I’m not a huge fan of chicken breast fillets but one favourite way of cooking them is beaten thin into escalopes, giving them the f.e.b treatment – dipping in flour, egg and bread crumb – then quickly frying to a crisp to just cook the chicken. I sometimes smear the chicken with Dijon mustard first…

One of my favourite standbys for quick, flexible, healthy snack lunches is Itsu miso-easy soup sachets. They come in sets of five and one is enough, diluted with a mug of boiling water with almost anything you care to add to it. I’ve tried tofu, leftover chicken, leftover peas and carrots, chopped green beans, diced…

Who’d have thought that a fridge tidy cook up of a single corn on the cob, few fine green beans and peas from the freezer with chopped coriander mixed through it, could result in such a good muddle of crunch and soft textures and gentle flavours. Delicious hot, the leftovers – I always make too…

Here’s a good example of how handy it is to have some pickled cucumber stashed in the fridge. It doesn’t take long to make from scratch (see Almost Greek Salad with Pickled Cucumber) but how handy to have it done. This salad on toast became a favourite lockdown lunch; all it requires is tuna, pickled…

I love pickled cucumber, useful in salads and sandwiches.  My favourite quick way of making it, is peeling, splitting and scraping out the seeds of half a cucumber, then slicing across the halves in skinny half moons. I then lay the pieces out on a plate and splash with cider or white wine vinegar. It’s…

The soft but dense and creamy texture of hake goes particularly well with the creamy texture of butter beans but I know not everyone likes them. If preferred, this could be made with cod, haddock or Pollack and other canned beans could replace butter beans; haricot or cannellini would work very well. The fish is…

The dense flesh of thick salmon fillets won’t fall apart when it’s cooked in kebab-style chunks, so is ideal for quick noodle dishes like this one. It’s briefly marinated in soy sauce then stirred into soft red onion with a hint of garlic, using miso soup paste or half a chicken stock cube for the…

The other night, when I faced leftover roast chicken and leftover peas, the memory of a lovely way of combining them popped into my mind. This fricassee is actually one of my earliest recipes and last night’s version with plenty of herbs, microplaned lemon zest and ‘garnish’ of little new potatoes tossed with lemon juice…

Mine is a typical postage stamp London garden with lousy soil depleted by ivy grown to hide the fence and block out the neighbours. Three things flourish, jasmine, honeysuckle and a vine, other things are grown in big pots. The vine, now 20-odd years old, produces small sweet green grapes but in late May, June…