Category: Easy Dinners

  • Easy Oven-Baked Risotto with Leek and Sage

    Easy Oven-Baked Risotto with Leek and Sage

    This week’s oven-baked risotto came about because of the snow. I woke up this morning at 7:15 all of a fluster as I do every time my alarm rings. It’s a soothing alarm tone, one with bells and bird song, it’s very meditative rather an a literal alarm which rings like a screaming siren, but…

  • The Perfect Bangers, Mash and Onion Gravy

    The Perfect Bangers, Mash and Onion Gravy

    Smoothies are all well and good, but I can’t escape the fact it is January. I didn’t expect the south of France to be sunshine and rainbows 12 months a year, but honestly, the other day it was warmer in Edinburgh than in Toulouse. And so, understandably, I’m in hibernation. The shutters are down, metaphorically…

  • Comforting Miso Chicken Soup

    Comforting Miso Chicken Soup

    If self-care had a physical form, it would be in the shape of miso chicken soup. You might be thinking that you self-cared yourself enough this Christmas – eating all that cheese would be anyone’s ideal form of self-care (besides anyone with lactose intolerance that is), all smug and warm like dipping into a bath…

  • The 4 Best Toast Toppings

    The 4 Best Toast Toppings

    The easiest snack in the world. It’s a piece of cake, or should I say, toast. And the great thing about this snack is the fact there is such a thing as toast toppings. If there is a snack that can withstand all weathers, it is toast. From Welsh rarebit dripping with cheese in the…

  • French recipe: Creamy Leek and Potato Soup

    French recipe: Creamy Leek and Potato Soup

    To quote Elizabeth Gilbert, since living in France, “I’ve been doing rude things to my body.” However, it seems unlikely that this leek and potato soup will help. While Liz made sweet love to pizza and pasta and gelato in Rome over the course of four months in her book ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, I have…

  • Classic Lasagne with Three Cheeses

    Classic Lasagne with Three Cheeses

    Before you immediately click away from this recipe because of course you know how to make lasagne, or you may be apologetically shrugging as if to say ‘so sorry Ally but my mum’s recipe for lasagne is unbeatable’, I’m just going to quickly say – you haven’t tried this lasagne. And I’m also going to…

  • How to Build a French Charcuterie Board

    How to Build a French Charcuterie Board

    It was during my first visit to see Gaylord in France that I realised how seriously the French take charcuterie. While it took me another year to eat snails, then a whole year after that I finally encountered frogs legs, charcuterie has been a weekly snack since my plane touched down in 2020. As you…

  • Cheat’s Prawn Ceviche with Avocado

    Cheat’s Prawn Ceviche with Avocado

    Our evening binge-TV is Modern Family. There are 11 seasons so it looks like we’re covered until next summer (who am I kidding, we’ll be finished within a month). In an episode we watched the other night, a character lamented, ‘Do you remember when summer meant fireflies, cut-off shorts and ice cream trucks?’ Do I…

  • Burrata Salad with Courgette, Basil and Pistachios

    Burrata Salad with Courgette, Basil and Pistachios

    At the beginning of the summer, the thought that one day I might be sick of salads was a laughable concept. Fresh, cold and crunchy, salads was everything the weather was not as here in the south of France, the temperature has been balancing on the cusp of 40C for more days than I care…

  • Easy Spaghetti Vongole

    Easy Spaghetti Vongole

    Many great spaghetti dishes come together in under 15 minutes. Aside from a slow-cooked ragu or a Bolognese, a spaghetti dinner gives you little time to prepare yourself, whether that’s finishing an email, video game or conversation before it’s on the table, steaming its way into a gluey tangle. Carbonara, spaghetti aglio e olio (the…