Making vegetables the focus of our diet is widely considered to be the single most important thing we can do for our own health and for the health of the planet. Over the last couple of years, eating a plant-based diet has moved from the domain of brightly painted veggie cafés to proud centre stage.
I hope this book will show you how to do this in your home without too much fuss. It’s packed full of the food I like to eat and the food I like to cook. To my mind, it’s this straight-up everyday food that is so important for us to get right, and get enthused about. And it’s the recipes in this book that I hope will help you cook achievable amazing meals every night of the week.
This book is my notebook of recipes, over 150 of them, flavour-packed with layers of texture and goodness. I hope they will be able to revolutionise how you cook and eat in the same way they have in my home. It’s modern cooking, making the most of a rainbow of grains and vegetables and using flavour and texture to transform your dinners into quick and easy feasts.
They’re recipes I am really proud of. From super-clever and ridiculously quick fifteen-minute one-pot pasta, to a Buddha bowl curry feast that would be grand enough to grace any table, this is the food that makes me happy. The sort that drives my cooking, led by flavour, texture and a deep love and respect for food.
Eating well
I am passionate about eating food that makes me feel good, and while I’ll sometimes reach for a trashy chocolate bar or a stodgy pub roast (which is all part of being human and nothing to be ashamed of), I know that’s not the food that I feel good eating.
I want stand-out, delicious food that leaves me feeling energised, light, bright and satisfied. It’s this intersection between wellness and deliciousness that I strive for with every plate of food I make and eat. And with all the talk of health and wellness in the food industry, I think this sweet spot is becoming ever more important. Wellness doesn’t come at the expense of deliciousness.
I welcome with open arms the new breadth of information and attention around eating well, and I am so thrilled that we are all putting more focus on what we put into our bodies and on the connection between the food we eat and how vibrantly we live.
But I also think it’s important to remember that we are all individuals, each with our own completely separate nutritional needs. I can tell you what works for my body, but I honestly can’t tell you exactly what’s going to work for yours. Nor in my opinion can any chef or, really, any nutritionist. While nutritionists can absolutely be a guide, it is you who have to do the work. You need to have a relationship with your body and a responsibility to listen to it and how it reacts to certain foods. If you feel tired and bloated after eating something, make a change next time – eat a smaller portion, or try a different way of cooking, or another ingredient.
There are lots of people out there ready to name superfoods that can help us lose weight, cure illness and make us more attractive and amazing. It sometimes feels to me as though all this sometimes over-the-top focus on nutrition and ‘clean eating’ has almost become the new, more acceptable way to be on a diet. And in a weird way, that isn’t promoting a healthy attitude to food at all.
It’s important to make a commitment to eating well, but it’s also important to be realistic. Cooking goodness-packed meals every night is going to have a huge impact on your health, and simply getting more vegetables into your diet is a great first step. You can worry about matcha and chia seeds later on.
To me, eating well is far more simple than it is often made out to be. Buy good ingredients, cook at home, make the majority of what you eat plants and vegetables, and listen and react to your body. I don’t think it’s much more complicated than that. Right now, too many sweeping generalisations are being made in the world of food. Foods like bread are being vilified, and chefs and nutritionists are making blanket statements about how certain staple, cheap and useful nutritious foods are unduly bad for our bodies. I think this is damaging, as it means our psychology around these foods changes. We attach guilt and a ‘forbidden’ label to food, increasing our anxiety around it and causing us to crave it even more.
My point here is this: let’s stop looking at food in its respective parts, and making some bad and some disproportionately good. Let’s get back to the whole picture, the whole food. Choosing a balanced way of eating and sticking as close to nature as we possibly can is the most realistic plan for eating long-term. Going to extremes is not a sustainable way of eating or living. What I am proposing here and with the recipes in this book is a sensible, flexible dietary strategy that we can incorporate into our lives successfully and joyfully, day-to-day, and over a lifetime.
The practice of quick, calm cooking
At home, I cook under the same constraints as anyone else. Even though I have a food background, when I come home from a day at work, feeling sometimes jaded with food, the last thing I want to do is spend hours at the stove. I am impatient, usually hungry, and I relish the art of cooking quickly. And that’s what I want to share with you in this book. The clever secrets that chefs and cooks use, quick ways of cooking, smart cheats and ways of working logically which have your dinner on the table in a friendly and achievable time. All of this can happen in a calm and well-choreographed manner that won’t leave your kitchen looking like a bombsite and having used every pan in the cupboard.
I know these recipes can come together in life-friendly times. I asked a kind band of brilliant friends, who aren’t cooks, to test and time themselves, so I know they are achievable for everyone.
The recipes which take 15 minutes are quick supper recipes, delicious and simple, with just a few ingredients that come together in one pan without much chopping or fuss. The recipes that are ready in 20–30 minutes are a little more advanced, with more complex layers of flavour and texture and a few more ingredients, while those that take 40 minutes are real feasts, riots of flavour and colour that I would happily eat at any restaurant table.
In addition to these chapters, this books pivots around a chapter full of what I like to call investment cooking. It’s batch cooking that you can do once a week, or even once a month in some cases, which will mean you have a freezer or fridge full of nourishing, cheap, home-cooked beans, snacks, grains and treats. It’s this cooking that is the backbone of how I cook these days – a little time one day a week yields enough chickpeas for a week’s worth of stews and hummus, and they taste so much better. I find this type of cooking so satisfying, knowing for example that I have a homemade sweet treat to snack on when I hit a low at 4 p.m. rather than reaching for a biscuit.
There is also a chapter on my quick desserts and sweet treats, such as a 10-minute frying-pan crumble, as well as some really easy breakfasts that will make great starts to the day – interesting flavours that come together quickly and make the most of my favourite meal.
This way of cooking is all about simplifying the process, and to some of you that might sound really obvious. More often than not, when I ask people why a recipe hasn’t worked, they reply that they burnt the onions while they were digging out the coriander seeds from the back of the cupboard, or something along these lines. The only way to cook speedy dinners and stay calm is to be organised upfront. I am sure all my friends will read this and laugh, as I have a reputation for being less than well-organised, but in the kitchen I am like a general. The kitchen