When boiled chicken is better than roast

My husband's not been feeling too good the last few days - some strange bug that's made him feel a bit queasy - so I decided to make him some boiled chicken. How unappetising does that sound - or indeed look? You have to say there are no comparisons between the colour and aroma of a roast chicken and the slightly pallid, slithery looking appearance of a poached one.Get over that, however and you've got yourself a feast. I covered the chicken - a basic free-range one from Tesco (oops, sorry, but it's been hectic this week) - with water, added a cut onion, two carrots, a bayleaf and a few white...

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How to make 2 meals out of a 15p bag of carrots

One of the problems of buying cheap veg, particularly ones that have neared their sell-by date is that they don’t taste of much. Which means they’re not going to taste that exciting raw or steamed. There’s also the challenge of ringing the changes enough not to tire of them, particularly if you’re catering for one.The best way to overcome that, I reckon, is to apply fierce heat to them - i.e. roast, grill or fry them over a high heat - and/or spice them up. That’s exactly what I did with a bag of carrots I picked up in the Co-op for 15p. I roasted enough to make two recipes - a roast carrot and...

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Which three recipes would you pass on?

There's been a huge stir this week about US food writer Mark Bittman's post on 'Three recipes to change your life and the world'.Bittman, a columnist for the New York Times and author of How to Cook Everything (also available as an App, incidentally) starts from the premise that no-one is cooking any more and that many see home-made food as more expensive than ready made meals. Which to be fair it can be but largely because we tend to eat way too much protein. His argument is that anyone can master three simple recipes and that "the more we cook the healthier we and the planet will be." A great...

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What I made with my bargain buys

First of all a very happy new year to you all. I hope you had a good Christmas and have managed to wade through the leftovers!You might indeed wonder what I got round to making with my bargain buys - or even if I ended up chucking them away (no, I didn't!)The turkey was roasted and kept us in cold turkey and fry-ups with madeira-spiked gravy (our youngest son's favourite way of eating it, devised by his dad) for days. (I should say our youngest is 25.) I made a turkey and leek pie filling with the last of the white meat which is sitting in the freezer. I prefer to make it as a filling so we can...

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