Sprout, chicken and pecrorino winter salad (M&S recipe) – perfect for post-Christmas as it’s light but also would be ideal for using leftover turkey, cheese, nuts and sprouts.

I’ve been wanted to try this out for ages – the theory is that the buttermilk tenderises the chicken and then acts as the base for the crispy coating It’s a really easy recipe – to be honest, it was only finding the buttermilk that proved to be difficult. I finally found some in one of the […]

Presented with three key ingredients – a whole chicken, a bag of carrots and a couple of pounds of Maris Pipers – it would be easy to go for the obvious. And I do love a mid-week roast. But I’ve been challenged* to come up with something a little different so I’m going for lighter […]

You can’t beat a one-pot stew for a swift and simple midweek tea. This one is based on a BBC Good Food recipe which I played about with cos I didn’t have half the ingredients (who keeps chipotle paste in the store cupboard?!) It was warming, spicy, smokey and a bit sweet which is why […]

I’m a bugger for a chicken Kiev – love the little blighters. Can’t say no an M&S chicken cordon bleu either. So I’m always on the lookout for interesting things to do with a chicken breast or two. This is one of the best I’ve found in a long time – a thin crispy, savoury […]

This is really just a quick easy marinade for grilled chicken – I’m optimistically banking on a few September barbies. Drumsticks and thighs are good for flavour and they’re good value – but they can take a while to cook through so I always slash them a few times down to the bone. It also […]

This was a student favourite – before the days of even thinking about authenticity or difficult-to-follow recipes, it was just ‘curry’. What you needed midweek to give you an excuse to make poppadoms. I always used chicken on the bone – thighs, drumsticks or a mix as it’s more flavourful and doesn’t dry out like […]

You can’t beat a home-made pie – it’s up there with soup and a cracking roast in terms of ‘most comforting things to cook’ in my book. And it doesn’t have to be difficult or time consuming, thanks to frozen pastry. Turkey or chicken and ham pie is a fantastic way to turn leftovers into […]

You know how The Colonel has a secret blend of spices for his fried chicken – well, I’ve got one too. Only it’s not a secret because I’m about to share it. I use it for traditional ‘Southern Fried’ coating for fish, chicken, turkey or fish. Recently I’ve taken to doing a final coat of panko […]

It’s that time of year again when the fine chaps at WordPress send out a little reminder of what my blog’s been doing all year. Last year enough people had been kind enough to drop by to fill 14 Boeing 747s, apparently. This year about 16,000 turned up – the equivalent of a six-date sell-out […]