Aware that this is the beginning of the academic year, I have chosen today’s recipe for those who have to fend for themselves for the first time, for Rebekah and all her contemporaries.
It can be a daunting prospect, shopping and cooking for yourself if you have always had someone to do it for you. For so many people the answer is fast-food restaurants or picking up a ready meal to zap when you get home.
But I question whether it really is so much easier and quicker shopping for ready meals? Instead of filling your shopping basket with ready-made dishes, try this exercise.
Buy bread and a bag of salad leaves, then add spinach, some mushrooms, two chicken breasts, a mozzarella cheese, a net of oranges, and some flaked almonds. I am assuming you have olive oil, salt, pepper, parsley, herbs and garlic. If not, put those in your basket too.
When you get home, peel and slice the oranges, squeezing in the juice from the end pieces. Flavour with a dash of liqueur and chill them in the fridge. In a dry frying pan, lightly toast the almond flakes, and put to one side, to scatter over the oranges before serving.
With a sharp knife, make a pocket in the chicken. Slice the mozzarella, season it and coat it lightly in chopped herbs before sliding the slices inside the chicken breasts. Brush the meat with olive oil, and grill, fry or bake in the oven for 20 to 25 minutes.
While it is cooking, wipe the mushrooms and fry them in olive oil with a little garlic and finely chopped parsley, pile them on the toasted bread, and serve with the salad.
Do not wash out the frying pan, because when you are ready to serve the chicken, put the contents of the bag of spinach in the pan with a tablespoon of olive, and wilt it over a fairly high heat, stirring it well.
Divide between two dinner plates, and serve the chicken breast on top, sliced across the middle to show the by now meltingly soft mozzarella, which is both stuffing and sauce. The orange and almond salad is your dessert.
This is a simple strategy for everyday cooking, to be varied at will, which anyone can accomplish and even come to enjoy.
But the recipe I want to pass on today is the staple, without which no student’s life is complete. First home, first dinner party, first supper for the in-laws, this will fit the bill for all occasions. In our house it was actually my husband, Tom, who first cooked it.
A wildly adventurous cook, without a cookbook in sight, he made the most marvellous spaghetti sauce one Saturday evening in my university hall of residence. I was fascinated to watch the whole bottle of red wine cook down and evaporate, and even more awestruck when I saw the can of sardines being mashed into the meat sauce as it cooked.
It was fantastic, to this day one of the most delicious and deeply-flavoured dishes of ‘spag bol’ I have tasted. Decades later, I still cook it, more conservatively, it has to be said, because I am a more conservative cook, but we eat it regularly, and I always keep a container or two in the freezer.
The recipe has evolved from those early days, with much influence from meals eaten in Emilia Romagna – the home of ragù to give it its correct name, from the writings of the ever-inspiring Marcella Hazan and from recipes handed down to our friends from their nonnas.
What is most extraordinary is that I have searched my own recipe data base, my many books and articles and I discover that I have never published this recipe. I suppose my thinking in the past has been, “Well, everyone knows how to cook spaghetti Bolognese”.
True, perhaps, but I think you will find this recipe to be to your taste. It takes a while to cook, so is worth making a large batch. I recommend you use a kilo of meat, and then either throw a party or eat some and freeze the rest in 100 or 200 gram containers.