Octopus is something I really enjoy eating. I’ve tried it in several ways: as a stew, with red capers sauce, as part of a seafood pasta dish, grilled on the barbecue

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However, this particular recipe is a favorite because it takes 15 minutes of preparation from start to finish. The 15-minute preparation time actually gives you a finished dish, including accompaniment. The octopus is cooked slowly, then combined with some basic ingredients and served on top of boiled potatoes. This description does not do justice to this dish. You have to take my word for it. Try!

This recipe is a Spanish dish, ‘Pulpo a la Gallega’, or ‘Polbo a Feira’ in the Galician language. It’s the simplest recipe with only four ingredients, but the taste is excellent. A couple more ingredients are used to create the rest of the dish.

Octopus is a hard meat. If you’re not careful, you can end up with a rubbery, chewy plate. One thing you should always do is freeze your octopus. Do not cook fresh octopus, but rather, freeze, thaw and then cook it. This foolproof process softens the fibers. I always buy my octopus from Miracle Foods, as they are always well stocked with frozen octopus (already clean and gutted), ready to be thawed and cooked. The cooking method also contributes to the final result. It seems to me that slow cooking always gets the job done, and it’s the easiest way to cook it anyway!

These are the two busiest weeks I’ve had in the last year, possibly even longer. My book is released on July 27th, next week! I couldn’t be more excited! My to-do list is longer (to say the least), so I’ve been more organized than ever to make sure I don’t waste time where and when I can.

It seems to me that preparing and cooking food can take up a large part of your time. That’s why I make a constant effort to look for recipes that are quick to prepare, with easy-to-obtain ingredients and lots of goodness. While I’m an advocate of taking shortcuts where and when you can, I try to limit them in the food department. This isn’t to say we’ve never said, pizza, but you couldn’t spend the busiest two weeks of the year eating food that comes out of a box in the freezer and oven every day. I could do it maybe once, in two weeks, but that’s the absolute maximum for me.

The slow cooker is a cooking tool that saves me huge amounts of time. It’s one of those magical gadgets where you can spend little time preparing (a batch!) of homemade kindness, getting away for hours, and enjoying food with your family again. Meanwhile, the kitchen has been cleaned, and a lot of work has been done, and you have plenty of extra food left to freeze. Genius, right?

Although it took me a while to get used to it (I went through the awkward phase of getting watery recipes, or dishes so bland I couldn’t stand them, and what about the phase where I only cooked stews and soups in it?), once I did, oh my relief. I was serving 4 meals in 45 minutes of preparation time. From start to finish. I’m not kidding. If you’re intrigued, I teach the whole process, the ins and outs and my secrets in a mini course called ‘Slow Cooking, Fast Batching’. Well, I say mini, the price is mini as it is an AMAZING value, but what you will learn is gold and EVERYTHING you need to know to be a slow cooker hit.

Let’s go back to the dish in question. This is one of those recipes that requires almost no effort, but knows how it does it! Here goes!