Ben Bayly and Karena and Kasey Bird. Photos / Jason Oxenham
For the past six months Greg Bruce has been challenging a chef to make him lunch in less than 10 minutes. He sums up the experience.
Six months ago, tired of arriving at work every day with the same lame sandwich of pesto, ham, spinach leaves and a few drops of Kaitaia Fire, I set out with the ambitious project of convincing the city's leading chefs to replace it one day a week with a concoction
of their choosing.
"What should I make?" they would sometimes ask me nervously, when we were in the early stages of correspondence, and I would laugh inwardly at their apparent belief that my knowledge of cooking might be extensive enough for me to offer a suggestion.
The conceit that they had to make their dish within 10 minutes was inspired by the misleadingly-titled cookbook Jamie's 15 Minute Meals, which I had been given as a gift a few years ago and from which I had cooked a few meals, completing none of them in under an hour.
The first thing I learned from the chefs was that cooking something in 10 minutes, even if you're a professional, is basically impossible. Fifty per cent of the first four dishes in the series were not cooked at all, and the central ingredient of one of the others was white Tip Top brand toast.
