This pasta dish with kale, lemon, trout roe and parsley is a quick and easy mid-week meal, but also the addition of the trout roe makes it seem fancier than it is. You could substitute the roe with anchovies which you can cook along with the garlic and kale if preferred.

Another great vegetarian meal that is suitable any time of the year and is filling enough to be a main meal without any addition. Particularly with the tangy lemony yoghurt dressing, this salad hits so many notes. I love the toasted nuts, and using lots of fresh herbs. It’s not the most cost effective of salads for that reason but there again there is no meat or fish, so swings and roundabouts I guess.

Hands down this is my favourite Thai dessert. I love the wonderful balance of the sweet, sticky coconut rice with a hint of salt combined with juicy, fresh mango.

This salad is both light a fresh from the fennel, apple, greens and the zing of the lemon but at same time the smoked mackerel packs a punch of flavour making the salad feel meaty and substantial. I love this in the summer for dinner.

This ice cream is very easy to make. It can be in the freezer within 10 minutes of starting. It’s super creamy and packed full of raspberries which offset the sweetness of the ice cream. As this is raspberry flavoured I couldn’t resist throwing some white chocolate in there as well, it’s just a flavour combo that is a match made in heaven!  

Have you ever been making a chocolate based treat involving melting chocolate and had the horror of it seizing up and becoming a stiff, grainy, lumpy mess? Don’t worry, it can be fixed!

The great thing about poke bowls is that they’re easy to prepare, you can put whatever you want in them and they’re generally quite a healthy meal whilst also being so tasty and colourful. I’ve used tuna here but salmon is another favourite. If you can’t get sushi grade fish that you can eat raw then you could always just use cooked fish.

This tuna kimchi fried rice is so flavourful from the Korean staples of gochujang, gochugaru and kimchi. You can control the heat with the gochugaru (Korean pepper flakes) and either keep it relatively mild or make it as hot and spicy as you like! This is a really quick and easy dish to make and so versatile. If you don’t fancy tuna you can substitute in prawns, tofu, chicken or whatever you prefer. A fried egg with a runny yolk finishes this dish off perfectly.

This dessert is surprisingly easy to make and can mostly be made well in advance making it a good option for a dinner party. It looks impressive yet means not too much faffing away from guests. It’s also got built in portion control!  I love the addition of the blueberries in the bottom but you could leave these out if preferred.

I love normal crisps made of potato, but the problem is I could mindlessly eat a whole big bag and we all know they’re not the healthiest for us. Kale crisps provide a far healthier alternative, baked in the oven you can control the amount of oil and salt used. They’re also super easy to make!

This is such a stunning looking dessert, perfect for a hot summer day when you don’t fancy a heavy dessert but want something more than just fruit. This can be served with cream, ice cream, yoghurt or just eaten on its own. I’ve seen similar recipes that use sparkling wine or even champagne but I have used sparkling grape juice here to make it non-alcoholic.

Another great Nigella recipe, I’m a big noodle fan and this is a twist from the norm. Cinnamon and celery give the dish a new dimension but the flavours of ginger, garlic, soy sauce and oyster sauce bring a comforting familiarity.

The last dish from my recipe archive. Simple pan fried pak choi, this goes with pretty much every Chinese dish as a side. It’s so quick simple, you really can’t go wrong!

I came across this dish during my travels in China, it’s spicy and fragrant, typical of Sichuanese food and was an instant favourite of mine. I had to try and make it myself when I returned home to the UK. This is another original retro recipe from 2013 that I wrote up along with my mum’s baked pork recipe.

I found this old recipe on my computer, it’s actually the first recipe I ever wrote up, way back in 2013 for another friend’s blog! I thought this might be a good time to repost and give it a new audience. It’s a recipe from my mum, one of the dishes she used to always make for me when I was a kid that was always happily received.

This is one of those salads that people who don’t really like salads tend to like. In that sense it’s a crowd pleaser as it’s a great salad for salad lovers too! It’s full of goodies, salty feta, spicy chorizo, sweet potatoes, toasty pine nuts, the only real green is the baby spinach.

Use sashimi grade tuna for this salad and all it needs is a quick sear. This salad is light and fresh with a distinct  hint  of East Asian flavour.

This salted caramel ice cream is rich and creamy, with a deep caramel flavour. The salt offsets the sweetness perfectly. It’s great on it’s own but even better with a variety of toppings. My favourites are caramel sauce, caramel waffles, chocolate chips and some chopped nuts. It’s really nice with some popcorn or wafers too, basically anything!

This is a popular type of fried noodles in Thailand. It has a relatively simplistic flavour profile, heavy with soy and oyster sauce. In contrast pad thai tends to have lighter zingier flavours with peanuts, lime and chilli.

It took me ages to find nice wide rice noodles to make this dish with, I finally found some in a really big Asian supermarket that had a 20 metre long aisle of different types of noodle! For this dish, the wider the noodles the better in my opinion.

I’m a big halloumi fan, whenever I have it in any meal, I never miss having meat. This salad includes both lentils and chickpeas which makes it really substantial and suitable for a main meal.