The best variety for savoury and sweet apple sauce is Bramley. They are the popular cooking apple, big with glossy green skin and they cook to a lovely pale golden fluffy puree which is easily achieved by beating with a wooden spoon. I cook the peeled and cored apple – often you only need one…

Yet again, on another chilly morning, I’m scrounging in the fridge vegetable drawers and store cupboard for something to turn into soup. This combo is a winner, leeks and onion softened with scraps of bacon thickened with creamy butter beans and prettied up with chopped parsley. It reheats perfectly but add parsley at the last…

My fishmonger here in West London (www.coventgardenfishmongers.co.uk) is big on shellfish and his nets of mussels are rarely barnacle-flecked but their glossy shells hide luscious, plump mussels. Not for me the usual scrubbing and scraping, rinsing and draining that can take a good twenty minutes and a lot longer than the actual cooking. This is…

This could be made as individual pies in shallow round, oven-proof dishes, or as a large pie to share. The filling of chicken, carrot and onion, is chopped small, the top covered with layers of super-thin potato slices, then roasted crisp. Lemon juice adds a welcome tart zing to its creamy sauce and parsley lends…

Two of my best pals slipped quietly out of Gatwick heading for Malaga just before Lockdown 2. They’d planned an extended stay ages ago – nine or ten weeks – ostensibly to write but so far, they’re having the luck of great weather and what sounds like a beach holiday. The food they tell us…

There’s been a small red cabbage mouldering in the fridge veg drawer for weeks and last night as I popped a Vacherin Mont d’Or in the oven (to join crusty oven chips to swipe through the cheese), it occurred to me that I could turn it into coleslaw with an extra high proportion of gherkin…

When I think back to the palaver my mother went through with the annual ritual of making the Christmas puddings, not to mention mincemeat for mince pies and Christmas cake, it is shockingly easy to make them today. All you do is stir all the ingredients together and steam the mixture in pudding basins. The…

I can’t stress enough how simple and simply delicious this gratin is. The starting point for the recipe was the need to make a hot meal from leftover roast chicken. Again. In my fridge I happened to have eight roast tomato halves and a small bag of young spinach. The former were skinned and cut…

When I was growing up in the late fifties and sixties, family weekday suppers followed a pattern. Monday night was always something made out of the remains of the Sunday roast and we always had fish (usually fried, with home made chips) on Friday. There was always pudding, usually a fruit pie, rice pudding or…

I love big chunky soups like this, thick with whatever vegetables are plentiful or need eating up. This one begins, as many soups do, with onion, adding carrot, leeks and a few long, skinny but small ratte potatoes sprouting as if they’re growing white beards. I also happened to have a packet of smoked bacon…