Jamie's 30 minute meals

So, there has been a lot of hype about this book recently and I thought it was time to give it a go.  The book was half price in Waterstones and I just couldn't resist!

I've heard complaints that the meals aren't achievable in 30 minutes so I wasn't expecting to do it that quickly.  In fact the episode I watched the other night mentioned that 30 minutes is a target goal for when you have practised the recipe a little.

The meal we chose to try first was Cheat's Pizza. The pizza is accompanied by 3 salads and a dessert of squashed cherries and vanilla mascarpone cream. All sounds very nice, right?

Ingredients:  Lots of them (see below)

As you can see all the equipment is ready to go...I have been paying attention!  Although we did have a couple of 'argh, where is the xxxx?' moments

The first step was the tomato salad.  Crushed and chopped tomatoes in a bowl with some chilli olive oil, balsamic, garlic and basil.  Very quick and easy:

Next step, Pizza!  Dough ingredients went in a food processor (I LOVE my food processor!)  Dough gets rolled and put into a pre-heated frying pan.  Job done... for now.

Pizza topping is made using the liquidiser and spread on the base you have cooking in the pan.  You add small pieces of mozzarella, parmesan and your toppings then transfer the pan to the grill to cook from the top - The base was already looking all crispy  and tasty by this point.

Mozzarella Salad was up next.  The remainder of the mozzarella with pesto spooned on, a bit of pepper, more basil leaves and a drizzle of olive oil.

The third salad, and the easiest to make is the rocket salad.  Rocket, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper.  In a bowl, done!  I won't bore you with a picture as it just looks like you would expect a bowl of rocket to look like!

Then it was back to the pizza to get it out of the oven and on to a board for serving:

Last but not least comes the dessert.  Mascarpone, milk and icing sugar are mixed, adding clementine zest (we couldn't find clementines so used mandarins instead).  Put into little bowls and added to with chilled, crushed cherries and served with some biscuits.  You are supposed to use fancy biscuits but I forgot them when we were out shopping for ingredients so we ended up with some Fox's butter biscuits instead.

So this is the completed meal:

So, how long did it take us?  Bearing in mind there were 2 of us doing this together so that helped.  The 5 dishes took us a grand total of 34 minutes.  I was rather pleased with that!

I enjoyed all 5 of the dishes.  My hubby didn't like the tomatoes, but he doesn't like tomato anyway.  He did however like the dressing and mopped some of that up.

The mascarpone dessert was amazing.  Kind of like a de-constructed cheesecake and one I will definitely make again.  The pizza was so quick and tasty.  We will make this again in the future instead of buying an oven ready one as this was quicker and tastier.

We are both now looking forward to trying out some of the other recipes in the book and hoping the others will be as good!