Jamie’s Asian Tuna, Coconut Rice & Jiggy Jiggy Greens.

If you only cook one thing from scratch this week, make it this: Jamie’s Seared Asian Tuna, Coconut Rice and Jiggy Jiggy Greens. I’ve had a copy of his 15 Minute Meals book for a while now, and this week, decided I was fed up of all the boring usuals I was cooking, so decided to go ahead and plan for two of the meals.

Now, being a seasoned Jamie fan, I know the flavours always work well, but I’m also aware that if I even attempted to cook this in 15 minutes, my kitchen would look like a bomb site afterwards (see my 30 minute post!) and I’d spend at least half an hour cleaning it up. So, I decided to do it all in ‘bits’ as and when I had time, and record the time taken actually doing the chopping, pouring, cooking etc.

It really is a simple recipe, and I’m going to summarise here rather than give you a definitive list: for that, there’s an app! I did everything out of order as I was preparing everything I could beforehand so when the OH arrived home, I could just do the ‘cooking’ parts. So to begin, I measured out half a cup of basmati rice, half a cup of reduced fat coconut milk and got the water ready to boil in the kettle for half a cup of that. I prepped the greens too using spinach, broccoli and little gem lettuce. They just needed shredding, adding to a pan with some sesame oil, crushed garlic and seasoning. (If you don’t have a Jamie Oliver range garlic press, I’d highly recommend it: works like a charm and you don’t even have to remove the skins.) Next I ‘created’ the serving platter, scattering pickled ginger and it’s juice, chopped spring onions, freshly squeezed pink grapefruit and chopped red chilli over a plate. I then coated the tuna steaks in sesame seeds, missing out the green tea as we didn’t have any and I’d already been to the supermarket twice! Everything was now ready to cook later. This preparation aspect took about 12 minutes, which didn’t include time spent gong back and forth, getting out ingredients, tidying as I went along etc. I also took out everything I’d need after cooking, such as chopped coriander and soy and teriyaki sauces for drizzling over things.

When the OH arrived, it was simply a case of adding the milk and water to the rice pan and boiling for ten minutes; searing the tuna, then slicing, adding to the plate and covering with soy and chopped coriander; and tossing the greens over a high heat for a couple of minutes before adding teriyaki sauce to taste.

It really didn’t take long, providing you have all the ingredients, and took no longer than 35 minutes all in all, including tidying the kitchen, which I think is pretty good from scratch. As expected, the flavour combinations were spot-on: this was one of the nicest meals we’ve had in ages: delicious.