LYDIA GERRATT

Slow baked aubergines in a rich tomato sauce with a hint of cinnamon, eaten with full fat Greek yoghurt and Turkish bread is the best dinner. Frying the aubergines golden brown in extra virgin olive oil before baking in the tomato sauce makes them even more flavoursome. It’s definitely worth spending the time to salt the aubergine slices first to draw out some moisture and create a denser texture as you’ll get a better golden colour and flavour when frying. It’s also worth f

You need this recipe in your life. It takes minutes to cook and the flavours and texture are so satisfying that you’ll feel that contented happiness from the simple pleasure of eating tasty good food. I try to only use ingredients that can be bought in most supermarkets, but with this recipe you’ll have to make a trip to a Chinese or Japanese supermarket to find the Enoki (Golden needle) mushrooms - it’s too good a recipe not to share. Enoki are not expensive or in the leas

This recipe is why I love hanging out with all the foodies on Instagram. Most of the people I follow are not celebrity chefs, but food lovers from all around the world who love sharing and talking about their recipe ideas. A while ago, I posted a photo of my Chinese style shiitake mushrooms on Instagram and a couple of Japanese women I follow told me about their go-to mushroom recipe. Their way of frying mushrooms and flavouring with butter and soy sauce is so simple (I did

What I remember most when my Montenegrin aunt gently fried pale green peppers in olive oil is the heavenly smell. There is something about that aroma, both savoury and sweet, which makes you very hungry. When the peppers became beautifully soft from all the stewing in the olive oil, my aunt would pile them onto a large plate, scatter with lots of raw garlic slices and sea salt. The peppers were left to cool on the balcony for 10 minutes so you could then eat them with your

Sometimes you see a lovely looking vegetable in the supermarket and wonder which is the best way to cook it. This is a super simple recipe, made with garlic and olive oil! Miraculous ingredients: Swiss chard, extra virgin olive oil Swiss chard with garlic and extra virgin olive oil Ingredients 200g Swiss chard 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 2 tablespoons water Sea salt Method Place a medium size frying pan (which has a lid) on a low he

Roast butternut squash, aubergine, red peppers, onions and garlic are brilliant as a warm salad on soft green lettuce leaves with huge dollops of yoghurt tahini dressing. Miraculous ingredients: fresh rosemary, soft round green lettuce, full fat whole milk Greek yoghurt, tahini Roast vegetable warm salad with a yoghurt tahini dressing Ingredients ½ butternut squash, seeds and skin removed and chopped into large chunks 1 red pepper, seeded and cut into 6 slices 1 aubergine, c

All the vegetables for this recipe go into a baking tray in a super-hot oven and are ready in under an hour. The ridiculously high heat quickly drives off all moisture so the vegetables caramelise and crisp up to delicious perfection. The handful of baby plum tomatoes makes all the difference. They add the right amount of acidity and sweetness to the potatoes. Don’t be tempted to leave them out! I make this dish all the time and eat it alongside any meat or fish, or someti

We are truly in the depths of winter, London has been freezing for weeks now and the only thing that warms me up is this soup, very strong tea with a tiny bit of milk and my hot water bottle with its fake fur fluffy cover. My little boys go mad for this soup, which is good as it only takes 30 minutes to make and I always have potatoes, carrots and chicken stock in the pantry, so I only ever have to buy the leeks and cream on my way home. I like it made with chicken stock (I o

This is such a brilliant breakfast recipe; eggs, red peppers, spring onions, tomatoes, jalapenos and cheese all wrapped up in flat bread. It’s so ridiculously delicious and will keep you going until dinner time. Long before I had children I used to go horse-riding in the Sonora dessert in Arizona for a week and stay on a dude ranch (COWBOYS!!). I expected the riding to be amazing and it was, but I didn’t expect the food to be so seriously tasty - south western cooking is to

I found this recipe in Jamie Oliver’s ‘Jamie at Home’ cookbook but I’ve changed it slightly to use fresh spinach instead of rainbow chard. I love chard, but it only tends to be available in the supermarkets when it’s in season during the winter and even then I struggle to find it. I thought fresh baby spinach would work just as well instead and I could then eat this dish when I’m working from home and add lots of chilli as I don’t have to worry about my little boys complaini

My husband is from Hong Kong and whenever he makes dinner for us he always cooks at least two vegetable dishes to go with all the other food on the table. I love this about Chinese cooking – there are always a lot more vegetables on the table than meat. I used to think Chinese cooking was complicated as I didn’t understand how to use a few ingredients to add serious flavour until my husband showed me how it’s done. The secret is to keep the ingredients list short and simple

This is one of the tastiest and most lovely ways to cook with mushrooms when they are at their best during the autumn season. And, it’s so simple that it’s barely even a recipe. You can use any type of mushroom but, if by some miracle, you get your hands on some fresh porcini mushrooms use them as the flavour will be beyond incredible. Otherwise, the large mature Portobello mushrooms from the supermarket have a decent full flavour that works so well with that that classic co

My mum used to make piles of potato latkes for me, my sisters and brother when we were little. She could never make enough as we loved them so much and ate them as fast as possible to make sure we got the most (that is the constant dinner time problem when you are one of four). Potato latkes are so more-ish that it’s worth doubling up the quantities in my recipe so you have some left over for breakfast to be topped with a fried egg! Miraculous ingredient: Maris Piper potato

Hey everybody, British courgettes are in the shops! They are so fresh as they were probably harvested the day before and as you would expect from seasonal vegetables, nice and cheap. Pan fried courgettes with lots of garlic, mint and extra virgin olive oil take 15 minutes from start to finish. They are super delicious and are yet another recipe in your armoury of getting your children to eat more vegetables (and love them!). Miraculous ingredients: British courgettes when

I’ve wanted to make this beautiful fresh pea risotto forever, but buying fresh peas in their pods at the supermarket is expensive. But then a few weeks ago we took the little boys to a ‘pick your own’ farm and plucked 2kgs of pea pods for £2.90 – bargain. Risi e bisi was on. This recipe is famous in the Veneto region of Italy. The risottos in Venice are made with the Vialone Nano risotto rice as it gives the final risotto a lovely soupy consistency. Vialone Nano is the sa

Why are the French so flipping brilliant at making seriously tasty vegetable dishes?! I’m sure it’s because they don’t worry whether something is vegetarian or not, they just put the right flavours together to scale those vegetables from downright bland to miraculous. We stayed with our family friends in Paris last weekend and lunch was roast chicken (from a rotisserie – the French are good at making cooking easy too!) with a huge platter of vegetables jardinière and bacon.

I flipping love aubergines. Once grilled, baked or barbecued these purple beauties transform from a strange tasting sponge to melt-in-the-mouth creamy deliciousness. I also love instagram – it has brought me into a new world of brilliant foodies. I always thought aubergines need to be fried in lots of oil to get the best flavour, but a few Middle Eastern food instagrammers I follow grill or bake their slices of aubergine to cut down on the amount of oil. If it works for th

I’ve been trying to recreate the classic Italian porcini mushroom pasta……but, I’ve encountered one huge problem, it’s impossible to buy fresh porcini mushrooms and if by some amazing luck you find one, they are unbelievably expensive (£10 for one mushroom!!). Or, if you’re brave enough (I am definitely not) you can do a spot of mushroom foraging as, apparently, porcini do grow in British woodlands, who knew?! So what better to use than dried porcini mushrooms. You can get t

It’s autumn and truly beautiful outside. It’s also the time of British vegetable abundance during the harvest month of October. I love this simple side dish (though a lot of the time I eat it as a main dish because it’s just so good) as it’s all about the Savoy cabbage, smoked bacon and a good amount of butter to make it melt in the mouth creamy. Fattened well fed pigs were traditionally slaughtered at the end of the summer to provide meat during the long winter months and

This pasta is simple; broccoli, lemon zest, garlic and olive oil. All these ingredients turn into a creamy tasting pasta dish even though there is no cream in sight. It’s the broccoli steam fried with olive oil that makes it taste so good. I use the normal every day broccoli as I think it is the sweetest tenderest one. Miraculous ingredients: Broccoli, extra virgin olive oil, Pennette rigate pasta, Parmigiano Reggiano (Parmesan) Penne with broccoli and lemon zest Ingredient