Lemon sole with caper sauce

Here’s a restaurant quality dish you can have for a home cooked price – I spent £2.57 on a single lemon sole. It’s a classic French dish (sole meunière) and cooking the fish on the bone deepens the flavour. Just be careful as you eat to remove the bones as you go – it’s worth the…

Beetroot burgers

Here’s a recipe inspired by a four day cookery and meditation retreat at Sharpham House I went on recently. This was the recipe I made as soon as I got home from the trip. It was for supper that same evening – I couldn’t wait to start trying out what I had learnt, even after…

Spanish hunter’s chicken

This started out as a chicken cacciatore (Italian hunter’s chicken) – minus the mushrooms, which I think are traditional in hunter’s chicken (of any nationality). But I had lots of red peppers to use up, and pitted black olives, so I was in two minds – Spanish chicken, or chicken cacciatore? So this is a…

Pea and mint soup with Parmesan crisp

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. This soup ticks all the ‘cheap, fresh and easy’ boxes. It’s also incredibly quick and can be made in less than 10 minutes. I always have a bag of frozen peas in the freezer and a mass of mint growing in a pot in the garden –…

Broccoli and Stilton soup

I was sitting up in bed on Saturday morning planning my week’s food shopping – reading through recipes online, as well as my cook books, while drinking cups of tea in the warm. I came across this article (How to make the perfect broccoli and Stilton soup by Felicity Cloake) so decided to add this soup…

Chicken, chickpea and chorizo stew

I can make this from scratch in about 40 minutes which is enough time to cook on a weekday evening after work. It’s perfect comfort food on an autumn evening. There isn’t very much work to do – just a bit of chopping and slicing and then stewing everything for around 35 minutes. You don’t…

Antonio Carluccio’s beetroot lasagne

I was very sad to hear of the death yesterday of Antonio Carluccio. I loved watching him in cooking programmes over the years and listening to him talk about growing up in Italy during the war and foraging for food – to make meals from mushrooms and nettles. His cooking reflects so much of the…

Rosti topped fish pie

The use of grated potatoes to create a crispy rosti topping turns this fish pie into something a bit special. You can use any fish really but I used two large haddock fillets which were reduced to £2.90 in Sainsbury’s. I also bought a packet of raw prawns for £3.90 – the prawns make the…