Five ingredients

Smoked Mackerel Pate

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  • I love this spread on some crusty bread.

This is a total crowd pleaser. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t love this (apart from those people who totally hate fish).

When people hear pate, they tend to think it’s going to be complicated. This recipe has only 5 ingredients, and takes 5 minutes to make. It makes a brilliant starter with crusty bread, or I enjoy it on a toasted bagel for lunch. It also makes a good topping for baked potatoes.

Just 5 ingredients and 5 minutes make this super tasty pate

The pate has lots of flavour, but if you want to mix it up a bit you can swap out the parsley and lemon juice for coriander and lime, with some finely chopped chillies.

Ingredients

200 Grams Smoked mackerel

100 Grams Cream cheese

Juice of half a lemon

Small handful of chopped parsley

Ground black pepper

Method

  1. Remove and discard the skin from the fish
  2. Break up the mackerel in a bowl, and flake with a fork
  3. Add the cream cheese, lemon juice, and parsley and mix until the pate is smooth. Taste and add black pepper to taste (you can also add more lemon and parsley if you prefer)

French Onion Roast Potatoes

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Roast potatoes topped with sweet caramelised onions and melted cheese.

Good roast potatoes are one of life’s simple pleasures. But it is possible to improve on perfection. This is a recipe that I used to make when I student and constantly broke. It’s made from simple cheap ingredients, and tastes fantastic.

Straight out of the oven.

You can eat it as a side dish, but I’m more than happy to eat a big bowl of it just on its own. You can also make this with mashed potatoes and it’s still a totally amazing comfort food, but do yourself a favour and try it with roast potatoes.

Onions caramelised, cooked low and slow.

Ingredients

1Kg Potatoes (Scrubbed with skins left on)

4-5 Large onions (Chopped)

2 Tbsp Oil

25 Grams Butter

Salt and pepper

100 Grams Cheddar Cheese (Grated), you can also use any cheese you find in the fridge.

Cover with grated cheese, before popping in the oven.

Method

  1. Pre-heat your oven to 200 degrees. Cut the potatoes into 3-4 cm cubes, and toss with 1 Tbsp of oil and spread across a baking tray. Bake for 30 minutes (or until soft)
  2. Cut the onions, I don’t cut them too finely. Heat the remaining oil and butter to a large frying pan. Add the onions and fry over a medium heat, stirring occasionally for 30-40 minutes until dark brown (not burnt) and caramalised
  3. Spread the onions over the potatoes, and then cover with the grated cheese. Return to the oven, and bake for 15 minutes until the cheese is golden brown and bubbly

Walnut Skordalia

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This is a traditional Greek dip and is super easy to make and super delicious. I made this as part of a meze at our February supper club, and it was the most popular dish of the night.

Delicious as a dip with vegetables or pitta bread

While you can use it as a dip, I’ve also used this as filling in wraps and sandwiches along with salad and chopped vegetables and it was amazingly tasty. It’s also really good drizzled across roast vegetables. To be honest you could spread this on a flip flop and I’d eat it, it tastes that good. This is also vegan, so you can keep all the non meat eaters in your life happy with something totally scrumptious.

Just 5 ingredients, and 5 minutes of your time to produce something totally tasty

Ingredients

80 Grams Walnuts

40 Grams Breadcrumbs (I know I bang on about it, but one of my favourite kitchen hacks is making a big batch of bread crumbs to keep in the freezer, it makes recipes like this a 2 minute job)

1-2 Cloves of garlic, roughly chopped (I used 2 and it was pretty garlicky which I don’t mind, but adjust to your own taste)

2 Tbsp Red wine vinegar (Again adjust to your own taste, the first time I tried a the recipe out it was a bit too sharp for me, so I’ve reduced the amount of vinegar but have a taste and you can always add more)

100ml Olive oil

Method

  1. Add the walnuts to a food processor and blitz for a couple of minutes until the nuts are finely ground
  2. Add the breadcrumbs, garlic, oil and vinegar and blitz again. The mix is meant to be quite thick, but if it is too thick for you, you can a small amount of water and and blitz until you get the consistency you like
Also great in wraps and sandwiches