I’m giving away a copy of Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals over here. Go enter!

On Thursday we tried our third recipe from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals, meatball sandwiches with pickled cabbage, chopped salad and banana ice cream. I don’t know if I was just tired because it was almost the end of the week but I just couldn’t make myself work quickly. I also let E help me the whole time because it’s nicer having him in the kitchen with me. We clocked in around 40 minutes.

I have to say I was a bit disappointed with this meal. The meatballs were nice, even though I made a mistake and they were falling apart, and the combination of meatballs, pancetta, jarlsberg cheese and olive oil on ciabatta was gorgeous, but I wasn’t a very big fan of the pickled cabbage. And that’s not because I don’t like red cabbage, for the record. The chopped salad was fine, but the banana “ice cream” was a miss. It was made of frozen bananas, plain yogurt and honey (which actually tasted really nice on it’s own) but then you’re supposed to coat balls of the “ice cream” in chopped coconut and that was messy, awkward and took forever. Then you froze it again. It was a bit odd.

Based on the three recipes I’ve tried from this book, and it’s philosophy, I’m a big fan. I learned a few new fairly quick recipes and I think they’ll only get quicker when I cook them again. And I learned how to use my liquidiser for more prep work, which is great. But once I go back to cook some of my favourite things I’ll definitely do a bit of mixing and matching rather than going strictly by the book.

For more thoughts on this cookbook, my friend A wrote a post here.

Want to win one? Visit the first post in this series!