondering what they did, and why they were necessary. Particularly flavour enhancers. Why did manufacturers need to put flavour into the food? Didnt it have any in the first place? There were E numbers and polysyllabic unpronounceable ingredients. I visualised them coming out vats and wondered if I would want to eat them if they were served on a spoon. The cost of processed food and their long lists of mysterious contents was alarming, so I thought Id better start learning an alternative way to feed the family.

Watching formidable Fanny Cradock, amiable Galloping Gourmet Graham Kerr and ebullient Keith Floyd displaying their skills on the television, inspired me. It looked so easy! I bought a simple cookery book and began experimenting with chops, sausages, home-made chips, and soon, somewhat to my surprise, managed to produce a perfectly roasted chicken with roast potatoes, Vichy carrots and Brussels sprouts the first complete meal I had ever made from scratch. I realised that with time and guidance, cooking wasnt rocket science.

Always one to gallop before I could trot, I tried a fully boned, stuffed and reconstructed chicken. After an hour of gory wrestling, a kitchen surface spattered with fleshy globs, and two sliced fingertips, the result looked like an albino frog that had been dropped from a great height and landed on a rock.