Jamie's 30 Minute Meals

[BellaOfTheBalls]

If you use this book what's your favourite recipe? And do you mix and match the recipes, especially desserts/side dishes?

I've rely found my stride with it recently and have friends coming for dinner on Friday. Debating the mustard chicken with dauphinoise but not keen on the dessert. I quite fancied a chocolate based dessert but with a heavy, creamy main course though it might be overkill.

I find it a bit irritating how he doesn't give any times for things, so it's hard to mix and match.

He's all "when you have done X, it will be time to do Y" but if you are not making X it's hard to figure out when Y needs doing.

I like the jerk chicken and piri chicken. Iirc there's a pasta putanesca that's pretty good too (it's a tomato pasta with parsley, tuna flakes and cinnamon powder).

I usually mix and match, seldom doing the whole meal. For example, his salads aren't that inspiring so I substitute something better than just leaves with lemon and olive oil. Or that I don't usually do pasta with a garlic bread (that's double carbs to me). I most often skip puddings too as I seldom eat them.

It's pretty easy to just do one or two of the elements. I don't usually use timings in the recipes, but rely on looking at the food.

I didn't like it. There were a couple of realy nice looking things in there but I don't want to follow an entire meal the Jamie O way and I certainly don't want to be washing a food processor for just about every meal.

If you're doing daphinoisse (yum) for main, a really tart lemon tart :) would be good to follow.

scuse typos

I never do the whole meal but it also takes me longer than 30 minutes!

I do tray baked chicken, mustard chicken mainly without the desserts.

I also love the JO will & Kate pie but it's not in the book.

I never do the whole meal either. However, I do:

Jerk chicken and peri peri chicken
Steak Sarnie
Dan dan noddles

Oh, and the sweet potato and normal potato mash dish is now a regular with other meals.

the chocolate brownies are fantastic. dangerous but lovely. the wee custard tarts likewise :)

it's my favourite recipe book by far!

The Kinda Lemon Cheescakes are a piece of piss to do and really yummy - a standard weekday pud in this house. But obv not chocolate based for your purposes! I also do the Portugese custard tarts a fair bit too.

Great ideas on this thread already. I really want to try the cheesecake and the banoffee pie now.

I've made the portugese tarts and they are really lovely indeed.

The chicken pie with French style peas and smash carrots is a winner in our house (although we use quorn and give DS something else as it's heavy on the salt)

we've never done any of the puddings though, and even with a food processor everything we've ever made takes a fair bit longer than 30 minutes!