Miles Collins

For dinner I mean…

Most people think I eat lavishly at home (and work) they assume my fridges and cupboards are full of freebies from suppliers, they are not. I actually eat very little at home, I live alone, I am disciplined in what I eat and five to six days of the week my meals are taken at work.

I don’t like junk food, if I want a snack then it’s a piece of fruit or I’ll go without. I don’t eat takeaway or ready meals but neither do I spend a morning preparing dinner.

When I am off the amount of effort I put into cooking for myself falls into two seasons; summer and winter. In the summer I want to be outside as much as possible because I crave the fresh air when I am at work and besides that it’s much nicer than being indoors. My dinners are light and very quick and easy to prepare in summer, they also tend to be quite cheap because I eat what I grow. Come the winter I make more of an effort, I still keep it relatively simple because there is only so much I can eat on my own and I hate waste.

I am all for food thrift, it challenges the cook into turning a cheap ingredient into something delicious which is far more interesting to me than buying expensive food for expensive sake. It can often mean false ecconomy, a cheap cut of meat treated well can yield more than one meal unlike a steak or a fillet of fish. Lesser quality meats which require longer cooking allow the cook time to experiment with the addition of other ingredients, there is more room for error and errors can usually be repaired unlike a burnt steak.

I eat a lot of chicken, at work we buy the whole bird. The breasts are used for a main course, the legs may be used in a terrine and the carcasse is always used for white and/or brown stock. I like to buy cicken legs for use at home, I cut them up, make a quick braise in whatever style I fancy and get on with something else whilst they slowly cook.

Last night I fried them with some hot Spanish paprika in olive oil flavoured with chunks of home dried chillies, a teaspoon of crushed fennel seeds and dried oregano were added along with a good turn of the salt and pepper mill. I had a spare pepper to use up and a small piece of chorizo so they went in along with a spoon of tomato puree. Glancing to my right I spotted the bottle of leftover beaujolais that I couldn’t bring myself to finish drinking. As bad as it was I couldn’t waste it so the chicken got a good glug of it. As the wine reduced I threw in a couple of torn bay leaves, a cup of chicken stock and enough passata (Italien sieved tomatoes) to cover the lot.Thirty minutes or a reasonable pile of ironing later and it’s cooked. I am fed, not out of pocket and free to enjoy the rest of the evening.