“Fresh Tomato Soup” from “Jamie’s Great Britain”

Andrew (12): Is this a Jamie Oliver recipe?

Maureen: Yes. We’re still eating from the delights of Great Britain’s kitchens. Why do you ask?

Andrew: Because it looks… interesting.

Maureen: Good interesting or bad interesting?

Andrew: In the middle interesting.

Maureen: Hmm. So what do you think?

Andrew: It’s a bit too tomatoey. All I can taste is tomato and nothing else. So that decreases its grade slightly.

Maureen: Jamie says that it “pays respect to that iconic Heinz tinned soup that we’ve all grown up loving.” But if I wanted Heinz tomato soup, I would just buy some. It would save me a lot of trouble.

“Conchiglie con Broccoli” from “The River Cafe Cook Book”

Kirstin: I chose this recipe because we’ve been away for the weekend and I wanted to cook something quickly from ingredients in the cupboard. I nearly had what I needed: I didn’t have salted anchovies, so I used tinned ones, even though the book says “tinned anchovies in oil are no substitute”. I used them anyway. It had cream and butter, and it’s a summer evening, so I thought it might be a bit heavy. But it was really good! I didn’t use all the anchovies — I used half the amount they said. 100g of anchovies sounded grim.

Tom: In the event the anchovies were quite subtle… a sort of distant saltiness.

Kirstin: I did think the cream was a bit much. And I don’t like those small, tiny bones you get in anchovies.

Tom: It wasn’t that rich, though. And it was more substantial than, say, spaghetti al limone.

“Penne alla Carbonara” from “The River Cafe Book”

Kirstin: It’s been a long day at work today, so I chose something easy. And I wanted to see what cream in a carbonara would taste like, having previously thought it would be a very bad idea. We normally cook the recipe from the Zuni Cafe book, which is about three pages of very elaborate description of how you have to swirl the pan with the pancetta, and has two kinds of cheese (pecorino and parmesan); but the results are totally worth it. This is much simpler. As usual the quantity of pasta was totally wrong. So we halved the sauce but cooked the same amount of pasta. It had too much cheese, I thought. But the sauce itself was very good.