What to cook this week

Which fruit and vegetables are the most recommended for the five-a-day mix? Leafy greens, berries and citrus, carrots and beetroot seem to lead the pack.

What to cook? The least possible. That’s a joke, but I’m going to skip all the fillers this week trying to lose the lockdown weight gain.

Barbecue ideas might come in handy as soon as the weather allows again. Also, the salad season is approaching: plenty to choose from in Cuisine Fiend's salad department.

Easter is coming and it’s a non-holiday again. I’m still going to do a fair bit of baking, even though this time I’ll do rounds and drop off cakes on family and friends’ doorsteps.

The first harbingers of spring have appeared on the market stalls too: Jersey Royals. Cook them simply to savour the taste and lightly crush them with a few chopped olives.

Spring is coming, the way out of lockdown is almost visible so it’s time to shape up a bit: let’s try skinny foods and smaller dishes this week. I’ll start with smoked fish salad bowl tonight.

Comfort food actually has the capacity to make us feel better. It may be a nostalgic effect of a favourite dish of our childhood, but there are foods that act in a warming, soothing or anti-inflammatory way.

Italian chefs are up in arms against the ‘falsification’ of traditional Italian cooking. So let's see some of my unorthodox-but-tasty Italian suggestions!

When I'm cooking a meal, I have no time for brooding and glooming especially if I’m focusing on constructing a lamb and spinach filo pie or a veggie version: spanakopita.

I’m going to continue hot chocolate and biscuit evenings, while wrapped in a blanket and watching Netflix. But what biscuits go best with winter and hot chocolate?

Cold weather is the perfect excuse to cook hearty, rich and warming dishes. Soups, casseroles and baked pasta dishes – let’s have them now before spring nudges us towards salads.

A bag full of produce from the market that I actually touched, smelled and picked up cheers me up. All right shopping online for clothes and flour but totally wrong when it comes to fruit and vegetables.

It’s a drudge, isn’t it? Nothing to look forward to and nothing to reminisce. Thank heavens for cooking: there are always new dishes, new combinations and new flavours.

This week I’m fantasising about rich foods over my skinny January salad. I'm writing about lovely comfort food instead of eating it. Dreaming is (calorie) free.

Said it before, I say it again: eat Half As Much (aka Eat HAM) is the best diet there is. Half or so, it’s about kickstarting the scales into showing more pleasing figures than they have been recently.

Have you made any resolutions? Like start a healthy diet, shed pounds, drink less and work out more? if so, here’s a bunch of skinny-meenie healthy ideas to start this new year with.

Here’s a run down the leftovers’ menu and a bunch of no-recipe advice on how to avoid waste: all it takes is chopping the cooked meat up, adding cheese and wrapping up in pastry or tortillas.

If you are going to bake and cook, share it. With neighbours who planned to go away, or the friend whose family live outside your tier. You can’t have them at yours, but you can take a Stollen log round as a gift.

The right approach is defiance and battery-operated LEDs slammed in the face of the pandemic. And cooking: the smell of mince pies joins the cheer from all the households, not just three at a time.

Small scale cooking, that’s all right. If you’re Christmassing small, you could roast a brace of partridges or pheasants; both extremely nice, and if game isn’t fit for Christmas lunch, I don’t know what is.

Time for traditional panettone on sourdough ‘mother starter’; though it’s not for the faint-hearted. It involves getting up at 4am to feed dough and constructing a panettone scaffold. Intrigued? You should be.

The season to be merry starting soon and it is a different kind of merry. The North Americans will have a go the scaled-down way at Thanksgiving - go ahead and tell us afterwards how to do holidays this year.

Out with boring, samey breakfast! Let’s find good and varied things to eat in the morning, especially that most of us commute to the front room or the study these days – so there’s time to prep.

There’s nothing as uplifting as rising dough so now is your chance to try your hand at panettone or pandoro. This could be the year you make your first mince pies, learn to make marzipan and bake Stollen.