Meals in minutes, the Skye and Thomasina-inspired way

I decided I needed to have more instantly-edible-yet-still-obscenely-delicious food in the house. Even for an enthusiastic cook like me, there are times when you just can't be bothered, or are too busy, or too hungry, to put in the effort and time required to make a meal from scratch. But even at those times, a gourmet is still a gourmet! Thence the challenge: how to eat fantastically well with next to no investment of time and effort?

Step 1: yesterday I made Skye Gyngell's slow-roasted tomatoes. Nothing to it, really - you just get the nicest tomatoes you can find, halve them, sprinkle them with salt, pepper and sugar, and roast them for as long as possible on as low as possible a temperature (in my case 4 and a half hours at 110 degrees). Then you keep them in a jar in the fridge and whip them out as and when you need them. For me, this was at lunch today (manchego cheese, slow-roasted tomatoes, cranberry and shallot chutney, parma ham, Dunkelbrot), and at dinner tonight (which I'm coming to). I'm still planning to make Skye's equally awesome tomato and chilli jam with half of the tomatoes once I get round to buying some chillies, but at the rate I'm going I might have eaten them all before then. (Both recipes, incidentally, from the beautiful book A Year In My Kitchen.)

So, dinner tonight. I cooked some spaghetti and tossed it with two of the tomatoes, 5 or 6 anchovies from a jar, and a good dollop of Thomasina Miers' Mojo de Ajo which I'd made a couple of weeks ago (this, I suppose, was Step 2). Thomasina describes this as a kind of Mexican confit of garlic: it's made by cooking a couple of bulbs' worth of mashed garlic and a couple of chopped red chillies as slowly as possible in plenty of olive oil. It probably would have turned out even better had I been able to achieve a slower, softer cook: Cologne's department stores and cookshops don't seem to be up to the task of providing a heat diffuser. (The other day I even cooked stock in the oven because I was sick of it bubbling furiously on the stove even on the lowest heat available on our cooker. I shouldn't complain really - we are among the lucky few in Germany who have gas rather than electric...)

Anyway, the pasta - salty, garlicky, richly-flavoured - was a record-setter on both the speed and deliciousness scales. I daresay I'll be doing this again.