LYDIA GERRATT

Mussels are dominant enough in flavour to be able to take on the powerfully fragrant Thai green curry aromatics and make one of the tastiest mussel dishes I have eaten. It’s so flipping delicious, you have to try it. Beautiful fresh Scottish mussels are in season now (during the winter) and you can pick up a 1kg net from the supermarket for £3.79, which is a total bargain! My little boys (now 7 and 5 years old) have been eating curries for the last couple of years, but only

If you love that dense savoury umami flavour you get from prawns, then I urge you to make this dish. Satisfying is an understatement. The key ingredient is prawns, and they must be raw with their shells and heads still on to make the stock. The shells and the heads are full of the naturally occurring umami compound called glutamate and it’s the glutamate that gives this risotto its unbelievable flavour. The bright orange colour seeps out of the shells when cooked. I buy a

This is a Hong Kong noodle dish that my husband (who is Chinese, so you know this recipe is the real thing!) taught me. It’s one of those dishes that is huge on flavour but doesn’t need a million ingredients to pull it off. Soy sauce, sesame oil and oyster sauce are the key flavours. I always have these bottles in my kitchen cupboard and along with garlic and ginger, which are always in my fridge, it’s only a few more ingredients to pick up on my way home to make the noodle

You need 3 things; super fresh squid, a cast iron frying pan and a lot of heat. I get up at the crack of dawn a couple of times a year and drive to Billingsgate Fish market to buy squid that has come straight off the fishing boats. I buy at least 3kgs and freeze them. When I was there last week, there were both Scottish and Cornish squid. I went for Scottish as I assumed that the icy Atlantic Sea would make the squid more tender and flavoursome as they grow much slower in

This is the pasta dish that is on every menu in those little Italian cafés that are right on the beach in Italy. It tastes phenomenal. Read through the recipe a couple of times, line up your ingredients and pans because once you start to cook, it’s fast! Though, you do get your food on the table and start eating quickly. A green lettuce salad and some wine to go with this recipe is all you need to make a perfect meal. Miraculous ingredients: fresh Scottish mussels, raw she

The flavours in this dish are incredible. Chorizo and prawns are like the best of friends, they get on so well together and the peas, well they just keep adding to the overall yumminess. It’s worth using egg tagliatelle as the texture and rich flavour are strong enough to take on the paprika released from the chorizo. My little boys scoff this pasta in 2 minutes flat. Miraculous ingredients: Unearthered chorizo de leon, Guiseppe Cocco egg tagliatelle pasta Prawn, chorizo and

The ingredients in this recipe are so achingly in season that even the food glitterati would be impressed. I actually ate this at the Royal Opera House (me and my sisters took my mum for her 80th birthday!) and thought it would be another brilliant fish recipe to have on hand. I’ve changed it slightly by adding the juice of a lemon and then fried/steamed the salmon in that juice. I find that salmon can almost be too rich (I suppose it is an oily fish after all) and the lemo

Sea bass is a beautiful fish. The fillets are perfect for frying and have an almost creamy flavour with a lovely thin crispy skin. When I weaned my boys onto real food at 6 months, I used to give them a lot of sea bass as they found the soft flesh so easy to eat and they seriously loved the delicate taste. A lot of the supermarkets sell sea bass fillets individually wrapped in 10 portion bags. Whenever I see them on promotion, I buy a bag and put it in the freezer (sea bass

I love smoked trout fillets. They taste even better when eaten with a little yoghurt, spicy rocket leaf and horseradish sauce. To make it into a decent size meal, I add some salad, fresh coriander and a few butter beans. When I’m working from home this salad is the best. It has all those seriously healthy ingredients I try and eat; smoked trout = OMEGA 3, butter beans = protein, full fat yoghurt and salad = all the right vitamins, minerals and fats. But, best of all the f

I think that this recipe is truly the loveliest and most delicious way to cook prawns. It’s the classic combination of garlic and parsley with the sweetness of prawns. A little chilli works amazingly well too, though I have to add the chilli to my portion separately once cooked as my little boys shout at me if the food is too spicy! Did you know it’s actually the prawn shells that release the savoury seafood taste which works so well with the sweetness of the prawn meat? P

It would be rude of me not to warn you that even though this recipe is super simple (it literally takes 15mins to cook) you do have to marinate the salmon overnight to get the best flavour. But I promise, it’s totally worth it. I came across this recipe in my all time favourite food magazine, Cook’s Illustrated. The first time I tried it out on my little boys I didn’t have any sake so I substituted with brandy (which is always in my cupboard) – it was very good, but a littl

I don’t think I could give you a more simple fish recipe if I tried…..no excuse for not eating more fish with your children (they need the brain food, parents!!). My mum is from Montenegro and that is where I, my sisters and brother spent every summer when we were young. I could write pages about the phenomenal food with its Venetian and Ottoman influences, but the shining light of all the dishes from this Eastern side of the Adriatic is the stark simplicity of its grilled f

My all time favourite ingredient I developed when I was a Waitrose food buyer was stock. I am so flipping proud of them. It took a year to find a factory that could make stock in the same way a cook does at home and then it took an age to find the right ingredients. We made the fish stock from the obligatory fish bones, but also used lots of lobster and langoustine shells to give it that deep, delicious, shellfish flavour. And it’s a good fish stock that makes this broth al

Red mullet has a delicious creamy almost earthy flavour. It is one of my favourite fish. It’s not that easy to find in Britain, the supermarkets don’t sell it, but I have found red mullet in quite a few fishmongers. The absolute best way to cook this fish is frying. I know you think frying will make the fish greasy, BUT, if you get the temperature right (as in very hot) there is absolutely no oiliness. The secret to non-greasy fish is dusting them lightly with flour before

This is the one dish I crave whenever I go on holiday to Italy or Spain as it’s so easy to find heaps of local fresh anchovies in all the fish markets. When they are fresh they taste nothing like the preserved tins of anchovies, instead they have that very satisfying fresh fish flavour; clean and extra more-ish when fried to a light crispness. I watched my Italian friend from Liguria, Patrizia (the one who has taught me so many true Italian recipes) make these anchovies for

Did you know it’s the prawn shells that release the savoury seafood taste which works so well with the sweetness of the prawn meat? The shells are full of the naturally occurring umami compound called glutamate. When you cook prawns, even for just a few minutes with their shells on, they take the flavour of the dish to a higher level of serious deliciousness. My best friend’s mum cooked this dish for me when I visited them in Liguria about 15 years ago. Patrizia’s family i

It’s spring, which means that the days of eating in-season fresh mussels are numbered….. By the end of April you won’t be able to find those black shiny nets of Scottish mussels in the supermarket and fishmongers. So I’m planning on getting my last few mouthfuls now. I LOVE mussels but after my tenth dish of spaghetti alle cozze I want a new recipe and mussel gratin is ridiculously tasty, easy and fast. This dish is cheap too. 1kg of fresh mussels is £3.80 for a net of pur

Every now and then I crave a light meal with killer flavours. The sharp sourness of lemon (I use a lot in this recipe), pungent garlic, aniseed tarragon and savoury parsley combined with delicate salmon flakes, peas and egg pasta does it for me. I usually double the quantities below to make enough tarragon, parsley and garlic herb butter to last for at least 6 months in the freezer. This butter is brilliant for adding flavour to any fish (I use it in the roast salmon, potat

My recipe was featured in the Waitrose Weekend magazine I used to work with a Food Buyer at Waitrose who had a serious passion for Cullen Skink. He would indulge his love for this classic Scottish soup once a year when he made the trip to Moray to visit the Baxter’s soup factory in Fochabers. The small town of Cullen is down the road, so you know you’re getting the real thing. This was the first time I had ever heard of this soup even though I had been working in the food i

My recipe featured in the Waitrose Weekend magazine; It’s autumn, there’s an ‘R’ in the month - now is the time to eat shellfish. Mussels are in season, they’re abundant, so delicious and best of all they are cheap. A fresh net, 1kg, is about £3.80 and will feed 2 adults and 2 children easily. I LOVE mussels. And I love that you can only buy fresh mussels during autumn and winter. It makes this dish worth waiting for. The spaghetti is cooked in the mussel liquor which cr