Mountain Soup is a tasty and absolutely foolproof hot main course recipe. Impress your friends with your laziness and culinary skill!

Ingredients

• 1 can meat ~ braised beef, for instance, or lamb, or steak & kidney pie filling. You can use fish, but stay away from chicken.

• 1 can sweetcorn ~ you can substitute any common pulse: peas, broad beans, red kidney beans. If you use ordinary baked beans, you should wash off the sauce, which will otherwise dominate all the other flavours and make the whole thing seem like eating a tin of baked beans.

• 1 can mushrooms ~ once again, you can make substitutions. The idea of the third can is to add an interesting flavour or texture to the other two ingredients. Campbell's Cheddar Cheese Soup is a good alternative. So is palm hearts.

Method

Put all the ingredients into a saucepan. Stir them, put on a low heat and walk away. Any time between 15 minutes and an hour later your meal will be piping hot and ready.

That's it. The rest of this entry is just gossip, though I should warn younger researchers that this is not as nutritious as fresh meat and vegetables, and cannot by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as gourmet cooking.

History of the dish

I call it Mountain Soup, because it dates back to a long weekend when I went up a mountain (well, all right, the foothills of a mountain) and lived off nothing but this and fruit salad. It wasn't a back-packing sort of weekend, more the kind where you drive a car to a cottage and take the occasional stroll. So carrying heavy provisions wasn't a problem.

The cooking facilities were very primitive - just a saucepan and a hotplate.

Sophisticated variations

At one stage I got very skilled at making Mountain Soup, trying out more and more unusual ingredients, until in the small hours of the morning after a party I ended up as part of a group of about a dozen people in a yuppie's flat in Richmond (Surrey, UK). Everyone was complaining of hunger, and I offered to make Mountain Soup. The kitchen cupboard was a delight, and so was the face of the owner of the flat as I put a huge pan on the hob and emptied can after can into it: lobster bisque, palm hearts, scallops, baked beans rinsed under the tap, a dozen cans in all. His anxiety turned into puzzled awe as his guests complimented him on the delicious slop he served them.

You can live on it (not recommended)

A friend of mine was having a trial separation from his wife and didn't know what to eat (it turned out that he had never cooked anything because he had never lived alone: after leaving his parents' home he'd lived in digs, and then he moved in with this woman who likes to do all the cooking, and married her). Anyway, there he was, thirtysomething, not knowing how to feed himself. I told him about Mountain Soup, suggesting that he would go on to experiment with other dishes and probably end up quite a good cook.

I didn't see him again till about a year later when he was back with his wife. He claimed he'd lived on nothing but Mountain Soup for eight months. As far as I could tell he was quite unharmed. The touching thing is that every week or so he takes over the cooking duties, and makes Mountain Soup for his wife.

A warning

During the time my friend lived on his own, he'd done some experimenting within the Mountain Soup genre, and I pass on his experience to you for your own good:

"Never," he told me solemnly. "Never, ever make Mountain Soup from Spam and mushy peas."