The countdown to dinner is one time when I inevitably try to pack in far too many tasks as the day gets into the home stretch. This furious cramming to get things done often means that my lofty plans for dinner end up resembling gulag grub, simply because time gets allotted to work instead of supper.
Recipes get pared back as each precious minute ticks by and it’s at this precise time that I find myself daydreaming about ways to buy myself some extra time. Preferably in front of a fire (and so we’re back to daydreaming). For me anyway, this means less time spent on fiddly, multi-stage recipes and more devoted to sniffing out simple dishes that avoid messy prep and help keep washing up to a minimum – especially when there are water shortages (my new favourite excuse for not doing the wash-up). After all, no-one likes to feel like an indentured slave on a treadmill of chopping, peeling and cleaning up.
My advice? Make your oven your new BFF. Because when the chill of winter is biting, there’s nothing nicer than sitting down to food that feels old-school in all the right ways: simple to make and satisfying and flavoursome to eat. And with literally hundreds of cookbooks extolling their virtues, oven bakes are the culinary pot of gold when it comes to saving time and cutting out mess, while still ramping things up in the taste stakes.
My favourite recipes have fewer than 10 lines of instructions, call for one, maybe two pots, and take less than 20 minutes to prepare and around 30-45 minutes in the oven. What’s not to love about that?
My two recipes this week meet those criteria brilliantly. Okay, so you have to start the squash and mushroom lasagne on the stovetop, but really, this isn’t a problem, as the mushroom/tomato mixture just quietly simmers away until it’s nice and dry, and with that big whack of miso paste in there, you get a meatiness that’s vegetarian. And yes, there is a lot of Taleggio there, but believe me, when you sink your fork into a spoonful of this and hit a molten seam of golden, oozing cheese, you won’t regret it. But feel free to substitute goat’s cheese or anything else you fancy.
The roast chicken bake is a bit more Mediterranean in feel – a reminder of summer when you most need it. And if you get your butcher to de-bone the thighs as part of your order, this dish takes less than 10 minutes to prepare. It’s almost ludicrously easy. You simply mix all the ingredients together in a bowl, transfer onto a tray, bung it in the oven and voila! It really is the ultimate no-brainer dinner. All you need is some squishy bread to mop up all those lovely juices.
