Egg fried rice is excellent fridge tidy food. Those leftover peas, the pickings from the roast chicken or the single egg, can be the beginnings of Chinese-style egg fried rice. It was one of the first things my youngest son Henry learnt to cook. When he was about six or seven, he loved going to…

I reckon Seasoned Pioneers make the best ras al hanout, the Moroccan spice mix crucial for tagine and useful for other dishes too. It brought a haunting spicy heat to this lovely stew of buttery aubergine with slippery soft red onion, sweet-sour tomatoes and salty green olives. Serve it piled over cous cous with a…

This soup is incredibly easy to make and very healthy. Merely slice and rinse the leeks, peel and dice the potato and cook together in 1.4 litre salted water, covered. When tender, after about 10 mins, add 125g spinach. I used a bunch of proper spinach with stalks but any will do; frozen not recommended….

This is such a simple soup; just roast peeled, halved carrots and halved tomatoes with a smidgen of olive oil, liquidize everything with vegetable or chicken stock and enrich and fine tune the flavours with a crumble of feta and squeeze of lemon. It ends up a rich, Heinz Tomato Soup colour with a creamy…

I’m calling this a pie in the shepherd’s pie mode but instead of a mashed potato topping it has thin slices of potato quickly blanched then arranged French apple tart-style. The slices are tossed with oil, so they slide together nicely and surface slices crisp up deliciously well. I’m not quite sure what happened between…

You want your best, firmest, tastiest medium-size tomatoes for this sandwich as they are sliced very thinly and topped with finely chopped pitted black olives and capers with a drizzle of your best olive oil and another of your finest syrupy balsamic vinegar. I splashed out on Natoora’s so-called winter tomatoes If you can buy…

Many years ago, when I cooked a daily after work recipe for the Evening Standard, I wrote about Katharine Whitehorn’s Cooking in a Bedsitter first published in 1963 and again in 2008. Her pragmatic and amusing style was a breath of fresh air in world where most cookery books were wrapped up in etiquette and…

One of my first kitchen jobs I had as a child was making pastry. I didn’t get to roll it out or drape it around any food, just the least interesting part of pastry making, measuring out the tablespoons of flour, cutting the fat over it and using my fingers to quickly rub the two…

My photo shows the cumin dusted slow-roast shoulder of lamb with cous cous, aubergine, potatoes and shallots from One Pot Wonders, the lamb so soft it can be pulled rather than sliced. This recipe isn’t so photogenic but is far simpler to make, the lamb slow-roasted with onions and carrots, sitting on diced onion to…