I, like many others it seems, received a copy of Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals for Christmas.
I had watched the television shows with recipes from the book so was quite excited to delve in and find out what it was about. I already have the previous 30 Minute Meals title that I enjoyed reading but never quite tackled. 15 Minute Meals cuts out all the frappery like desserts and extraneous side dishes. It focuses on the main meal and each recipe is accompanied by visually enticing photography of the food plated up on a giant board or platter, to be plonked in the middle of the table and served family style.
Just flicking through the pages, I would definitely like to eat almost everything in the book. To me this is the strength of 15 Minute Meals. Quite often there are only 2 or 3 recipes that I’d actually try in a recipe book, but in this one everything seems like it would be delicious and it seems to be achievable by the home cook.
Well the only way to truly find out would be to give it a red hot go. The first recipe I tried was Steak Medallions, Mushroom Sauce & Spring Greens. p 82. First you have to get all the ingredients out, fill the kettle, get all the pans out and crank up the heat so they’re ready to. With every thing out, my benchtop is crammed with stuff.
The recipes are written in such a way that you follow it to the letter. Everything is spelled out, nothing is assumed knowledge. I can see how this might be helpful, but for me personally, I found myself struggling to keep track of where I was up to. I wasted time reading and re-reading things as I found the method lengthy and wordy.
It’s also a bit mad once you get going. You’ve got to make sure that you have no interruptions whatsoever otherwise it’s easy to lose your flow and all the timings are out. The end result was a really nice meal. The mushroom sauce was a revelation!
The second dish I tried was the Chicken Tikka, Lentil, Spinach and Naan Salad, p 26. Everything out again. To be honest, with all the ingredients and pans out, it’s quite overwhelming. The kids want a cheese toastie in the middle of it all – hang on a minute kids. I’ve now used 3 pans, several spoon and tongs, my thermomix, two chopping boards, a knife, a peeler and a serving dish. The kitchen is a complete disaster. Oh but the salad was REALLY good. Insanely good. And yes I cooked it in around 15 minutes. However it took at least another 15 minutes if not longer to clean up.
I know by calling this book Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals it’s tapping into society’s need for quick food as we all work longer hours and are reaching for ready meals and takeaways. However I’d argue that none of the meals are as fast as they make out to be. Sure, if you time the actual cooking time without interruptions, it might add up to 15 minutes. But who does that? First we have to source all of the ingredients from the shops and our cupboards. Almost all the recipes use small quantities of a lot of different ingredients. The Chicken Tikka recipe for example, uses 30g of feta cheese. What am I meant to do with the rest? Then there’s the clean up. OH MY LORD. I struggle with washing up at the best of times but the amount of mess these recipes create (if you follow the method to the letter) is twice or three times more than I’d usually have to cope with. Please tell me what the point of cooking something in an arbitrary time frame is?
My other beef with the recipes is that some of them are rather carb heavy. For a lot of people this would not be an issue, but for me personally I’d rather up the protein a bit and skip the overabundance of rice, pasta and bread as fillers. Fair enough, it’s easy enough to do except it then stuffs up the whole timing aspect of following the method.
On a positive note, I’m pleased that all the recipes are ‘healthy’. They’ve been co-written by a nutritionist and there are a lot of healthy swap-outs and lighter versions of classic dishes.
Overall I love the book for the fantastic meals. If you can leave the whole 15 minute nonsense out of it you’ll find that the recipes are incredibly tasty, varied, healthy and above all achievable by the average person.
Do you own a copy of this book? Would you agree with my review? Which recipes have you tried and would highly recommend?
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Agreed wholeheartedly with you… Great recipes… It should just be called Jamie Oliver’s great new recipes or if you have watched the shows I would call it “Scatter Nice Sh*T all over a tray and Drizzle with yoghurt….” I have got some great ideas that I have adapted… I never follow recipes anyways so found the show good for ideas for getting flavour onto the plate without long cooking…
Lol, I like your “scattering nice shit all over a tray” summary. Pretty spot on. I can’t wait to work my way through it. I’ve been quite impressed by the flavours so far.
I have the 30 minute cook book which like you I love to read. But I have seen some of the shows of the 15 minute meals and they actually look like food I would eat. So I am thinking about getting that one to actually cook from. But with kids and stuff going on it would never just take 15 minutes and I’m ok with that.
I think as long as you realise it’s never going to take 15 minutes and you shed that expectation, the meals are fabulous.
Apparently he copped a lot of flak in the UK because the 30 minute meals took longer than 30 minutes. Labelling it 15 minute meals is mis-leading, and the cleaning up part never even occured to me. I’d rather take longer to cook the meal and clean as I go, rather than face a mountain of washing up. And yeah, good luck keeping everyone out of the kitchen the whole time!
You could probably do it in 15 minutes if you practiced a recipe 2 or 3 times, but then you’d be doing from memory rather than following a recipe.
I think it was pretty bold to call it 15 minute meals, he could have called it “Fast Dinners” or something to that effect.
i also kind of wish that the recipes were more traditionally laid out. I think it’s easier to read if in sections.
Yeah, I think the title’s are a problem. I also hate TOO much detail, you are constantly looking for your place on the page!
I don’t have it but is there a lot of prep time in the 15 minutes or is prep assumed? Good to know that the dishes are tasty though!
The prep is getting everything out – all the pots and pans, all the ingredients and utensils. You have to turn the pans on, have the kettle boiled, have the food processor ready to go with the correct blade.
All the other prep like chopping is included in the 15 minutes.
The dishes themselves are seriously tasty.
Im about to cook our first 15 min meal tonight. I have to say that getting all the ingredients for his books are so costly and difficult to find in supermarkets in NZ that it almost makes the book not worth it. I totally get your feta annoyance, the recipe im doing calls for 40gm of feta too, luckily I have some already but otherwise your spenindg minimum of 4$ on one tiny part of the meal, same goes with thigns like adding pine nuts. I think he needs to do a healthy cost effective book.
A good friend of mine gave me Jamie’s 15 minute meals for Christmas as I’ve just had a baby and am time poor.Hubby flicked through the book one night and thought the “Beef kofta curry” on page 66 looked tasty, so I decided to make it for him one night.Now I’m a tertiary educated female and I couldn’t make sense of his instructions. Mind you, in his defence, I will say I’m no Honours graduate, but I think I can follow a simple recipe if the instructions are clear to follow.Now in the the 2nd paragraph, it says “Put 1 mug of rice, 2 mugs of boiling water and the cardamom pods into the casserole pan, then halve and add the beans and put the lid on.”I’m sorry, where do I put it once I’ve halved it?Last time I checked, I wasn’t Jesus (or Moses, my religious memory is not very good).I wasn’t sure where to put it, so I skipped that step and didn’t halve it.I know this is a very minor error on Jamie’s behalf (or his writer) but when you only have 15 minutes to prepare and cook the dish, you don’t have 15 minutes to try and make sense of where to put the water once you’ve halved it (or what do with it if you have halved it, that’s another step that’s missing). So I carried on, all the while thinking my hubby was going to have a tasty, healthy dinner (and something different to our usual ‘weekly recipes’) Unfortunately, it was not to be. The beef kofta was flavourless and the rice wasn’t cooked properly, it was still hard.Seems that Jamie does a lot of quick talking and moving in the kitchen (which is most of his appeal), but his recipes lack instruction and taste.In the end,we rang our local thai take-away and called it a night.Looks like our ‘regular dish’ is back on the menu.At least we can say, it will work!
Jeraldene – thank you for stopping by and commenting. I actually had a good chuckle reading your comments, very funny, you certainly brightened my day. I’d say, give the book a chance. If you go in not trying to make things in 15 minutes, get rid of that expectation, then you’ll find that the recipes are rather tasty.
Just watched the poached chicken salsa verde with minestrone and it looks yummy. I too have the 30 minutes cookbook and do find the recipes difficult to follow. Also so many of the recipes are written for fish from the UK. It would be nice if there were descriptions about the fish so I could work out what I could use instead as I am from Australia. Because of this, I am in two minds about getting the 15 minute book.