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Introduction

From scrumptious soups to sizzling lemon sole, cheeky cheesecakes and perfect peppermint creams, here are a hundred of my favourite recipes for relaxed home cooking.

I love nothing more than collecting recipes, testing them and sharing them with people – well, actually, I have to confess that eating the delicious results does give me a bit more pleasure…

Recently I’ve been like a mad food scientist in the kitchen; conducting culinary experiments using everyday ingredients and putting a wicked spin on some familiar traditional recipes. I’ve also drawn inspiration from my travels to Barcelona, Sri Lanka, Corsica and chilled-out Byron Bay, so be ready for a few surprises!

In this book are the kind of recipes that I like to cook on autumnal afternoons and cosy winter evenings. You’ll find comfort in duvet day chicken noodle soup when the dark skies seem just a little too foreboding, and braised lamb shanks with Rioja and chorizo will bring the warmth and passion of an Iberian summer into the nippiest of seasons.

At one in the morning, standing in the kitchen covered in flour, I came up with another of the recipes that I’ve included here. While making a sugar syrup for toffee apples, I rifled through the cupboards and found some red food colouring. As I dropped a few beads of the scarlet liquor into the sugar syrup the mixture fizzled a bit. I swizzled it around in a heatproof glass jug and through the fog of a sugary fatigue I started drizzling crazy shapes on a sheet of baking parchment. When I lifted the band of now warm and hardening sugar and wrapped it around a freshly iced sponge cake sitting forlornly in a corner of the kitchen, graffiti cake was born!

For me, cooking can provide pure escapism into an aromatic realm of flavours, zests, glazes and textures. Sometimes this inspires me to reinvent recipes drawn from childhood memories, such as my sausage roll’s big night out, which reminds me of the salami sticks my mum used to put in my school lunchbox.

It’s important to me that I use ingredients that don’t require a trip to an exotic foods store, and to include recipes that even the most inexperienced or reluctant cook can have a go at. Both my busy thirtysomething sister and my retired seventy-year-old dad have successfully cooked some of the recipes in this book.

I hope that there’s something for everybody here. Whether you like an old-fashioned English muffin spread with lashings of butter, a not-so-Cornish pasty to take on those long winter walks, an oat couture granola bar for a quick-grab anytime snack, or the wonderfully retro and revamped caramelised pineapple and rum upside down cake to finish off the day.

In this book you’ll also find recipes for homebaked breads, cakes, cookies, muffins and bars; soups, starters and canapés when you feel like making that extra effort and easy main meals for lunch or dinner that can cook slow or be rustled up super fast. If you’re vegetarian or fancy a meat-free day, there are also some ideas for new slants on serving up your favourite veg. Not forgetting the sweet stuff; desserts such as my steamed chocolate pudding with warm Mars bar sauce that I could eat all by myself in one sitting, and a few of my favourite little extras – chutneys, sweets and other fine stuff.

Cooking at home, whether for family and friends or just for yourself, is one of life’s great pleasures, and hopefully with these recipes I can show you that it can be relaxed and easy, too.