Since I’ve been working at Ebury, this little book pops up time and time again in the bestseller list. I try to cook a few cookbook recipes every week, but am always falling back on my two favourite cookbooks – Economy Gastronomy and The Kitchen Revolution (can you sense a theme? I clearly like to cook in batches…). Anyway, I thought it was high time to try this one out, so this week I have been trying it out.

So far, I have cooked two recipes from the book, the Quick Meatball Casserole and Chicken with Creamy Bacon Penne.

The Quick Meatball Casserole was really easy to do, but I didn’t have any parsley and I think I added too much liquid somewhere along the line. My saucepan was full to the brim! Not very like the picture in the book, sadly! The end result is okay, and certainly beats lunch from the canteen, but it’s not thrilling. The sauce is (unsurprisingly given how much liquid I splashed into it) a bit watery and the meatballs aren’t spicy enough.

The trouble is any meatball recipe is that my friend Aline gave me her recipe for meatballs, which is the Best Meatballs Recipe Ever, so anything else has a lot of work to do to compare. I’d give it a 3/5.

The Chicken with Creamy Bacon Penne led to a tiny cooking disaster for me because I replaced the cream with crème fraiche without adding any additional water. OOPS! There was a tiny bit of burning as a result, but once it was sorted Oh My God, this is tasty. Definitely a 4.5/5 for me. The pasta comes out really flavourful and sauce is just so good. I could actually drink it. Okay, maybe not drink it, but certainly lick the plate, which is what I did last night…

Tonight I am cooking a sausage, broccoli and potato hash and Friday night it will be a quick and easy moussaka, so watch this space…

Has anyone else got this book? What do you think?