Today I’m going to talk about two easy meal options that have variety for when you’re just starting out cooking, or for when life is crazy and you want something very easy to do. I’ll talk about a way to plan things around potatoes and pasta so that you’ve got a good variety, and different ways to enhance the toppings, to add sauces, et cetera, to go with those. Start off with easy meals when you’re learning to cook. If your son or daughter is going to leave home soon, this is a good way for them to learn to cook. So, let’s get started.
Let’s start off with potatoes. To make a meal with potatoes, you need to know how to cook them. You can either bake them in the oven or steam them on the stove top with a metal steamer in a pot. If you’re going to do them in the oven, you’ll want to season the outside nicely. It’s good to put them on a baking tray with some baking paper or parchment paper. You wash the potatoes, dry them, and spread them out on the tray.
It’s good if they’re evenly sized, because then they’ll cook in about the same length of time. If you do have some that are a little bigger, put those near the back, and the smaller ones near the front. You can always remove the smaller ones if they’re cooked sooner, but generally the back ones will cook a bit faster anyway, so hopefully they’ll even out.
Think about whether you’re going to do only one meal or a few meals in the week with potatoes, and judge how many potatoes you’ll need. Usually a meal based on potatoes would need one large potato or two small ones for ladies, and two large ones or three medium ones for men.
Once you’ve put your potatoes on the tray, sprinkle a little olive oil on top or put a knob of butter on each, and add quite a bit of salt. The oil or butter will spread around the potato while it cooks, and help it to get a nice, crispy, flavored skin. It’ll also help them to cook faster. Next, you put the tray in the oven. You should preheat your oven to about 200 Celsius (400 Fahrenheit). It takes about an hour to cook, so you need to check it after about 45 minutes. Give the tray a little shake to spread the oil around the potatoes, and then check it again after an hour.
Hopefully, it won’t take much longer than that, but it depends on the size of your potatoes. Once they’re soft and you can pierce them with a fork – test a few potatoes; we definitely want them to be done enough – then you can take them out. You have a few options for what you can do with them. You can either do toppings for the potato, you can do twice baked potatoes, or you can do a potato bar.
So, first let’s think about protein. An easy protein for when you’re starting out is to take tinned fish like tuna or salmon, crush it up, shred it with a fork, and then add mayonnaise or another sauce that I’ll speak about in a moment.
You could also add chicken. If you want to bake the chicken, then take some chicken breasts and put them in a glass dish with some olive oil and some seasoning. You’ll want a good amount of salt, a little pepper, and perhaps some onion powder to sprinkle on top. Add some herbs like oregano or thyme, and maybe some smoked paprika or lemon juice. The more seasonings you put on at the beginning, the better your chicken will be. You should bake that in your oven at 180 Celsius (375 Fahrenheit). You have to bake it for about half an hour until the chicken is cooked. Then you can shred it and put that on top of the potato.
Then you need a sauce to go on top. You can make a simple sauce by mixing about half a cup of mayonnaise with a squirt or two of tomato sauce, a squirt of lemon juice, and a sprinkle of salt. That gives you a seafood style sauce. It’s very nice to have on top of tuna or salmon, and it’s also nice on the chicken.
This is for if you want to just put a meat topping and a sauce on the potatoes. For a baked potato bar style meal, you can put all kinds of toppings on them. You can have your meat, and you can also have any sort of vegetables. You can slice some zucchini and fry it in the pan for a few minutes. You can also add salad ingredients like cucumber and tomato to your potatoes.
If you want to steam the potatoes, you’ll need a metal steamer and some water in the bottom of a pot. Then you’re going to put the potatoes inside the steamer, just above the water, and then close the lid. It needs to steam for about 45 minutes until the potatoes are cooked through. You need to check that it’s got enough water along the way when you’re doing that.
Something else that’s fun to do with potatoes is make smashed or “crashed” potatoes. You put some cooked potatoes on a tray or a plate, and then you take a potato masher and squish the potatoes until they burst a little bit and they’re flat. Then you’re going to add seasonings like oregano and olive oil again, even if you added them originally. You’re also going to add things like onion powder, and then feta cheese and some mozzarella cheese that melts. Then you put them in the oven. They make an even more flavorful base for any meat or anything you want to put on top of the potatoes, or they can be a side.
To make twice baked potatoes, you’re going to cut off the top of the potatoes or cut them in half – that’s even easier. Cut them in half length ways like you’d slice a cake in half, and then scoop the potato out of each half, leaving just enough behind to keep the firmness of the potato skin. Then you’re going to mash up all that potato that you’ve removed in a bowl. Add some cream or a little bit of milk. You can add cooked sweet corn kernels from a tin, or you can add cheese, like parmesan cheese, cheddar cheese, or any jack cheese that’s got good flavor. Then you mash all that up until it’s soft – the cream helps with that – and you put it back into the potato skins. Sprinkle a little cheese on top, and bake them in the oven again.
Heat them again until they’re hot through, and maybe a little crispy on top. You can also add some protein into the mixture before you put them back into the skins; maybe a little bit of shredded chicken to make it more of a meal. These keep great in the fridge. You can make a few extra and reheat them later for a meal.
You can also top your potatoes with things like beef bolognese, cooking up your mincemeat, but I don’t want to go into that too much, seeing as this is a first-time cooking. You can do anything simple. Another thing that’s great to add to potatoes is bacon. You can fry the bacon in a pan or cook it on a baking tray in the oven – don’t let it get overdone. Then you just pull it apart and add it to either the twice baked potatoes, or to the simple baked potato, with or without your sauce.
Another great sauce to top your potatoes with is cheese sauce, but that one’s a little complicated to make, so we’ll leave that for now. A mushroom sauce is quite simple, though. Buy a few mushrooms, slice them up, and add lots of seasoning. You’ll want to add salt, maybe a little onion powder, and a tiny bit of nutmeg to bring out the flavor in the mushrooms. Then you put them in a pan with a lid on. The water in the mushrooms will create steam and help them to cook. Once they’re cooked through and getting nice and brown, you can add a little bit of cream. Turn off the plate so that it doesn’t get too hot, and pour the cream in over the mushrooms. It shouldn’t boil, but just heat up. And there’s your mushroom sauce to pour over the potatoes!
Our second option to use as a starting point is pasta. The best thing to do is to choose the pasta you like best. Do you like spaghetti, or spaghettoni, which is thinner? Do you like tagliatelle, the long ribbons? Do you like penne, the little tubes? Look for the palest pasta in the supermarket. The whiter it is, the better the quality, and the better the taste. It’s dried more slowly, and it tastes better.
Once you’ve got your pasta, then follow the instructions on the package. To cook it, you can just put a pot on the stove, about two thirds full of water, and start heating it. Once it gets to the boiling point, you can add a good amount of salt. “Salt like the ocean”, as Joe says on MasterChef. Then add a little bit of oil; a little bit of olive oil or coconut oil to help the pasta to not stick together.
Then add your pasta – you don’t need to put a lid on – and let it boil until it’s al dente. That means a little bit less than soft; a little bit chewy. The best way to test is to just take a piece out of the pot and taste it. Then, once you drain your pasta – this is an important moment – take the last little bit of pasta water, and add it back to the pasta to be absorbed. That adds flavor. It shouldn’t be too much, just about a big spoonful. Then you can add a little olive oil, some salt, and even a little Parmesan cheese, and mix it up. Whatever pasta dish you’re making, if you season the pasta like that immediately after it’s been cooked, it tastes really good.
Then you can decide what to add. We want to go as simple as possible. If you have some cream and some basil pesto, add those to the pasta. First take about three tablespoons of pesto and mix it into the pasta, and then add a little bit of cream until it seems to be the right consistency. You don’t even need to heat it again. You can also make some mushroom sauce, like we talked about before. Make it in the same way, and add it to the pasta, the mushrooms and the cream together.
You can make a bacon cream sauce, or a bacon and mushroom sauce. Again, you cook your bacon in the oven, shred it or pull it apart, and add it to your pasta with a little bit of cream. The cream brings a bit of liquid to the pasta, but you don’t want to add a lot. Mix it up until it seems like the right consistency to eat. Add some more Parmiggiano Regiano, or parmesan cheese. Freshly grated cheese is always best. You can add some basil leaves.
Another thing you can do after you’ve cooked your pasta is to add some baby tomatoes if you like them. Have them ready sliced, and add them as soon as you’ve drained your pasta. Add the seasonings while it’s still hot so that they cook a little bit; put the lid on for a few minutes. Add some basil leaves. The tomatoes will soften nicely and bring flavor, and then you can also add a tiny bit of cream if you want to. You can also add some shredded chicken like I mentioned for the potatoes.
It’s best to keep it really simple. Just decide on something yummy like bacon, and add that. The most important part is to cook your pasta perfectly, and to season it perfectly before you add any toppings, and then you can be creative with what you like to add. Sun dried tomatoes are great as well if you soak them in some olive oil and salt beforehand.
Bacon carbonara is also great. It uses egg instead of cream. You can look up a recipe on the internet to try. Basically, you need to have your bacon cooked and add that and the egg once the pasta’s cooked. You don’t want the egg to cook too much, so you don’t want it to be hot on the stove when you mix it in, just warm.
So, those are two very easy starting places for some meals. Soon I’ll do another episode with some other options using rice, et cetera. For now, try out what you can and be creative. The most important part is cooking the base well, using different ideas for what you’d like to put on top, and keeping it as simple as possible.
