quick eats
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009by the cook
Byland Abbey, 1/2 a mile from Wass, 1 1/2 from Oldstead, 6 1/2 from Helmsley, England
My kitchen view keeps changing. This morning when I was chucking together the curry it was out across a huge grass reserve in Harrogate….tonight as I cook the rice, it is over a stone wall sprouting long grass to a twelfth century Cistercian abbey. Under these circumstances I almost find myself liking cooking! Almost.
Which brings me to today’s topic. People have asked what we cook. You have to understand I am not one of these gourmet mothers, who relishes spending hours over a stove all for the satisfaction of seeing smiles on her children’s faces as she presents multi-course meals every evening. Besides, (and I consider myself very fortunate that this is the case), I have been gifted with children, who will describe macaroni cheese as “fit for a king, Mum” and who devour whatever morsel is set before them, no matter what the colour, texture, taste or even state of aliveness. They are easy to please and just need to be filled. So bearing that in mind, and considering the fact that we want to spend as little time as possible on food preparation at this stage of our journey (but do not want to resort to fast food outlets or rubbish food), and given that we can only fit one pot on the stove at a time and have no oven…..allow me to introduce you to our most frequent meal.
Cook 1kg of pasta in boiling water – remove from heat before it is fully cooked and set aside to continue cooking (yes, a truly barbaric way of cooking pasta, but this conserves gas, you know).
While the pasta is doing its thing, get the kids to chop up a couple of onions, half a dozen carrots, three peppers (one red, one green, one yellow) and as much garlic as you have time or inclination for. Fry these up in some olive oil and and add four cans of chopped tomatoes, a splash of balsamic vinegar, a swish of soy sauce, a squirt of tomato paste (it comes in a tube in Germany and hasn’t run out yet) and some vegetable stock powder. When the pasta is ready, drain off the water (if you’re really lucky there’ll be some bushes nearby enabling you to inconspicuously not fill up your grey water tank) and stir the vegetable mixture through.
Add fresh basil leaves and chopped chives or perhaps parsley (because that’s what we have growing in our wee window garden).
Sometimes we don’t have peppers, so we leave them out. Sometimes we add a jar or two of bockwurst (yes, we buy sausages in a jar) or a stick of chopped up cabanossi. Other times we crumble in some fresh white goat’s cheese.
We usually serve with a jar of sauercraut or a fresh salad on the side. Or we might throw a few handfuls of kale or cabbage or some other healthy green something in with the pasta instead. And we call it dinner (for a dozen people).
Or we throw everything we have in a pot, cook it for half an hour, wrap it in a blanket for the day while we travel and then present it as soup when we arrive at dinnertime.
Similarly quick to prepare is The Frittata. This is simply as many tins of vegetables as you can fit in a pot with a dozen eggs and fresh herbs. Once cooked, it’s edible!
Occasionally on a travelling day we stop at a supermarket and find meat patties and fresh bread rolls. On those days we get the little kids shredding lettuce and buttering rolls, middle-sized ones grating carrot and opening tins of pineapple or beetroot, and the big kids cooking the patties and onions and perhaps eggs. Someone usually comments on how much better these burgers are than the McDonalds ones we see other people eating and someone else provides relative costs and everyone is happy.
When we have a bit more time on our hands (usually on a day we have not travelled anywhere), we might make corn fritters or pancakes or potato salad (lay it on a bed of lettuce and chuck some salami in, and you can convince even the men that it is a complete meal). You see, we eat simply, but no-one goes hungry, and we are still managing to eat mostly healthily. In fact, in England sometimes there is no difference in price between organic food and other food (although, on the other hand, fresh fruit and vegetables are hideously expensive, and while we don’t mind living out of tin cans for a couple of months I would not like to be feeding a family here on a regular basis, not without having my own vegetable garden anyway).
Additionally, one big difference between New Zealand and Europe/UK is that prepared salads here are very cheap. We can get a kilo of potato salad or coleslaw for a pound or a euro, which is near enough to NZ$2.50. With some good German Wurst you have a quick and cheap meal. With a bit more time you can spice up the salads with your own fresh herbs or cheese or whatever. Mostly though, I’d rather go for another walk in the ruins of an abbey for quarter of an hour than chop chives or grate cheese.
Obviously we have only been able to cook like this since getting the motorhomes…when we were staying in guesthouses through Asia, the nearest we got to cooking for ourselves was the very occasional bowl of instant noodles if we had access to a kettle for boiling water – but food was so cheap there we ate out every single day (we did eat more than our fair share of noodles on the Trans-Siberian though). In Laos, we cooked every day, but that was because we had a fire to cook over. There we could eat out for not very many dollars, or we could cook for ourselves for next to no dollars (hence the three weeks of cooking – plus I’m a firebug and the novelty of cooking on a fire did not last long enough to wear off). Here we have the choice of cooking for ourselves or not eating at all. Eating out is simply not an option.
Would you prefer I spent the rest of this post giving little tips for using less gas and wasting little time or would you prefer to see pictures of today’s Abbey?
Generally it’s just a matter of some forward thinking – like cooking double the amount of rice at one time – use half for dinner today and the other half for a rice salad tomorrow. While you’re cooking the oats or rice for breakfast, throw in some eggs to be hardboiled for lunchtime sandwiches. Cook eggs in with potatoes when making potato salad – it’s the kind of thing I’m sure you do all the time at home already. So how about some pictures….in fact, as I was writing this I looked up and saw the sun setting, casting the front face of the abbey in a beautiful hue, so I grabbed the camera, and now you can appreciate it too:
When we had arrived earlier this afternoon, black thunder clouds hung over all, giving it quite a different appearance.
Oh, and look at the garden across the street:
And just up the lane, where we took a wander before dinner, is a noisy-sheep-filled farm. I had always read James Herriot’s children’s picture books and enjoyed them, but thought the illustrations a tad romanticised….well, today we drove through his birthplace, just a few miles from here (down a 25 percent gradient hill, which caravans are forbidden from and which we struggled up valiantly in first gear)…..and all this countryside looks JUST like in his books. Forgive me, Jimmy, for my ignorance. By the way, the same applies to Beatrix Potter’s books – the illustrations are EXACTLY what we are driving through.
Can you see why we don’t mind about eating one-pot dinners all the time if it means you have time to take a walk through this?
Time on the road: need to check Jboy13’s record!
Distance covered: 81km
rayres