When TV chefs taste something they have just made, they are never disappointed, are they? Hmm, could have done with five more minutes in the oven, a bit less salt, not one of my best, frankly … No, everything is always bloody marvellous. For Jamie, especially. He’ll close his eyes, look up, shake his head, barely able to comprehend what he has just created. “That, my friends, is a mighty, mighty beautiful pasta,” he says of his spicy ’nduja vongole. His creation, his work; it’s like me saying: “That, my friends, is a mighty, mighty beautiful opening paragraph.”
He’s doing his stripped-back cooking; restricted to only five ingredients. It has completely changed his life and it is going to take the stress out of ours, too, he says. He is doing it to Back to Life by Soul II Soul – that is how stress-free it is, it is like the summer of ’89, before you had kids, remember?
Actually, he is using six ingredients, because everything gets a generous sprinkling of Jamie-isms. “Whack it in a tray … smash it out … everything here is like best mates … crispy and gnarly … gorgeous oils just kind of cooking out of there... it’s fast, it’s furious, it smells incredible… happy days.”
Dishes come with a snappy strapline: “minimum effort, maximum flavour, gorgeous grub for those you love” and “a phenomenally fast no-frills feast for the people you love best”. Don’t forget the love – that could almost be another ingredient, a store-cupboard staple, seven and counting.
What? You want metaphors, too, to make the possibly unfamiliar more familiar? Coming up … a comforting sausage bake is “a bit like a day in wearing your jim-jams or that frumpy old jumper that rarely sees the street or your friends”. The ’nduja vongole is “a bit like spaghetti vongole’s eccentric uncle”.
OK, I’m sold, Jamie, I’m going to get involved, cook along, stress-free. Not the vongole – I already do that. Without ’nduja, granted, I do ’nduja vongole’s boring nephew, but it’s one of my signatures and I’m sticking with it. Totally with Jamie on (the excellence) of parsley stalks, by the way; I once spent an entire morning in a posh restaurant destalking parsley and, in doing so, making it a less interesting ingredient.
I’m not going to do the sausage bake, either; that is more of a winter thing and I worry I may not have enough love for it. Flaky pastry pesto chicken? Nah, looks like chicken in a croissant. No, the sun is shining, so I am going to do watermelon granita (“basically like edible snow”): the kids go nuts for it, apparently, and I have got a couple of them with me – kids, that is – so we’ll do it together.
Jamie has two of his with him, sparkly clean, just out of the bath in their jim-jams, and ever so slightly posher than he is. Guess what? They absolutely love his granita and give it as many thumbs up as there are thumbs.
Right, our turn. On goes Soul II Soul: “However do you want me, however do you need me” … We have got our watermelon and limes from John the greengrocer and mint from the garden. All we need now is our stem ginger in syrup – where do we keep that? Oh, we don’t.
Never mind, you can get it in all supermarkets, says Jamie, and we know someone who, at this very moment, is in one of them – a supermarket Jamie used to be best friends with, as it happens. Oh, but Sainsbury’s in Willesden doesn’t have any stem ginger either (they might want to get some in – there is almost certainly going to be a spike in demand). A special trip to Waitrose is called for – what happened to quick and easy? Anyway, we enjoy cutting up the watermelon, although it is not entirely stress-free. The kitchen ends up like a murder scene, CSI Dollis Hill. Then it goes into the freezer – four hours, Jamie says, it will be ready just in time for tea …
Four hours later it is not completely frozen. Probably because Jamie has a better freezer. We buzz it up anyway, and it’s more edible sleet than snow. But the kids go nuts for it; it is… [looks up, closes eyes, shakes head] a mighty, mighty beautiful watermelon slush. And next time it might even be snowy, quick, easy and stress-free. Happy days.