Salad doesn’t have to be something on the side or a bit of greenery bringing up the rear. It can be a starter or the main event and it...

Happy Easter! To celebrate, I'm rounding off my chocolate recipe series with some tips and extras, including the all-important question...

A rich lava-like centre underneath a crisp crust, and a dark, brooding chocolate flavour - quintessential winter comfort, but a taste...

This is a River Café Cookbook recipe. Over the years, I have tried varying it by adding chopped crystallised and stem ginger, rum-soaked...

This needs a couple of hours to chill, but apart from that it’s a doddle to prepare and is not cooked. It works equally well with...

These light-textured shortbread-like biscuits go down well with everyone from tinies through to nineties, probably because they are less...

This may lack sophistication as a strategy, but experience has shown that there are two surefire ways to success when giving a lunch or...

Fortify yourself with… A bottle of madeira and a bottle of Australian liqueur muscat or PX (pedro ximenez) sherry. •Use the madeira for...

An effortless way to cook whole fish, either one per person or sharing. Just put the fish in a foil parcel with herbs and liquor and put...

Aka irresistible chocolate mousse with rum. It's another simple classic that we could all be making instead of more elaborate cakes. And...

Irish whiskey may sound unlikely, but trust me. Ideally you should buy live prawns and cook them yourself, but I’ve been known to use...

Why aren’t we all eating syllabub? It’s a breeze to make and delicious. This one, based on Elizabeth David’s classic Everlasting...

Far be it from me to suggest that anyone should find cooking with wine in Britain off-puttingly expensive, but I do concede that, thanks...

Look up the recipe for Coq au Vin in Larousse and it advises using a Chambertin or a Mercurey. Helpful or what? A Chambertin will set you...

This dark, spicy, autumnal dish can be made two or three days in advance and kept in the fridge. Serve it cold, tepid or warm, with...

Everybody needs a failsafe, rich and warming beef casserole recipe for winter. This is mine. I always use shin, because it has such a...

This is not the most sophisticated-looking of dishes – you have to serve the meat in chunks rather than neat slices - but it’s incredibly...

Call me biased, but I reckon that the secret weapon the great chefs never mention is booze. They bang on about how they use only the...

Anything this lacks in colour compared with pears poached in red wine it more than makes up for in flavour - and on the budget front it...

Pork is cheap, but chops are often so lean (obsessively so in supermarkets) they need remedial treatment to stop them being dry. The...