Autumn is rolling back around, and with it, my love of all things hot and spicy and bean-stew-y. This recipe is one of my most popular, often cropping up on Instagram and Twitter in the delightful way that my readers love to share their dinner with me. Keep them coming folks, I genuinely love receiving photos of my recipes made […]
This recipe seems and sounds too simple to be true, but sometimes the best dishes are those that allow their ingredients to sing at the tops of their voices without too much complicated fannying around drowning them out. I love a mushroom, especially when I can find exotic varieties reduced to clear in the corner shops and supermarkets, taking them […]
I ordered a rare takeaway last week, having spent 2 days gutting and cleaning my school-holidays-ravaged house from top to bottom, exhausted, and unwilling to mess up my kitchen having spent 17 hours in a pair of marigolds and mostly on my knees. They had a fairly decent range for us herbivores, but I found myself hankering after a shashlik. […]
Apparently we don’t bother with pancakes on Pancake Day any more. That’s what a press release that landed in my email inbox this afternoon told me; that we, as country, aren’t all tossers. We don’t flip out. We no longer belong in the gang of whisk-pour-fry-flip-lemon-sugar-munchers. I simply don’t believe it, and I hope you will all prove me wrong. […]
This year, I saw in the New Year with just a couple of friends and our young children. I drained my last glass of gin, danced around the living room as the clock struck twelve, sang the wrong words to Auld Lang Syne and cuddled and kissed everyone in sight. I went to bed, knowing that that would be […]
I’ve been meaning to write about my ‘mushroom mince’ for months now – I use it instead of soya mince or Quorn as a cheaper alternative that isn’t full of unpronounceable ingredients or a gazillion processes. It’s simple, quick, and actually tastes like food, and can be dried out and stored in a jar for months, or frozen to use […]
This beautiful bounty of Sunday morning baking was based on the vegan banana bread in my first book, A Girl Called Jack, but uses some wholemeal flour and coconut oil for extra goodness. If you don’t have coconut oil, fear not, as the song almost went, Any Oil Will Do. Vegetable, sunflower, light or mild olive, groundnut, rapeseed, whatever you […]
On Thursday, I got a text message from my best friend asking if I wanted to meet for lunch and casually mentioning that it was National Hot Dog Day. Normally I side-eye those National Something Days but heck, National Hot Dog Day? There’s something I can get behind with aplomb. Gusto. Unfettered enthusiasm. And sausages. I’ve been making vegetarian sausages […]
Some people say socca, some say farinata; I decided to christen my breakfast this morning ‘gramcake’ – a pancake made with gram flour and little else. I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to crack into my bag of gram flour, seeing it ticks all of my culinary boxes – it’s high in protein, versatile, and I can […]
One of my readers got in touch last week to say that they had started baking bread using recipes from my book and blog, and that it helped immensely with their anxiety. I totally get that – I find if I’m having a wobbly day, or week, a good session of kneading dough helps to work through it somewhat. It’s […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Now don’t freak out, but here’s a recipe for tea bourgignon. Like bourgignon for tea, but a little more exciting. The pedant in me thinks I can’t exactly get away with calling this vegan heap of deliciousness a ‘bourgignon’, given that it doesn’t have any beef or wine in it, but the rebel in me is shrugging her shoulders and […]
So, the two delightful four year olds in residency have both announced recently that they ‘don’t want school dinners any more’ ‘because they make us eat lots of VEGETABLES.’ News to me, this one, as they have both been fairly consistently good Vegetable Eaters throughout their childhood – albeit *different vegetables*, which means we have a list stuck to the […]
After yesterday’s culinary adventure with old bread crusts and tinned tomatoes (which turned out to be one of the nicest, bowl-lickingly-good things ever), I spooned the leftover portion of soup into a jar and stored it in the fridge, intending to make a soupy lunch out of it today. I opened the fridge about 12 o clock to find the […]
The eagle eyed among you may have noticed that the last few days have seen a veritable flurry of vegan recipes from yours truly. I don’t have any big announcements to make about changes to my diet, I just thought I’d give a lot of love to my vegan readers old and new (who graciously ignore the occasional sausages and […]
This recipe started life as an idea for a vegan white sauce for a future-lentil-lasagne (for new readers, I’m not a practising vegan, my wife-to-be has a pig restaurant, but a lot of my recipes happen to be vegan and I have a loyal core of vegan readers, so I wanted to make a conscious effort this year to cook […]
I woke up this morning craving a carrot soup – it’s all rock and roll round here these days. I’m a bit snuffly around the edges at the moment, sore throat and generally feeling a bit sorry for myself, and still limping around tragically on a still-broken left foot. This may be the most self-pitying recipe introduction to date. But […]
What do you do when you have a pile of black bananas sitting in the fruit bowl? I don’t even know how this happens – I generally work from home, bananas are my go-to snack because I can reach them and don’t have to do anything except peel them and shove them in, yet all too often my darling other […]
Vegan On A Budget, PETA, 20th March.
This luscious, dense, simple little number was thrown together this afternoon in the midst of a craving for something hot, stodgy and comforting while I worked from home in the bitter cold. I love my beautiful (rented) house with its views of the sea, but when the temperature drops and the wind kicks up it is devastatingly cold, and I […]
The first time I stayed at my girlfriends house, all she had in the cupboard was Diet Coke, tinned mandarins and a sticky patch of something ominous that was possibly once soy sauce. Her hob hadn’t worked in over 2 years, and she stubbornly warned me not to try to change her. Undeterred, over the course of the last 10 […]
This simple recipe is a must for any peanut butter lovers. Its first incarnation was as peanut butter-flavoured yoghurt – made by mixing two of my staple food items together for a sweet treat – and it went from there. I don’t add sugar or syrup to sweeten this recipe when I make it as I like the slight tang […]
This recipe first appeared in my Guardian column in 2013, where the prices have been helpfully preserved for posterity – and comparison. It is not a vegan recipe, for the purposes of accurately comparing the rise in prices in basic food products over the past five years, but can easily be made vegan by using your favourite brand of vegan […]
As a child I loved Pop-Tarts™, those saccharine toaster pastries thick with white icing and multicoloured sprinkles that, when eaten greedily from the toaster, would scald your tongue with red-hot jam. I decided to see if I could make my own version from scratch, pastry and all, and here they are. They’re not an everyday breakfast but they’re definitely a […]
I came across this idea in the food magazine that comes free with the Guardian, by the inimitable and rather wonderful Nigel Slater. I was at my girlfriends house for the weekend, where she helpfully leaves the Guardian magazines in the bathroom for my bathtime viewing pleasure, and scrawled the idea of a whole roasted beetroot in my little blue […]
In case you ever find yourself wanting pancakes, but not having any eggs in the house (or bananas, or chia seeds, or flax seeds, or vegan egg replacer), here’s a cheeky cheaty recipe – because some things are just too good to keep to yourself. Serves 4-6, depending on appetite, from 6p each 150g plain flour, 7p (65p/1.5kg, Sainsburys Basics) […]
I very rarely advocate the use of specialist equipment in my recipes, but there is simply no way to make a crumpet without the use of an egg poaching ring. I retired mine when I went vegan, and had to properly search through my kitchen to find them again, but it was worth it. I picked mine up for £1 […]
