Vegetarian chilli

A spicy tangy chilli is the basis for tortilla and nachos. My meat chilli takes forever, slowly evolving from a magnificent bolognese through chilli con carne and re-emerging to appear in tortillas and nachos - the veggie one is a lot quicker! Prep time is about 5-10 minutes, cooking time is 40-50 minutes.

A good panful will still give you plenty to freeze, unless you're feeding a very large group - each tortilla only needs about 2 heaped tablespoons of chilli (about 50ml); for nachos, you need about 250ml of chilli per person. This recipe makes about 1.5 litres of chilli - that's about 30 tortillas, or nachos for 6. Or, nachos for 4 and then 10 tortillas, which would feed 4 nicely if 2 of them are very hungry, or feed 10 if they're all me and only want one tortilla each. You get the idea - whichever which way, you probably have enough to freeze some as well, and chilli freezes very happily and is even nicer the next time.

Spicy tomato sauce

A very simple spicy tomato sauce which I use to top mushroom and lentil bake, but which you could use for anything. Very few ingredients and super-easy, all this baby really wants is time. So get it going first and let it simmer in the background.

Mushroom and lentil bake

For a writer, I'm pretty rubbish at naming things. My twelve-week writing course was called, for the first four years, "the twelve-week course", before in a fit of uncharacteristic brilliance and after four years of writing emails in which I explained that it covered the key elements of stories, I renamed it "Story Elements". The follow-up course I created at my students' request is now in its fifth year of being known as "the follow-up course". Occasionally, this troubles me.

I called this dish "lentil bake" for years before I had the epiphany to make it sound at least a tiny bit nicer by mentioning another of its key ingredients, so now it's "mushroom and lentil bake". But in my defence, most dishes are named after their ingredients, it just sounds fancier when you're naming them in French or Italian or Hindi or Urdu. So feel free to rename it champignons et lentilles cuits, funghi e lenticchie al forno, masharoom aur masoor kee daal bekd (shoot Google translate, not me), or indeed مشروم اور دال پکایا. (The original recipe is from Rose Elliot's Bean Book, but I can't remember what she called it.)

It's much tastier than its name suggests and it's also a good one for the leftovers list because you could substitute whatever leftover veg you like, in the place of the mushrooms, and it's an absolute winner for using up old bits of hard cheese and even edible rind.

Baked Camembert supper

Baked camembert is ususally touted as a starter, which is odd, because it's everything a starter shouldn't be: very filling, rich, and satisfying. It doesn't work so well at the end of a meal, either: it's hard to make a main course light enough that people will welcome quantities of gloopy, melty cheese after it, instead of groaning inside at the prospect, trying to swallow enough to be assuage their host's feelings, and then feeling a food coma setting in so fast that they must either take their leave or nod off at the table.

What it does make, however, is an absolutely brilliant romantic supper for two! Or for one, if you're very very hungry, or for more, if you are more, and add additional camemberts. Bizarrely, it's also incredibly healthy - because once you have your splendid Baked Camembert centrepiece, you surround it with fresh raw foods that want to be delved into melty hot cheese, and end up eating more raw vegetables than any usual supper might feature. Plus once the oven's hot, it only takes 15 minutes.

Aubergine sausage and olive stew

I threw this together as one of those random oh-and-we-have-that-too stews and was so astonishingly impressed with it, I immediately scrawled all the ingredients down in the Little Living-room Book of Thoughts. (It's important to have spangly wee notebooks stashed about the house generally, but in the living room especially, because you never know when Doctor Who or Farscape will trigger a major ephiphany, or you'll be struck with a thought about right-angles, or need to jot down a poem or plot line, or, indeed, a recipe.) The main point of amazement, though, was OLIVES! IN A STEW! IN STEW! OLIVES! You can put olives in stew. PUT OLIVES IN STEW.

How to make (chicken) stock

Very short summary: after a roast, throw the carcass, some onion, any veg peelings, and maybe bay leaves and peppercorn into a large pot, cover with water, and simmer gently until you go to bed. The next day, drain it, simmer some more to reduce it if you want, done.

Stock cubes are to homemade stock what packet soup is to homemade soup. I hate foodie snobbery so if you don't have homemade stock and some recipe's insisting on it, whatever, use a stock cube - but that is the difference. A considerable one. (Whereas the difference between fresh tomatoes or tinned is generally very minor. Provided you're making a sauce, not salad.) Some recipes are very insistent on homemade stock - the recipes that really need it are the ones that rely heavily on the flavour of the liquid, eg risotto, a broth, French  onion soup, without much else (as opposed to bolognese, which has tons else). But sometimes the recipe writer is just demanding, so if they're also insisting that something has to be pancetta and bacon won't do, or that you must specifically use gorgonzola and no other blue cheese, then take their advice with a pinch of salt. They are living in their own, rainbow-filled unicorn-populated magical ideal world. Bless.

ALL THAT SAID - stock is very, very easy to make, especially if you don't forget about it and nearly burn the house down. Three times, people. Three times.

Hummus: it's not middle-class, it's chickpeas.

I get alternately baffled and a bit harrumphy when perfectly innocent food-stuffs get designated as being a particular class. Lentils as middle-class bewilders me especially - lentils? Seriously? The incredibly cheap, nutritious staple eaten by most of the subcontinent? Likewise hummus. It's not middle-class, it's chickpeas. With some other stuff. You could call it Greek fairly accurately, if you wanted, but not middle-class. And yet despite its now being very widespread and familiar, the 'orrible little label persists. So: sod that. It's not middle-class, it's chickpeas.

Nachos to share

A great big bowlful of nachos, dumped squarely between you, eaten with your fingers, oh joy joy joy! Memories of Panchos in Obs, sharing a towering mound of nachos with Nikka, while the Gipsy Kings played... I used to make this loads, then forgot about it for years, and it's burst back onto the menu recently. This is part of the vat of bolognese meal cascade, so if you haven't made a vat of bolognese, you should start here.

Socca pizza: prepare to be AMAZED!

When I'm not eating wheat for whatever reason, the thing I miss most is pizza. Even pizza restaurants can't seem to manage a wheat-free pizza, it's always something a bit soggy and disappointing. My current food hero is Jack Monroe, so when she posted a recipe for socca pizza, made with gram flour (chickpea flour) I leapt to it. It was brilliant! ...ish. Almost there. Not quite... crispy. So I started experimenting. And refining. And tweaking. And obsessively measuring every detail. Happily, Will's fallen in love with it too, so me repeatedly making us pizzas with tiny variations on a theme (science tip: you can't change two variables at once), is fine. And when I burn my hand again, he's very happy to take over, while I sing Aranjuez with my hand under the tap. So: after extensive, tasty research, here's how to make perfect, crispy gluten-free pizza. After the recipe I'll go into all the ins and outs, because not everything has to be perfect all the time, but it can be if you want it to be, and then toppings ideas.

Sag paneer

Sag aloo (aloo = potato, remember) is one of my always-orders for Indian food (and if you're in Oxford, you should be going to the Standard Tandoori, which is a marvellous story that shall be told another time, but trust me, ignore the name, and just go) and another one I figured was unreplicable at home... nope, not at all. Quite easy to make. But as I usually have the aloo served up in aloo gajjar, and paneer is basically cheese (cheese... CHEESE... CHEESE...!) , sag paneer is now one of my always-makes for curries. Or just sag, if we don't have paneer. (Paneer, I should add, is cheese, quite mild-tasting, white, often comes already cubed, and I buy it from the Indian grocers aka the spice shop. You can also make it but I haven't learnt how yet.)

Sag actually just means "greens", which could be spinach or not; palak means spinach specifically. So most of the year round I'm making palak paneer, but occasionally, when the season and the stars are right, it's most definitely sag paneer, because I'm using this:

Aloo gajjar

Aloo gajjar (which actually just means potato-carrots, but sounds more glamorous) is a staple side dish for almost every curry I make - humble ingredients, quick, yummy and spicy, and been in my repertoire for long enough to feel like comfort food. It even predates the Balti Bible curries, as a quick bit of cookbook archaeology shows:

Kimchi

A quick break from the avalanche of curries, because the cold / flu is still going strong, and a bowlful of kimchi is suddenly the most magical salty-chilli-gingery-garlicky elixir imaginable, and a brilliant fuschia-purple to boot. You know the way a spoonful of Branston pickle can make your mouth spasm in sudden pickle-lust? That's what kimchi does.

Luxurious dhal

This is a gloriously luxurious dhal, so a bit more effort than most, so I go into a bit of a disquisition on dhal and lentils first, and then a random tangent of family folklore, and then get back onto the subject of how to make it, but you shouldn't think all dhals are this as involved as this one, but it is, of course, thoroughly worth it.

Fragrant stock

All the curry dishes keep saying "fragrant stock or water" - most of the time I'm really not fussed about it and just use water if I don't have fragrant stock; occasionally, when I can be bothered, I'll make up a batch of fragrant stock for a curry I'm cooking and freeze the extra in 200ml batches, for future curries. When it comes to a luxurious dahl, though, I really will bother, because those lentils want all the soak-in glorious flavour they can stand! And actually it's ridiculously easy, and quick. It only takes 20 minutes, so for most curries, you could pop it on once you've got the onions frying, and it'll be ready in time. It also smells glorious.

Balti madras

So far on the many marvellous curries list, we've got how to make some major spice mixes (balti and garam masla and green masala paste) and perfect rice, but the only main dish so far is the bright fresh-tasting jalfrezi. And for a true curry cascade, you need many many curries: you need "main" dishes and dahls and vegetable side dishes, all tucked away nicely in the freezer, so whenever you want curry, you only need to make one dish and still serve a curry feast. Or do what I've just done: crawl from a fluey sofa to pull a selection of curry dishes out to defrost, then curl back up with lemsip and a laptop. To muse on Madras.

There's nothing for lunch!... Green masala & egg

Another emergency lunch where I'd failed to defrost a soup in advance and didn't have the makings of a nice big salad and the fridge was looking accusatorily empty and unpromising. In fact, the fridge's total Fresh Food quota was four baby sweetcorn and a tablespoon or two of leftover cream. There were, however, eggs. I also don't have much time for lunch. Mental process: egg on toast? But that'll make me sleepy all afternoon. There's frozen peas: pea omelette? But an omelette without cheese is no fun... Oh look! I have green masala paste! Toast takes 5 mins, hard-boiling eggs only takes 10...

There's nothing for lunch!... Dahl soup

(You are bearing witness to a process of discovery here. If you want actual recipe thingy, scroll down to the photo of the typed bit.) It's lunchtime, the fridge is a barren wasteland with some dead leaves clinging to the bottom of the salad drawer, there is nothing for lunch - but wait!

Breakfasts: anything but cereal

These days, I eat breakfast every morning and have really delicious breakfasts that I actually want to eat, which is a total revelation, because I spent years miserably spooning cold milk into my face, with the occasional floating husk caught up in it, out of a dutiful sense of Doing The Right Thing. For the Most Important Meal of the Day (total myth, btw), it was an utter misery. I hate cereal. All cereal. Pronutro, that South African staple that turns instantly to stodgy baby food the moment milk touches it most of all. But also sweet cereals, bran cereals (oh the years I spent dutifully eating all-bran!), even muesli if it's with milk. Crunchy muesli with yoghurt is acceptable, but that's it. I don't eat toast much, either - I like it, but it's not an especially healthy staple. I think back and for most of my twenties, I started each day far too early, simultaneously brittle and woolly with sleep, sitting up at a table because That's What You Did, with that horrible bowl of cold milk and its horrible floating bran flakes, trying to get it over with 15 mls at a time. And then, because this was my twenties, went off to an ill-fitting job in ill-fitting clothes that I sort of hoped would pass muster but it was very possible that one half of my body would lose bloodflow when I sat down at my desk. (That wasn't my entire twenties, obviously, but it's what stands out when I think of those miserable breakfasts.)

Well, ring the changes! Around 28 or so, with a very nice job and clothes that fitted, I had the revolutionary idea: what if I ate a breakfast that I actually liked? Even if it wasn't on the Official Breakfast List?

Mexican scrambled egg

This is the sort of breakfast you want when you wake up so hungry that the person next to you is in real mortal danger, but you only have about ten minutes' worth of energy max so a full English is out of the question. Yes, I eat spicy food for breakfast. I eat all sorts of weird things for breakfast, which I'll post about in a sec. So this is me stumbling sleepily and ravenously downstairs on a Saturday morning at a quarter-to-whatever-you-think-is-early, and this is what my rummage turns up:

Not-just-Christmassy Red Cabbage

I haven't overshared for ages, because the day after my birthday, all the horrible EU VAT stuff hit, and then while I was still wrestling with that hydra-octopus, I got a wipe-out two-week-plus flu. So instead of spending my much-anticipated holiday making spice mixes and cooking muchly and doing odd decorative things to the house, I spent it sipping lemsip and banging up on EU legislation and stats. Fun fun fun.

Everyone else in the world might already have their red-cabbage recipe, but I only discovered this for the first time last New Year's (the one a year ago), for a dinner party, and thought it was so marvellous that... I didn't make it again until this winter. Which is ridiculous. Like the special notebook that's too nice to use, or the fancy ingredient you save for the right moment until it grows mould and has to be thrown away. I meant to post this recipe before Christmas, and then at least before New Year, but instead I shall stick to my original realisation, which is that it's for all of winter. Also, for a dish I'd mentally pigeonholed as "special occasion", it's very cheap, and for anyone whose New Year Resolutions feature cabbage heavily, this is for you. It is wonderful.