Category: Easy Dinners

  • Milk-roasted chicken with garlic & lemon

    Milk-roasted chicken with garlic & lemon

    I don’t often use the word ‘mouthgasm’ to describe an incredible eating experience, but when I snaffled a wing of this milk-roasted chicken, its skin crisp and golden, interestingly ‘mouthgasm’ was the first word which popped into my mind, quickly followed by the experience itself. Describing a mouthgasm is somewhat obscene, so bear with me…

  • Roasted buttered salmon

    Roasted buttered salmon

    Over these last four months, the UK has been in strict lockdown. Slowly but surely, we are on the return to some kind of freedom, so here are some happy thoughts: 4. Pubs. At last, pubs and restaurants are back. Not that I have a social life other than hanging out with my parents, but…

  • Caramelised onion and feta galette

    Caramelised onion and feta galette

    Lunches are never easy. You open the fridge and hope something delicious jumps out, provocatively dancing the salsa, shaking the tubs of parmesan and olives like maracas. After a year of this working-from-home madness, I repeat, A YEAR, I decided to bake a caramelised onion and feta galette which I had been threatening to do…

  • Cauliflower, pine nuts, salsa verde

    Cauliflower, pine nuts, salsa verde

    I made a cauliflower dish for lunch the other day. It was roasting in the oven, the salsa verde was patiently resting, the pine nuts were on the right side of toasted, when I looked in the fridge to see what else I could grab for us to eat alongside. Aside from a wedge of…

  • Quick and easy one-pot pasta

    Quick and easy one-pot pasta

    This is a story of two extremes. On one hand there is my compulsion to be extravagant and a show off, versus my need for ease and convenience. This dichotomy is reminiscent of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, except focused on food rather than evil. One will overrule the other in the end. And it’s…

  • Vegetable and pearl barley soup

    Vegetable and pearl barley soup

    January is a month of slurping soups. There are thick parsnip and apple soups, practically white with cream and a brightness of flavour that makes you suddenly sit up and eat your lunch more alertly than usual. A butternut squash soup drizzled with turmeric yoghurt, in an attempt to coerce flavour into this despondent vegetable…

  • What to eat this January

    What to eat this January

    We’re back at that time of year – oh happy January! After Christmas, I often feel like a lump of lard. December is a reckless month for eating, one that I fully support of course, but it’s really no wonder the hashtag idiom #newyearnewme popped up a few years ago. With the fresh new year…

  • Roast chicken, lime and herb salad

    Roast chicken, lime and herb salad

    This year we have all made a new friend. That friend is called Lockdown. He’s not a friend to everyone – he’s quite smothering and bossy, to be honest. He says he has your best interests at heart. But if that best interest is me eating my body weight in baguette and not taking any…

  • French cooking: Crêpes

    French cooking: Crêpes

    As I predicted, moving abroad has its hurdles. I write this still awaiting my SIM card and with no bank account, not for the lack of trying. Administration in France is not easy at the best of times but add a pandemic and doors start gently closing with a perfunctory, ‘Désolé!’ Unlike French bureaucracy, that…

  • Goat’s cheese and coriander salad

    Goat’s cheese and coriander salad

    Lockdown has been a peculiar time. Like many others I’m sure, my normally eager productivity has sunk into the depths of a swampy quagmire, struggling to stay buoyant. Cooking for myself is suddenly hard work and my cool night time habit of reading cookbooks has worryingly disappeared. People have been proudly nurturing their sourdough starters…