50 quick meals

Jamie Oliver's Meals in Minutes
A Revolutionary Approach to
Cooking Good Food Fast
By Jamie Oliver
Publisher: Hyperion

I'M too busy. It's too expensive. I don't know how.

According to Jamie, these are the three excuses that he gets when he asks people why they don't cook at home.

I am guilty of the first one. No matter what, they are excuses. If we can’t cook on a daily basis, there is always the option of cooking ahead of time during the weekends.

In Meals in Minutes, Jamie has 50 meals for you to put on the table: meaty ones, vegetarian meals, quick pastas and desserts, curries and others that you may have not thought possible in a short amount of time.

What I like about this book is that the recipes in each meal are all written on one page. That means no page-turning at all. Most meals in this book have a starter, main course and dessert.

If you are used to reading a recipe the usual way, then you need to get used to reading the recipe a bit differently here.

Jamie has written the recipes in a unique way that various methods of the dishes are interwoven.

You will start preparing one dish, put it in the oven, work on something else and go back to the oven. This way no time is wasted preparing the dishes.

But if you decide to choose one or mix and match recipes from different meals, you may have a problem.

It will be difficult to follow the recipe as the method of the recipe is interwoven with methods of the other recipes.

The photography in this book is simply gorgeous, making the dishes mouth-watering. The photos alone will make you want to try out the recipes.

Jamie also shares basic tips that will make a huge difference when preparing the meals.

For instance, don't let the other rooms invade your cooking space. Put away the keys, books from the kitchen counter. Sort out your kitchen equipments before you start, just to name a few.

He also lists down the equipment that you will need to make the meals in 20 – 30 minutes. According to him, without some of them, you won't be able to work fast enough.

You may already have most of them in your kitchen and I suppose you can work around the rest for a start. The big ones you need are, mainly, the food processor, microwave oven and a blender.

Meals in Minutes is the same book found on Jamie's website. The British version is called 30-Minute Meals, while this book was meant for the US market.

Looking at each meal and the preparation involved, I think it is going to take me more than a few minutes to make each meal. But, I guess, practice makes perfect.

Hopefully, I can stop the excuses and start cooking on a daily basis.