{"id":5,"date":"2012-09-26T08:20:31","date_gmt":"2012-09-26T08:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kennytaylor.co.uk\/?page_id=5"},"modified":"2012-10-06T17:10:02","modified_gmt":"2012-10-06T17:10:02","slug":"about-me","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.myfifteenminutemealsproject.co.uk\/?page_id=5","title":{"rendered":"The 15 Minute Meal Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Ok, so I\u2019m about to embark on a new project.\u00a0 I\u2019m not entirely sure of the sense of this, because life is pretty busy and a new project probably isn\u2019t what I need, but …<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I own a lot of cook books.\u00a0 At a guess I would say I have about 3 or 4 dozen.\u00a0 A few years ago I got to the point where I started to feel guilty about buying new cook books.\u00a0 For a while I stopped.\u00a0 Or nearly stopped.\u00a0 There were a few gifts from people and I think I may have brought the odd one or two myself but I cut down, a lot.\u00a0 I realised that I had probably only cooked a small percentage of the recipes I had.\u00a0 It wouldn\u2019t surprise me if it was as low as five percent, less maybe.\u00a0 Actually I know The Silver Spoon cook book has around 2000 recipes in it so it will be much less than five percent. So I decided that rather than buying new books I would cook more recipes I had never attempted from the books I already owned.\u00a0 I had some success with this.\u00a0 But the vast majority of the recipes I own remain uncooked.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lately I have gotten over this guilt and started buying cook books and cookery magazines with, at least, the same regularity as I used to.\u00a0 I get as much pleasure from reading the books as I do from cooking with them. In fact I probably get as much pleasure from just looking at the pictures.\u00a0 I treat some of these books as coffee table books and just have a quick browse every now and then.\u00a0 I have decided that even if I don\u2019t cook a single recipe from a book, if I\u2019ve enjoyed looking through it then it was worth buying.\u00a0 I know we all, or at least those of us lucky enough to have a bit of spare money at the end of the month, have those things that we are prepared to spend money on, and spend it a little irrationally.\u00a0 We also all have those things we begrudge spending money on.\u00a0 For me, for example, I don\u2019t spend money on cars.\u00a0 I have never brought a new (or even vaguely newish) car.\u00a0 I have only ever brought cars out as an absolute necessity.\u00a0 I have owned four cars in my life time and only bought two of them, I was given the other two.\u00a0 I was given my current car four years ago, and each year that it still goes through its MOT with relative ease (just one \u00a33 part this year) is another year I don\u2019t have to buy (or acquire) a new one.\u00a0 I will however, buy cook books when I don\u2019t need them.\u00a0 I could probably cook a new recipe every night for the next twenty or thirty years and not exhaust my collection.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0While I may have gotten over the guilt of spending more money than is reasonable on cook books, there was something that I wanted to achieve during my book buying moratorium that I didn\u2019t achieve.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t even come close.\u00a0 For a long time I have wanted to cook through an entire cook book.\u00a0 I have wanted to cook every single recipe in a book.\u00a0 Before now I haven\u2019t even really got down to the business of seriously choosing which book I will cook my way through.\u00a0 Some books are so big and have so many recipes, some of which some would be very expensive, that the task is very daunting.\u00a0 The first time I seriously considered doing this was when Jamie Oliver brought out his 30 Minute Meals.\u00a0 Now I should add that 30 Minute Meals came out whilst I was on my book buying moratorium.\u00a0 I did not buy this book.\u00a0 It was bought for me (as it was for many people) as a Christmas present. \u00a0This book, is probably uniquely placed to be easier than most to cook your way through.\u00a0 Each \u201crecipe\u201d is an entire meal.\u00a0 You don\u2019t have to look through your chosen book and find the main part of the dish (the meat for example) and then find the bits that supplement the main bit (the vegetables say) from elsewhere in the book.\u00a0 Most books have a section of starters and puddings as well.\u00a0 So you need to pair (or trio) dishes together that work.\u00a0 Now at the beginning this will be easy for any vaguely competent cook.\u00a0 But as you work your way through the book, it will get harder.\u00a0 You may run out of some types dishes and then what do you? Do you repeat a vegetable dish you have already cooked, or are you free to dip into another book or make something up?\u00a0 And also what happens if a recipe for a main dish suggests a side dish to go with it, but the book itself doesn\u2019t contain the recipe, where do you go?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Ok so I know I\u2019m being really pedantic and it would be possible, more than possible, easy in fact to cook your way through any number of books.\u00a0 And there is really nothing to say that you can\u2019t add in a recipe from someone else, after all the purpose of the exercise is just to cook every recipe in a book and not to only cook from that book.\u00a0 The point I\u2019m making, in a wafflely way, is that 30 Minute Meals made it really easy, all the decision were made.\u00a0 All you had to do was buy the ingredients, get a few buddies round, and cook.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0So why didn\u2019t I do it? There were a number of reasons.\u00a0 Even though the nature of the book gave the project a relative ease, it is still quite a daunting task.\u00a0 All the meals are really nice and quite big meals.\u00a0 They are not really meals that you would cook on a Tuesday night as a quick meal for the family before you all go about the other tasks that you do on a Tuesday night.\u00a0 They are meals that you may be able to cook quite fast (with a bit of practice I would argue), but they were meals then to be enjoyed.\u00a0 They have something of an occasion about them.\u00a0 They\u2019re not super special occasion meals, but like I\u2019ve said they\u2019re not a quick Tuesday night with the family kind of affair either.\u00a0 I would be happy to present any of my friends and family with any of the 30 Minute Meals and have confidence that they were being given something a little special.\u00a0 In its self this isn\u2019t a reason to not cook through the book as a project but it makes it a more daunting, at least longer, task.\u00a0 There are 50 recipes in 30 Minute Meals.\u00a0 At the rate of 1 a week that\u2019s a year long project.\u00a0 With how my life is, I doubt that I could realistically achieve more than 1 meal like that a week on average.\u00a0 Also, although not a massive issue, some of the recipes do work out to be relatively expensive.\u00a0 So, while this may not stop you cooking through the book as a project, it does make doing several recipes a week more problematic.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0So I think that 15 Minute Meals is a good candidate for the reasons I never actually took on the project of cooking through 30 Minute Meals.\u00a0 I am confident that these would still be meals I would be happy put in front of my friends but at the very least I should be able to cook through the book relatively quickly.\u00a0 There are other reasons that I am particularly keen to do this project with this particular book.\u00a0 I\u2019m a pretty ok cook.\u00a0 But I am best at cooking for other people and best when there is at least a small sense of occasion to it.\u00a0 By this I mean a Sunday lunch type affair rather than a quick meal on a Tuesday night before I go out for the evening.\u00a0 I really am not that good at cooking quick meals.\u00a0 I live on my own, and I have done for some time.\u00a0 This has made me a worse, or at least a more lazy, cook than I used to be.\u00a0 I only really make an effort when I cook for other people and of late it\u2019s got pretty bad.\u00a0 If no one\u2019s coming round for dinner then the food I\u2019ve been cooking, is barely cooking at all, and sometimes it definitely isn\u2019t cooking.\u00a0 It\u2019s been straying into the something on toast (or just toast, or just bread and a bit olive oil and vinegar) territory for too long now.\u00a0 So the appeal of this book is that it is aimed at helping you do those quicker, but good, meals.\u00a0 If I\u2019m honest I don\u2019t have all that many of those in my repertoire.\u00a0 So I hope that this will make me a better cook in that kind of way.\u00a0 The very act of doing this project will also get me to cook more than I have been doing lately as well.\u00a0 Also I\u2019ve got a bit slack at having people over for dinner lately and so doing this should get me back to cooking for people more often again.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

————————————————————————————————————————————————- Ok, so I\u2019m about to embark on a new project.\u00a0 I\u2019m not entirely sure of the sense of this, because life is pretty busy and a new project probably isn\u2019t what I need, but … I own a lot of cook books.\u00a0 At a guess I would say I have about 3 or 4 … Continue reading »<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-5","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myfifteenminutemealsproject.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myfifteenminutemealsproject.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myfifteenminutemealsproject.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myfifteenminutemealsproject.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myfifteenminutemealsproject.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.myfifteenminutemealsproject.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115,"href":"https:\/\/www.myfifteenminutemealsproject.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5\/revisions\/115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myfifteenminutemealsproject.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}