Food 11: Barely-cooking cooking

for when you just don't have the strength

Good morning! Not everything has to be an effort. Here are a few very easy, basic-but-delicious things to make when you’re starving but the idea of cooking makes you want to lie down.

With apologies to Ramón Casas (Decadent Young Woman After the Dance, 1899)

Note: these are not healthy suggestions for balanced family meals. They’re for knackered adults who are hungry and keen to get back to bingeing Ripley.

All the eggs, obviously. See also Ed Smith’s fantastic egg book. There’s nothing in it I don’t want to make.

Cheese, bread/crackers, good butter, olives. Green salad as a separate course, either before or after. Quite chic with either a booze-free aperitif of divine Botivo or a glass of very cold white wine.

Pitta bread with emergency humus. Put one tin of whatever white beans you have in a food processor with its about a quarter of its liquid (unorthodox, but we’re cutting corners). Keep the rest of the liquid. Add a clove of garlic, the juice of half a lemon or more to taste, 1 teaspoon of ground cumin, some salt and 3-4 tablespoons of tahini - start with 3, you can always add more later. Whizz until it’s the consistency you like, i.e. anywhere from textured and claggy to very airy and smooth. If it’s too thick after a decent period of whizzing, add more liquid from the tin. If you chucked it absentmindedly, put a glass of water in the freezer for 10 minutes and use that in small increments. Note that it will look like wallpaper paste initially - have faith and keep whizzing before adding extra liquid. It suddenly takes flight.

Tortillas from a packet, grated cheddar, sliced jalapeños from a jar. Fill half the tortilla, fold it over, put it in a frying pan with a tiny dot of oil on a medium heat until golden and crispy, flip and cook until that side is golden too, eat.

Heinz Cream of Tomato with cheese on toast on the side.

Packet ramen with a halved jammy egg (in boiling water for 7 minutes exactly), thinly sliced spring onions, a dash of soy sauce and a drop of sesame oil. I really like this spicy one.

Rice with butter and soy. Cook rice. Add generous amount of butter. Add soy sauce to taste. Stir. That’s it. You could quickly fry-steam some greens with minced garlic and ginger to have on the side (start off frying, then add a lid and a tablespoon of water. You could add a bit of oyster sauce if you had it).

A Boursin omelette. Make an omelette and adorn it with blobs of Boursin, which will melt even if you don’t fold it over. I like this with sliced salted tomatoes on the side.

Steamed (6 minutes) frozen dim sum dumplings with a dipping sauce made of equal amounts of soy sauce and rice vinegar, sesame oil to taste and a squirt of whatever chilli sauce you have to hand. Luxe dumplings here. Note that these people also do really delicious frozen venison puffs.

Aglio e olio, aka instant pasta. Cook spaghetti. Fry one or two sliced garlic cloves in two big slugs of olive oil until just golden, a matter of moments. Toss in dried chilli flakes, stir about for five seconds, add the cooked spaghetti and toss. Parsley if you have it, but never mind if not. (I have stopped draining most pasta in a colander - I fish it out with tongs instead. The starch in the water that clings to it helps sauces along).

Meat chips, method below, which is my kids’ disgusting name for something really moreish. It tastes of MeatLiquor circa 2011 - a compliment. This is adapted from a recipe in John Gregory Smith’s book Fast Feasts. I strongly recommend following him on Instagram for more.

Oven fries in the oven. A little oil in the pan, medium-high heat. When hot add minced beef plus 2 quite heaped teaspoonfuls of ground cumin and 1 of ground allspice (very underrated, allspice). Squirt in 3 tablespoons of tomato paste. Stir it all about until the mince is partly crispy, then add half a glass of water (for about 500g mince) and let it mostly evaporate so that you’re left with something bolognaise-textured, i.e. sauce-like but not runny. When fries are five minutes away, open oven and dollop this over them, along with any grated cheese you might have. You can tart this up with sliced chillies, lime juice, coriander leaves, quick-pickled red onions (very thinly sliced, put in a bowl with salt and enough lemon juice to wet but not drown, stir, leave for about 15 minutes), etc etc. Note: you can download John’s (John Gregory’s?) latest mini-cookbook - 10 very easy dinners - for the sum of £1 from here.

Sushi rice with spiced mayo, sesame seeds and tinned tuna. This doesn’t sound much cop but it is so delicious. I add chopped cucumber or sliced avocado on top. Even mentioning it here makes me want to go and make it. I feel like I’ve linked to it at least twice before but never mind - people need to know it if they don’t already.

Roast or grilled vegetables with romesco sauce, using peppers from a jar. Or on top of sautéed greens. Or as a dip. I also like it with roast asparagus but later on in the asparagus season, when they’re older and bigger. (For now - I bought the first local ones yesterday - this easy Hollandaise is perfect).

Toasted sourdough topped with ricotta, freshly podded young broad beans and your best olive oil. Although ‘your best olive oil’ is a piece in itself - sometimes very expensive olive oil just makes me want to cough.

Crispy gnocchi with shop-bought sauce. Don’t boil the gnocchi. Get your biggest frying pan, add some olive oil and fry them until parts of them go golden and crispy. Add the sauce, heat through, eat.

Julia Turshen’s chickpea curry, using tins, which is number 6 on this list and could not be easier or lower effort. All the other suggestions on that list are great too.

Extremely adaptable chicken traybake: Get some potatoes. Peel or don’t peel and cut into walnut-sized pieces. Or use baby potatoes, in which case only cut the rogue teenage ones so that everything is roughly the same size..

Get some chicken thighs, skin-on, bone in. Rub the chicken thighs in a jar of something you like. For me that’s rose harissa, but it could be any kind of ready-made paste or marinade, from tandoori to peri-peri to jerk paste. Rub this into the thighs.

Toss your potatoes in a bit of olive oil and salt and put the chicken thighs on top. Bake at 180C until the thighs are done, about 40 minutes. The chickeny juices will have seeped into the potatoes. It’s a nice dinner and it takes under 5 minutes to put together, after which you can go off and do something else. I have this with a side of yogurt into which I’ve grated half a clove of garlic. No paste? Just do olive oil and chopped woody herbs (rosemary is lovely) and squeeze on lemon at the table.

Loads of these bean recipes from The Bold Bean Co., all of which involve nothing much more arduous than opening a jar or tin of beans. Thanks to Liz in the comments for reminding me!

In case you missed it: this is an extraordinary long read by Lauren Collins in The New Yorker. It’s about ‘the hottest restaurant in France’ being an all-you-can-eat buffet in a leisure complex in Narbonne. It has a seven-storey lobster tower, caviar (also tripe) and nine kinds of foie gras (non merci). The cheese platter involves 111 cheeses. I’m giving you the absolutely merest gist - the lavishness and gigantism are, well, off the scale. All of the dishes are canonically French - the Journal du Dimanche called it ‘a sort of conservatory of the nation’s gastronomy.’ Michel Guérard, who has three Michelin stars, called it ‘the greatest culinary theatre in the world’. It costs around 60 euros a head. I was convinced this piece was an April Fool, but no. I’m torn between feeling nauseated and wanting to book a table.

These fortnightly food posts are free. For almost everything else you’ll need a paid subscription. Thank you very much for reading and have a lovely Sunday!