Quick and easy fried bread

One of the excuses people use for living on precooked convenience foods is that it takes too long to make a decent meal from scratch. Utter tosh. Granted, if you want to eat burgers and fries, then yes, it will take quite a bit of time to make that meal from scratch. But what’s the point of making burgers and fries when you can get them anywhere and everywhere. Surely one of the good things about making a meal from scratch is that it’s not food you’re going to see on every restaurant menu (including the fast-food ones).

When I lived in the UK, I rarely made Indian dishes because there are so many excellent Indian restaurants on almost every high street in the south east of the country – in a lot of other places in the country too. The food’s excellent and it’s reasonably priced. However, that’s not the case here in Edmonton. While there are Indian restaurants, they’re not that accessible for me (at least not without having to drive miles).

I sometimes try my hand at the odd curry but having tasted such good Indian food, it’s always just an OK dish. I find that it’s much easier to whip up a cracking pasta dish. And now we really are talking quick cooking! Jamie Oliver has a recipe in one of his cookbooks that uses no more than half a dozen ingredients and it’s excellent. I’m always amazed that something with so few ingredients in it can taste so good. It’s spaghetti, extra virgin olive oil, garlic, chilli, anchovies, and lemon. However, what really makes this dish so good, I suspect, is the pangritata that’s placed on top of the spaghetti after cooking. Pangritata is poor person’s parmesan cheese – what the pheasants in Italy used to use instead of parmesan. It’s basically fried bread so probably not that good for you, but at least it’s cooked in olive oil and not lard! In Jamie’s chilli spaghetti recipe, you cook breadcrumbs – and these have to be course breadcrumbs, it won’t work with fine ones – in olive oil with sliced garlic and thyme. Once they turn crispy and golden, drain on absorbent kitchen paper all ready for when the pasta’s finished.

To make the pasta dish, cook the spaghetti. While it’s cooking, soften a chopped garlic clove in three or four tablespoons of olive oil. Add the anchovies to the pan. Once they start to melt, crumble in a dried chilli or sprinkle in some chilli flakes, and squeeze in the juice of a lemon. Once the pasta’s cooked, add the chilli mix and give it a good stir so that all the pasta’s coated. Divide between two bowls and then sprinkle on the pangritata. It takes no longer than around 15 minutes to prepare – including all preparation. I would happily eat this every day if I could only convince myself that fried bread was good for my health!