This is our 8th cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. We decided this week to move our “Jamie meal” to Saturday nights which gives me a lot more time to put the post up on Sunday. The goal for this particular meal was to CARB-LOAD in preparation for today’s long run. With that in mind, we picked out “Pregnant Jools’s Pasta, Crunchy Chicory & Watercress Salad, and Little Frangipane Tarts.” We saw the corresponding TV episode a couple months ago, so we had a good idea of the preparations.
Substitutions: We couldn’t find red chicory in any of the shops – it must not be in season – but we did find a bag of mixed salad at the farmers’ market that had red chicory in it. We only made a half-recipe of the dessert. It was supposed to use “golden” caster sugar, but we couldn’t be arsed buying it specially so we just used plain. The Snook ground his own almonds (just because he objected to the price of pre-ground at the grocery store) and we used cherry preserves instead of raspberry jam. Everything else was as-written.
Quick verdict: Yum! This is the quickest and easiest recipe in the whole book, I bet. The frangipane tarts are really impressive considering how quick they are to make. The sausage pasta is just good, filling comfort food that would please any picky-eater. The Snook found the simple salad a little too bitter for his taste, but I thought it was a nice contrast to the sweetness of the pasta. We both rated it 9/10. Our elapsed time was 35:23, but the last 5 minutes were just standing around waiting for the tarts to finish baking. If we’d have been quicker getting them in the oven, we’d have easily made the 30 minute mark. This is a great recipe for any beginners who aren’t super confident in their cooking ability!
