This week I was invited to a cookery challenge hosted by the lovely Lisa Faulkner on behalf of Heinz new Chilli Sauces. To help launch their new range, a roomful of 15 bloggers / foodies were challenged to create and cook a dish which would then be judged by Lisa. Lisa won Celebrity Masterchef in 2010, has written two cookery books - oh and lives with John Torode - so she knows a thing or two. The rules were that we had to incorporate one of the new sauces from the range: - P

Leeks are of course available in supermarkets all year round, but there's something about this time of year that makes me just want to buy armfuls of the things and cook until I'm sick of the sight of them. Caramelising them is how I currently get my kicks - my life is one big party, you'll see - and tarting them up onto some filo turned out to be a runaway success. Here's how... (Serves two as light lunch - feel free to multiply up) 2 leeks 3 sheets filo, folded in half 1 cl

Excuse the blurry pic - obviously I was in a big hurry to get to my drink before Milly did. Just sharing a new thing I've tried recently - Vermouth! My experience of vermouth until now has been limited to literally swilling it around a frozen glass and tipping out before filling with gin and an olive for a martini. This is nothing like that kind. BELSAZAR is a high end German (yes, German!) Vermouth made by aromatising and fortifying wine and botanicals in the Black Forest. T

Can you tell I was hungover when I made this? Encompassing the holy grail of hangover cures: carbs and fat, this is really not my normal day to day food but oh my gosh it was tasty. Like a big, grown up mac'n'cheese, but even better. I was feeling slovenly, so obviously did not make my own gnocchi and just boiled up some pre-packaged stuff, but you could totally make your own if you wanted (egg, potato, flour, roll into a sausage, chill, slice, boil). Here's how I made this o

I recently required a casual, not too £££ Soho lunch destination for a quick work meeting. Oh and it needed to be toddler friendly - not as simple as you'd think. I suggested three places to my date for the day: Balls & Co, Smack Lobster, and Suvlaki. I'd not been to any of them, so there was an element of guess work at play and I must admit when I was trying to hoik a 17kg child and buggy combo up the steps of Suvlaki alone, I had my doubts. I wish I could remember what Suvl

Sometimes it's nice to get out of London. Not much, but sometimes. And Windsor is a good destination as any to do so; trains from Waterloo or Paddington take under and hour and a return is about a tenner. Unfortunately, the day I needed to get there all hell had broken loose at Paddington and no trains were going anywhere. Ideal. I jumped in an Uber with a trusty pop up wine and even with Friday night traffic 45 minutes later was happily ensconsed in Browns (everyone goes the

We're not spoilt for pubs in Golders Green, funnily enough, so one Sunday recently we headed round the North Circular towards Finchley in search of entertainment. Ostensibly we'd gone to investigate talk of a little farmers market - The North Finchley Feast - but little was very much the operative word, and once we'd scoffed some mini Greek pastries there wasn't much else and we ended up wandering round to The Bald Faced Stag in East Finchley. I've driven past it a few times

I don't think you can beat a Friday night curry - and I for one would happily eat it every night of the week. Last Friday's DIY curry was one of my fave yet though, so thought I'd share it with you on the proviso no one tells Mrs Parmar this is what her latest chapatis got used for. We'll tell her it was okra. Its a super simple fragrant curry that you can leave to cook for a few hours whilst you get on with stuff. Don't be put off by the longish list of ingredients - it does

Unless you've been walking around with your eyes shut for the last year you'll know that Ella Woodward aka. blogger Deliciously Ella is a pretty big deal. A staunch advocate of organic living, her self-titled healthy cookbook is the biggest selling book on Amazon for 2015 and she's frequently credited for the rise in sales of superfoods, green juices and the like. Like anybody that puts themselves out there, Ella has her haters. Sometimes they're funny and mostly harmless (s