I’ve wanted to develop this idea from a mad little kernel in my wild head, into a fully fledged recipe, for several years now, and I’m delighted to finally share it with you. It’s all the fun and flavour of a fish pie, in 15 minutes, in one pan, and it’s an enormous hit in my household. Especially with me, […]
This recipe first appeared in Tin Can Cook, my fourth cookbook, and one that started off as a passion project and ended up being my bestselling book to date, with around 20,000 copies donated to people in food poverty in the UK. (For which I tip my hat to The Trussell Trust, for facilitating the administration of thousands of books […]
This recipe was one of my favourite, simple ones from my first cookbook, A Girl Called Jack. Originally borne of a way to use up a bulk-buy bag of carrots (in the days before the guinea pig!), and to make veg exciting for a then two-year-old boy, it’s a simple, bright staple in my home today. In fact, I’ve just […]
This recipe from my microwave series is based on a recipe from my book, A Girl Called Jack, that I see popping up on my Twitter feed and Facebook pages time and time again – it seems to be a definite favourite among my lovely readers! And so, I wondered if it was possible to make a portable microwave version, […]
Friends will know that my Marmite obsession is almost as out of control as my peanut butter obsession. In leaner times, I would substitute Marmite, which was well out of my budget range, for a paste made from a crumbled Basics beef stock cube, mixed with boiling water, and allowed to cool. Smeared onto toast with butter, it delivered that […]
I love making a mushroom stock when I have a few shrivelling up in the drawer of the fridge, cooking them long and slow with some garlic and onion and some dried or fresh herbs, before freezing it to use as the base of a flavoursome risotto or stew… Pungent and almost truffley, at just a fraction of the […]
Bear with me folks, because this baby sounds a lot posher and more complicated than it actually was. You can make it go further by blitzing a slice of bread in the blender or grating it, and mixing it with the mince to pad it out. There’s a scarce amount of onion and garlic in this, because of the short […]
It would be remiss of me not to include this ‘not really a recipe’, as I have eaten it almost every day since the microwave project began. It came around by accident, like so many of these things do – I was trying to make banana chips in the microwave and ended up with a hot banana mush… Undeterred, I […]
I’m a few days into the microwave cooking project since I gave up my oven for Lent and I have to say, I’m having a blast. I’ve set up a test kitchen in a corner with a fridge, microwave and kettle, and it’s like learning to cook all over again. Today I poached an egg for lunch, and mucked it […]
Baking eggs in the microwave is an egg-splosive roulette, where every second and wattage seems to count! I’ve done it for a few days running now, to try to test the waters before sharing my accrued wisdom on the subject, only to find I’m three days in and still none the wiser! I thought I’d cracked it (no pun intended, […]
After last weeks porridge experiment, several of my readers got in touch to tell me that they do something similar, but with dried skimmed milk. Well, I rushed to the supermarket to pick up a bag, to solve another household problem. So Thankyou dear readers for this ingenious idea – I’ve made a Super Express Portable Porridge pot from a […]
COOKING ON A BOOTSTRAP 