5 Quick Dinners For One

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We’re back with five MORE meals I make using ingredients I always keep stocked in my kitchen!
As a chef, I’ve learned which pantry staples create impressive dinners without a grocery run.
Quick, satisfying, and perfectly portioned for one person. Maximum taste – no shopping list required!

MY PRODUCTS: https://bit.ly/AndyCooksEssentials
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RECIPES:
Arayes – https://www.andy-cooks.com/blogs/recipes/lamb-arayes
Blackened Fish Tacos – https://www.andy-cooks.com/blogs/recipes/blackened-fish-tacos
Prawns in Black Bean Sauce – https://www.andy-cooks.com/blogs/recipes/prawns-in-black-bean-sauce
Roast Chicken with Butter Bean and Asparagus Salad – https://www.andy-cooks.com/blogs/recipes/pan-roasted-chicken-leg-butter-bean-and-asparagus-salad
Spaghetti Amatriciana – https://www.andy-cooks.com/blogs/recipes/spaghetti-amatriciana

TIMESTAMPS:
00:49 – Arayes
08:48 – Fish Tacos
16:19 – Roast Chicken with Butter Bean and Asparagus Salad
22:40 – Prawns in Black Bean Sauce
29:10 – Spaghetti Amatriciana

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Director, Chef and Host: Andy
Producer: James Threadwell
Videographer: Nick Hargans
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Kitchen Manager: Sarah Allchurch

#arayes #tacos #chicken #prawns #pasta

all right you absolutely love the five easy meals for one video I posted last month and it sounds like you want some more so today I’m going to share five more meals that are quick easy and delicious and it all starts with pantry staples like canned beans frozen prawns and pasta plus a few key ingredients that are going to transform your weekn night dinner into something special i’m talking about dishes like areas fish tacos pan roasted chicken prawns and black bean sauce and amachin chana these meals they’re easy to pull together and you don’t end up with heaps of dirty dishes and if you’ve got your own go-to meals for one then I’d love you to drop them in the comments below but before we get stuck in I’d like to thank [Music] in first up one of my absolute favorites because they’re delicious and they’re really easy to pull together areas so it’s basically minced meat i like lamb but you can use beef you could use chicken or tur wa hello turkey whatever you really wanted to into a bowl and then we’re going to season it and we’re going to stuff it into the pitter bread honestly if I’m doing this and I’m being really not lazy efficient i’m being efficient with my time i’ll take the onion i only need half an onion for that amount and I grate it i’ll grate it straight in the bowl and then garlic you could use the same grater but it’s a bit chunky so I will use one of these finer ones i’m going to go two cloves in here actually while we’re here do the garlic and the yogurt too so raw garlic and yogurt can be really overpowering i like it garlicky i will do a whole clove on this but you can just do half a clove and see how you go especially if you’ve not got a date so a good pinch of salt fresh ground black pepper all spice and a little bit of parsley as well again this is late night cooking we’re not going to pick the leaves going to tear the big pieces of stalk off i’m going to fold this bunch on itself and run a knife through it then a couple of times the other way and that goes so we’ll get our pitter ready before we mix that cuz we’re going to have a dirty hand any pitters will work really i like these kind of like nice small ones cut them in half and then just kind of work them open so that they’re sometimes they can you know supermarket pitters are a bit me sometimes and they get a bit stale doesn’t really matter for this dish cuz they’re going to get fried but if we can kind of like work them open so that they’re good to go once we’re ready to fill them for me two pitts is is more than enough with that amount of mints i think it’s a pretty nice kind of well rounded meal you know like there is quite a lot of vitamin C and onions um you got your carbs and obviously we got lots of protein happy days so the best way to mix this you can either use a spoon honestly I think the best way to mix anything like this is to use a clean hand and you just want to mix it enough so everything’s well incorporated if you overm mix this what you do is you start working the fats and the proteins together and it becomes quite bouncy like a sausage which like certain sausages which is desirable in some recipes not in others for me I don’t think you want it super squishy like super bouncy this one so try not to overm mix it and all I do is flatten it out in the bowl that I’m using and then divide it into four evenish pieces it doesn’t have to be perfect so one two three four so we take our pitter take our quarter of our meat and then all we’re going to do is using our hand try and you kind of want it as evenly spread as possible throughout the whole pitter so get most of it done with your hand in there and then squeeze it so that it’s nice and flat it doesn’t matter that you’re getting like this is going to be cooked right so don’t stress that you’re getting raw meaty stuff on the outside cuz it’s about to go into a hot pan the reason you want it nice and flat is so that it cooks evenly you know you only just want to cook this meat just through put that in the bowl fill the rest of them so I got a clean lemon and a clean hands we got our yogurt with our garlic i love lots of yogurt on this i I don’t know why i just kind of like lather it up in it but then we don’t really want the juice you just want the zest so the zest of one lemon the reason I don’t like the juice in here isn’t because of the flavor i like the the the yogurt to be nice and thick and if you add the juice it just thins it out too much I think so use lots of zest you still get that lovely lemony zesty flavor a little bit more parsley no eat your greens pinch of salt some pepper then just give it a mix now it would kind of defeat the purpose of uh the whole point of the video but you could kind of make like a lab out of the yogurt first and then mix it through so making a lab you basically hang your yogurt in a chucks or some cheesecloth in the fridge overnight and lets all the way come out of it you get like a really nice thick yogurt i think that would work really well in here however I don’t think I’ve ever done that in real life so done leave that aside let’s get these things cooking so we got a big pan over sort of a medium high heat we want it to get hot but we don’t want it like raging hot we want to enough time to toast these on the outside nicely and cook the meat all the way through so a good gug of olive oil good gug that’s a terrible measurement isn’t it twoish tablespoons of olive oil and I do encourage you to use olive oil with this now I know it’s expensive and by all means if you don’t have olive oil and it’s midnight don’t not make this because of that but it does add some flavor to it then once it’s hot we’re going to get these in here and then I like to ch one of my presses on here and you just get better contact with the bottom of the pan so I’ve just turned that pan down to sort of medium and see it’s like we’re getting lots of little whispers of smoke we don’t want this thing ripping hot like I was saying we’re going to want to control the temperature here we also will start moving these around the pan it doesn’t matter how good your pan is it’s going to have hot spots so what we’re looking for golden brown nice color flip that over oh see hot spots that’s what I was talking about so we’re going to move that to the one with the least amount of color so they cook a bit more evenly make sure that pan’s down nice and low okay so when they start sizzling like that it means that there’s moisture coming out of the meat and you don’t want too much moisture coming out for the obvious reason of you don’t want them to dry out also that moisture will make your pitter soggy as soon as they they’re cooked on the in the inside and you can tell that by how firm they are but that that was like literally 4 minutes 4 and 1/2 minutes in the pan it doesn’t take long for that mint to cook through we can be fancy shove a lemon wedge on the side you know and if you’re serving it to your friend or something put a bit of this on the plate bit of parsley for for garnish there you go delicious dinner in like literally 20 minutes and that’s generous super tasty full of protein really filling and very moorish to be perfectly honest normally I just eat them over the chopping board one less dish to clean up oh the worst part of my job that joke never gets old lots of yogurt m it’s delicious texture it’s great cuz you got the crunchy pitter and then that you know the minced meat in the middle really nicely seasoned creamy yogurt and it’s also a little bit spicy almost from the from all that garlic it’s delicious it’s super quick to pull together and what I like about it but next up we’re going to one of my all-time favorite pantry staples tacos [Music] fish tacos now I think the good thing about having some of these corn tortillas in your fridge is they last a long time and you can do anything with them one thing that I really like to do and I I thought about putting this in as a recipe not really a recipe toast one of these peanut butter job done delicious so we’ll you know we’ll elevate a little bit past that we’re going to do black and fish taco you can do any fish you want piece of salmon you could do the same thing with chicken um just make sure it’s not too thick cuz it will get nice and dark which is kind of what we’re after then we’re going to do a little real quick pickle with red cabbage and jalapeno and then we’re going to make like a little light sory salad out of the avocado some tomato some white onion and some coriander so we’re going to start with our pickle first to get that kind of marinating now we’re only making three tacos one portion we don’t need heaps when you start you know finely cutting cabbage it kind of goes quite a long way so cut a piece off like that and make sure you hold it together nice and tight if you wanted to save dishes you could just run your knife through this or if you’ve got a mandolin handy you’re going to get a kind of a better result for the mandolin maybe use the guard um like I do because it hurts so that’s more than enough place that in a bowl now since our mandolin’s dirty we’re going to do the same with the jalapeno nice little thin slices in they go pinch of salt some red wine vinegar give that a really good mix making sure that the salt’s well distributed h and the jalapeno is nicely mixed through the red cabbage you’ll see it’s going to go a lovely vibrant purpley pink color and you want to do that first so it can sit there and marinate while we’re getting everything else ready so we’re going to make a little spice rub to do on our on our fish so we got some dried herbs garlic powder smoked paprika and some cayenne pepper some brown sugar and the brown sugar is what’s going to make this blacken from the sugar’s caramelizing big pinch of salt not a big pinch sorry a small a mediumsized pinch of salt little bit of black pepper we’re going to give that a mix with the brown sugar make sure you’re using the back of the spoon to break it up a bit cuz it does have a tendency to clump together got our fish we’re just going to put a little bit of oil on it this is a binder that just helps that spice rub stick to it we’re going to really heavily cover this fish in uh in that spice rub pat it on there and then we’re going to get the other sides and the same spice will work will work really well with chicken you do literally the same thing i’d suggest using like chicken thigh or Maryland’s make sure it’s nicely covered on all sides leave that to one side and I’ll just wash my hands so we’re going to do a little salad as well so we got some little cherry tomatoes here now we’ve got three tacos in total and I reckon you’re going to need about one and a half tomatoes per taco into the bowl just need a little bit of white onion diced white onion now Mexican food pretty much always uses white onion like this however if you don’t have white onion you have a a stray spring onion in your fridge feel free to use that instead and that goes so this is a shepherd avocado which are in season in Australia at the moment you get h avocados most of the year here and then for about 2 months we get these and they’re some people get frustrated with them cuz they don’t peel very easily and they’re not the nicest ways to eat avocado for how Aussies eat avocados which is basically on toast but they do work well in salads they are hard to peel sometimes though this one’s a little bit underrite but for what we’re doing it’s fine and that goes let’s do half an avocado then some coriander or cilantro just run your knife through it stems and all little pinch of salt a lime juice of Oh that’s a good juicy lime makes up for the rubbish avocado give it a nice mix we’ll leave that with our cabbage and we’ll take this fish and get it cooking so this fry pan is probably a bit of overkill for the size of piece of fish that we have but you know was already here so we’re going to use it but you want a cast iron pan or even a stainless steel pan the dish is called blackened so don’t come in the comments be like “It’s burned.” Supposed to be it’s not burnt it’s blackened get a bit of heat in your pan skin side down protein press on top we have still got skin on it we want it to get crispy cuz fish skin that’s not crispy is not good in my opinion if you not if it’s not going to be crispy I think you take it off before you cook it but now you can see that the pan’s smoking a bit we’re going to turn that heat right down we don’t want it to be too hot when we’re cooking fish like this you pretty much cook it all the way through on one side it’s not like cooking a steak where we’re trying to have it nice and even a good crust on both sides and it cooked cooked through uh evenly with fish we just want the crust or the crispy skin on one side so we cook it through pretty much all the way on one side the last 30 seconds we’ll flip it just to make sure that the um the outside of the flesh side is uh is cooked through we’ll rest it and then we can carve it okay so that’s been like simmering under there nicely for a good six minutes now you can see here I don’t know if you can see it’s pretty hard to see because of the marinade but I can feel that fish is cooked most of the way through i’d say 70% cooked which is what we’re after we’re just going to flip it over now and cook that other side first person that comments “It’s burnt,” gets a prize i’m literally going to leave that there for like a minute in total so probably got another 30 seconds then I’m going to pull it out onto a resting tray so we’re going to leave that element on but get the pan off to the side so we’re going to toast our tortillas i like to do it straight over the flame you got to do it with your hands too authentic that way all right time to assemble so what I’m going to do is take this piece of fish and cut it into three so I’ll cut it into three this way i’m actually going to flip it over i find easier to cut fish like this if you try and cut through this like the soft the flesh first all the way down and then push through that crispy skin stunning so next we’re going to start with the pickled cabbage and jalapeno fish is cooked lovely tomatoes avocado and onion there we go blackened fish tacos with a quick pickle of red cabbage jalapeno and a real simple avocado and tomato salsa little bit of extra lime for good luck let’s see how these taste that’s delicious it’s spicy it’s vibrant from the lime and all that onion and the sweetness from that the black and fish really helps as well and it cuts through a lot of that spiciness texturally it’s great it’s really not that hard to pull off and you can do it if you don’t have a piece of fish you can do it with anything piece of chicken but the point is have a pack of tortillas in your fridge at all times cuz they’ll get you out of a pinch more often than you know but definitely try these they’re delicious let me tell you a little bit more about Squarespace if you’ve thought about creating a website [Music] cooking so next up this is my roast chicken and salad dish I do when I’m eating a roast or wanting a roast chicken by myself and it’s not as hard as you think so I’m going to get this pan just get some heat in it first of all and then I’m just going to drizzle some olive oil over this chicken we’re going to get this in the oven as soon as we can and then we’ll get everything else ready in the meantime make sure it’s well covered in oil and we’re going to season it with salt so this is a chicken Maryland which is the drumstick in the thigh um still on the bone they’re really affordable which is great and as we just found out this is called a Maryland because of the state of Maryland and it kind of resembles the state of Maryland in the US i think it’s also named after a dish called Maryland chicken but the more you know so we got a bit too much heat in that pan now but that’s all right get some oil on there couple of tablespoons in goes our chicken protein press on top and in the oven there you go so that oven is set to 180° on fan force and I reckon that’s going to take about 30 minutes to cook all the way through and because of that press on top we’re going to get lovely golden color on the skin so while our chicken’s in the oven gives us plenty of time to get the rest of our stuff ready first thing is a tin of beans do not underestimate the power of a tin of beans beans are delicious they feed the world there’s a lot of places around the world where you eat beans so the thing I love about beans is they’re always ready to go cuz cooking beans from raw or from like a dried bean can take a long time so we’re just going to drain these rinse them really well under water and then let them dry off a little bit all right let those hang out for a bit so the rest of our salad’s super simple now I love asparagus what we’re going to do is just cut it up into little I’m going to take the tops off cuz these butts kind of cook really fast we’ll use those as well but then cut it into little discs so like literally half a centimeter thick all the way down it all makes sense why when it comes together leave that to one side then I’m just going to take a couple of garlic cloves and I like to I like to grate them over my bench scraper stops your board from stinking like garlic especially just for two cloves and it makes it easier to use when we’re going to go to make our dressing leave that to one side then just got a small bunch of thyme here this is pretty young time i’m not going to bother picking this i’m just going to run my knife through actually probably that’s probably too much let’s go half that amount what’s that 10 sprigs and just cut it up i think when time’s nice and young like that it’s really painful to pick i think you’re kind of wasting your time as long as you cut it up fine you’re not going to get that like woodiness that you’d get from a little bit older time push that to one side then we’ve got some onde here for a bit of greens say I don’t know maybe a cup full just maybe two cups full and we’re going to keep this pretty chunky we are going to toss this through the beans and the asparagus and then the only other stuff we need a little bit of hot honey some seeded mustard and some butter but we’re going to wait for our chicken to be finished cooking then we’ll rest it and then we can make the rest of the salad so that’s only been in there for 26 27 minutes and it should be done oh yeah that’s 70° at the bone not a problem at all that’ll rest up nicely put it on a rack to rest you want some of that chicken or the flavor that’s on the bottom of that pan but not too much otherwise your sauce is going to become a bit gnarly a lot some of that’s chicken fat some of that’s um like juices off the meat um so I’d pour more out than you think into the tray underneath cuz you can add it back if you need it we also do want to add a little bit of butter you could leave it out but I kind of think the butter adds like a nice velvetiness just kind of stir that around a bit and just be careful as well this this catches people out all the time this is a fry pan that’s been in the oven for half an hour that handle is hot so make sure you use a towel so keep a towel in your hand or you’ll uh you’ll regret it so get the garlic in there and also the asparagus straight away we’re just trying to saute this we’re not trying to like fry it really hard we just want to get rid of the kind of the rawness from it i’d also be careful about how much salt you add to this you’ll be surprised how much salt sort of still lingering in that pan again you can add more you can’t take it out and this is where we really start adding flavor good amount of black pepper our fresh thyme some good quality seeded mustard about a tablespoon decent amount mustard and chicken match made in heaven half a tablespoon of hot honey at this point turn the heat off i am going to add a little bit more of that chicken h juices from the pan and go our beans cuz at this point we’re just trying to kind of warm stuff through the beans don’t need cooking the asparagus is cooked now it’s all dressed already in the pan going to add the juice of a lemon cut through all that sweetness and also let the sauce down a little bit yum okay so we’ve got our here we’re just trying to wilt this we don’t want to like cook it we’re just trying to wilt it so put that in the pan and stir it through carefully all right super simple platting here in the plate we got carbs and all the veggies and it’s kind of self saucing as well you can see in the bottom of that pan just how much sauce we’ve got in the bottom too which we can kind of let accumulate there and we’ll pour it over the chicken at the end on goes our roast chicken leg drizzle with the sauce so there you go roast chicken with a butter bean and asparagus salad almost looks good enough to eat doesn’t it there’s something truly delicious about a pan roasted piece of chicken and I think people think you know a roast chicken needs to be for a family of four and don’t get me wrong I love a roast chicken but doing it like this means you can do it for yourself or you and your and your partner um and you’re kind of simplifying the sides too right you got tin beans which are delicious couple of veggies and a few pantry staples and you’ve got what I think rivals any roast dinner [Music] delicious this protein is one of my favorite proteins for a couple of reasons it’s delicious it’s low fat so it’s really good for you but one of my favorite things about it is that you can get a bag of them in your freezer and you can pull out a handful they defrost really quickly and there’s lots of different things you can do with them one of my favorite dishes from Chinese takeaway shops of all time is uh black bean sauce like beef and black bean sauce so I’ve always made um prime and black bean sauce when I’m kind of in a pinch um and shout out to my mate Nagi who made a had a really cool recipe for beef and black bean sauce the other day um I took a little bit of inspiration from that i think some of her techniques were really cool um and then some of it’s also you know stuff that I do so first things first we need to soak our black beans so these are salted black beans you’ll find them in like Chinese supermarkets and stuff or or Asian supermarkets they they’re delicious they taste salty unsurprisingly little umami bombs we’re just going to cover those in a little bit of hot water just to let them kind of soften a bit just enough to cover and then while that’s doing its thing we’re going to cut all our other things up like any W cooking or stir fries you got to make sure you’re ready cuz it’s all going to happen pretty quickly one green capsicum take the cheeks off and the bottom and then we want kind of big triangles roughly the same size as the prawn I guess is a good way to scrub that got spring onions here just take the bottoms off we’re going to keep the white parts about 1 cm so still have some bite you don’t want them to completely disappear put those aside and then the green part will cut finer and we’ll toss through right at the end on an angle keep that to one side it’s a good the beauty of having a big board so you can just keep your mis and plus there garlic i’m going to slice this today you could mince it if you wanted to sometimes it’s nice to kind of have like big pieces of garlic like that it’s also easier for cleanup cuz if you smash this onto your board it requires a bit of extra scrubbing put that to the side and then the ginger we’re kind of right at the tail end of the fresh ginger or like the young ginger season i’m going to have like a I guess that’s a thumb sized piece my thumb sized pieces are usually pretty big but we’ll take the knobbybly bits off just scrape any of the kind of darker pieces off when it’s young like this you don’t need to stress too much about peeling it but just like the garlic I kind of want big pieces of ginger today so put it on a flat surface slice it nice and thin and then slice it again so you have like little little kind of matchixs push that to the side so we got our black beans got our prawns some shaing cooking wine light soy sauce little bit of oyster sauce the only other thing oh we got a bit of sugar too some corn starch so we need that to thicken our sauce so we’re going to add that to a bowl along with about the same amount of warm water and give it a stir just to make a slurry so walk on high heat look and if you don’t have a walk you can just use a fry pan now it’s not the same you should use a walk you should have a walk cuz they’re not that expensive but if you don’t have one don’t stress just use a firing pan neutral flavored oil i’m using peanut in the bottom of your walk spread it all around just you kind of like need to season a walk every time you use it effectively so make sure the the oil hits all the sides a little bit more oil than that first in cement when we’re using a walk we the heat should be concentrated on the bottom right when people say walk it actually means breath of the walk so that’s kind of when you toss it like this and you’re getting all this char happening on the outside now it’s really hard to replicate in a domestic kitchen so yes it’s great to be able to have it but don’t stress too much now we’re going to add the spring onions and we’re going to get our prawns in there the other trick is when you’re working on a walk at home try not to lift it off the heat cuz you’re going to lose a lot of that heat pretty quickly you know leave a little bit more time between each ingredient than you would in like a Chinese restaurant uh and that’s because you want the temperature of the walk to come back up all the temperatures come out cuz you’ve added something cold now the ginger goes in and the garlic our black beans a little bit of sugar half a teaspoon not that much at all the sha singing wine light soy and our oyster sauce stir that through so it’s all lovely and incorporated you see these prawns aren’t too far off being cooked which is what we’re looking for i am going to add a little bit more soy sauce we want this fairly saucy so if we get to the point where we’re like h it could be more sauce there i reserve some of the water that we soak the black beans in i’m just going to add that to it and then we need to thicken that so that’s where our corn flour corn flurry our corn starch slurry that’s a hard tongue twister comes in in that goes stir that through add some more water if it gets too kind of sticky you want a nice shiny sauce you don’t want a really gluggy sauce you also want lots of sauce I think all right pretty happy with that finally the spring onion greens heat off so then to serve I’m just going to quickly stir those spring onion greens through i’ve got some jasmine rice here steamed jasmine rice on the prawns go get all that lovely luscious sauce and all the other aromats on there there you go prawns and black bean sauce all the work in that dish is done before you start cooking it you saw how fast that was to cook literally four five minutes in the walk and you’re done and as long as you got some rice ready to go happy days i love black bean sauce it’s delicious salty sweet full of umami and those prawns carry it so well and the fact it can be from your freezer to on your plate in like 30 minutes is an absolute winner yum i even surprise myself [Music] sometimes amatricana i’ve practiced that word so many times and it’s really hard to say it without sounding like you’re taking the Mickey and like putting an accent on amatricana i think that’s correct pronunciation it’s a spaghetti with a sauce based around this delicious piece of meat guanchali another great pantry staple now I know what you’re thinking come on Andy we don’t have guanchchali in our fridge the reason why it’s a great pantry staple is cuz it doesn’t really go off buy a piece put it in your fridge it’ll last months if you don’t have guanchali and you want still want to make this then like some panchetta uh or some kind of smoky bacon but it’s pretty if you live in a metropolitan city now you can get your hands on guanchal i get if you live in regional Australia or regional US guanchal a little bit of garlic some chili flakes some pecarino some uh tin good quality tin tomatoes uh and a little bit of white wine there’s not much here that’s fresh that can go off so there’s no reason that you can’t have this stuff ready to go so first up we just want some guanchal so take your piece that you’re going to use this is this is the fat so guanchchal is a pig gel so the cured pig gel you do need to take the skin off cuz it’s too tough to eat you can save this though uh and if you’re doing like bolognese sauce or like a raggu or something put that in there it’s got full of flavor but with the rest of it we’re just going to dice it up the only other thing that we really need to do on the board is we’re just going to crush this garlic just like that we’re not going to cut it or anything like that we’re just going to do that so I got a big pot full of salted water and I got about 150 200 g if you’re really hungry of spaghetti we’re going to get that in there and get that cooking just going to move this to this other hob let that do its thing got a fry pan over a high heat we don’t need heaps of oil cuz this guanchali is going to render a lot of fat about like half a tablespoon just to just to get things started in with the guanchchala the pan doesn’t need to be ripping hot as well when you put the guanchal in there uh and what that does is just brings the temperature up slightly what we’re trying to do is render this fat out as well as crisp up the outside of the fleshy parts of the guanchal so start in a cold medium pan keep it moving around um and by doing that it’ll just make it it’ll kind of render more evenly and you it’ll color more evenly too once your spaghetti starts to soften it’s really important that you keep mixing it if you don’t mix it you got a chance of it sticks together it’ll also cook more unevenly not really more uny it’ll just cook unevenly i’m going to turn that temperature down that pan’s getting a bit hot it’s not burning or anything but it’s the uh it’s not giving a chance for that fat to render before the meat part is uh starting to crisp up so control your temperature here we also All this lovely fond is good we want that fond but we don’t want it to burn if you’ve made a mistake and your pan’s still a bit hot just add a little bit of water in there to kind of bring the temperature down of the pan so I can see my fonds like a nice color but I don’t want it to get any darker so I just got a little spoonful of water instantly cleans that bottom of that pan off and we can continue to render that guanchale down a bit more so we’re happy with that we’re going to add our chili flakes as much or as little as you like i don’t like too much chili when I’m cooking Italian food especially because I feel like you kind of take away from you know the subtle nuances of like the guanchal and stuff like that there’s too much heat but a little bit is really nice in there i also added those two little pieces of um crushed garlic and we’re just going to kind of move that around the pan for 30 seconds just for that garlic to open up and start releasing some of its oil smells good tell you what cured pork and garlic what’s not to like about that next we go with our white wine make sure you’re using a wooden spoon to scrape off all that fond and we want that to reduce by at least 2/3 before we add our tomatoes all right so our wine’s reduced by quite a lot which is great we don’t want it to completely reduce so going to add our tomatoes and I just put a little bit of water in that can and that’s for no other reason other than I don’t want to waste any of that tomato goodness break up our tomatoes i’m going to cook those out use the back of your spoon to break the tomatoes up you know it’s a pretty quick sauce so we don’t have heaps of time to you know for the the heat to really break them down so it’s kind of it’s not important but it’s good to use the back of your spoon to break them up so you don’t end up with big pieces of tomato bring that to a simmer going to give it a little season with salt not too much at this point cuz that guanchale is pretty salty but we do need to season those tomatoes let those tomatoes cook out for four or 5 minutes then we’ll check our pasta see how it’s going so we got some pecarino here delicious cheese i love it we’re just going to grate some that we’re going to toss through our pasta we’ll grate a bit more over the top once it’s served this will really bring it all together it should kind of emulsify through the sauce make it lovely and rich sauce is looking good it’s actually a lot of sauce for one portion i really struggle with left like having tomato tin tomatoes left over i don’t know why it just kind of freaks me out for some reason so I’d rather make a sauce like this and then kind of pull some out if you wanted to um and save it it would actually freeze pretty well don’t let you know someone’s not might yell at me for that but I think that sauce would freeze pretty well but I’d rather do that make the sauce rather than have half a ton of tomatoes in my fridge that I know reality is is probably going to go in the bin in a week when when I kind of find it again so we’ll just check our pasta i think that’s pretty much ready best way to check if your pasta is cooked is to eat it good i’m turn the heat off i am going to just reserve some of the sauce i probably won’t need all that amount so pull half of it out in goes our pasta don’t stress about letting it drain off a bit of that pasta water will help that starchy water kind of helps it get all homogeneous and lovely toss the sauce through the pasta get the heat back on just so that it just helps with the emulsification add our cheese once your cheese is nicely kind of stirred through it it’s time to serve plate it up big plate of pasta i did a video once about portioning of pasta and everyone got really mad at me that I didn’t make enough so I reckon I’ve made too much this time that’s a put you to sleep size meal that one it’s a lot of carbs bulking a little bit more cheese on top cheese is life there you go amatri chana let’s dig in and have a taste i also got told off for twirling my pasta on my spoon apparently no one in Italy does that but there was a good amount of debate in the comments that some people do twirl some people don’t let me know in the comments do you use a spoon to twirl your pasta or you do it straight in the plate it’s rich full of umami from those tomatoes really nicely seasoned great delicate porky flavor from the guanchal what is not to like about that so there it is another five dishes that got me through nights cooking for myself when I didn’t want to cook heaps and didn’t want lots of dishes if you want to build your repertoire of dishes for one make sure you subscribe for the next time that this one comes around thanks so much for watching and don’t forget to let us know in the comments what one you’re going to cook first we’ll see you next week for another recipe peace