Chickpeas are a great choice in budget cooking, and there is so much more to them than hummus. I stipulate a cooked weight for today’s recipes, and by far the easiest option is to use drained tinned chickpeas, but I much prefer soaking and cooking dried ones, because you can impart more flavour into them. That said, the cooking time can be as much as an hour, so I understand why they put some people off. To get around this, […]
budget
A pair of Roman-inspired pasta dishes. If you’ve never tried to make homemade pasta, it really couldn’t be easier than this recipe for pici – little pasta worms with a wonderfully bouncy texture. I’d usually serve them Padella-style with cacio e pepe, but, in a nod to getting one of my five-a-day into dinner, here they’re paired with an easy broccoli and walnut pesto. Pasta with chickpeas and rosemary is another Roman classic, which I’ve taken great liberties with, adding […]
Raspberries are a top-drawer summer fruit that are at their best (and cheapest) between June and October. Part of the rose family, they have a fragrant, bittersweet flavour and soft texture, with the crunch of the pips right at the end. (My very clever ice-cream-making friend Kitty Travers even makes a delicious, refreshing summer drink from the pips that she sieves out of her raspberry creations.) They can, of course, be eaten raw with cream, and work well in a […]
Cooking is about the conversion of everyday ingredients – bags of flour, tins of tomatoes, dried pasta, spices – into something that ends up much more than the sum of its parts. I always think this when making pizza (which is always cheaper than buying it in): it’s a simple base topped with a simple tomato sauce and whatever else you have that needs using up. The same can be said of pasta bakes and curry bases, which I always […]
