My cheating art

I'm not a great fan of processed food - at least not the mass produced, stacked high on supermarket shelves kind. It may be inconsistent or even reactionary, but at the same time I'm all in favour of the artisanal cured pig product/home pickle kind of processed food.

Despite this and even though this is my first foodiefan blog I have decided to talk about a couple of cookery cheats that proved useful recently and that involve buying processed products.

This weekend, I was called on to barbecue at short notice and with little time to shop. This late in the summer it's not always easy to come up with something new to grill. We've done burgers, ribs, steaks, lamb and so on. A quick trip to the supermarket (Sunday - no real shops open) could have been dispiriting but I realised that being alone and unobserved (thank you Oscar) I could ring the foody changes by cunning culinary fraud.

There wasn't much good meat on offer but I found some OK looking chicken breasts and leg quarters. Chicken has to be handled carefully on the barbie but I had an idea that just might make it worth it.

In the World Food section I found a selection of Patak's indian sauces. I chose the medium Tikka Masala. The ingredients list didn't look bad at all - two chemical additives mentioned but they were lactic acid and acetic acid - nothing that looks too scarey to me. On the same aisle I found there was a big choice of flat breads - rotis/chapatis, tortillas, khubz etc. I took the chapatis. Next I hit the dairy cabinet and picked out a 500 ml carton of Greek yoghurt (sheep's milk, naturally). In the vegetable section I got a a few onions, garlic, a bit of fresh ginger, cucumber, tomatoes, mint and coriander.

OK, now I can see some people thinking that this is a lot of ingredients to cheat with but I think cheating should be evaluated with respect to the goal: it's more effort to blag a PhD than a Microsoft certification but it's worth the extra effort.

Back home I skinned the chicken pieces; diced the breasts (biiiig chunks); jointed the leg quarters into drumsticks and thighs and slashed the flesh of each piece a couple of times. Then I mixed the jar of Patak's sauce with the yoghurt and added some chopped garlic, ginger, mint and coriander and an onion. Into this orange gunk went the chicken.

Now, I think that if you have acid in your mix you need to limit the amount of time chicken spends marinading. More than a couple of hours and the texture gets yucky as the chicken cooks in the acid bath.

After a couple of hours then, I had the grill fired up, the breast chunks were threaded on skewers and placed over the coals and the on-the-bone joints were laid out on the higher of the two grilling platforms. I let the skewers grill until they were cooked and showing typical tandoori style charring while the on the bone pieces, I cooked slower to start with and then moved over the coals to char after they'd cooked for a half hour. Never take chances grilling chicken - make sure it's cooked through thoroughly.

I served the lot up with chapatis that had been oven warmed (couldn't bother with the tava) and a tomato cucumber and onion salad with mint and coriander. They went down amazingly well. I allowed everyone to think that I'd been grinding spices all morning and hid the Patak's jar away.

My next cheating art event was an emergency dinner. I had a piece of pork loin boned and skinned but not rolled. I could have roasted this a la mode and served with roast potatoes and so on but I wanted something a little bit less obvious as we had guests. So, I was back at the World Food section and this time I bought two jars of Walkerswood Run Down sauce.

Back home I took a knife and stabbed the joint of pork a few times all around and then put it into a plastic bag with one jar of the run down sauce. I left this for most of the afternoon. When it came time to cook, I put the joint in a roasting tin with a couple of sliced onions and then poured the remaining jar of sauce over it. The joint went into the oven for half an hour a pound and every half hour or so I added a wine glass or two of water and stirred up the pan. I ended up with a really good pork roast and by deglazing the pan over the stove with more water a fantastic gravy. We ate this with rice and peas and steamed kale. I suspect that any Caribbean cooks will be horrified if they hear about this but it was a great meal and a real change from plain old roast pork for little extra effort.

So, that's it - confession time is over. I live with my shame only because my cheating didn't involve any tins of Campbell's mushroom soup. If you don't believe that cheating can work, you should try these two food frauds and see if it changes your mind.