How to make kale crisps

Three years ago I tried ready-made kale crisps for the first time. I realised that they would be easy to make, so soon after that I made some. Ones you buy ready-made are often overloaded with flavouring, so thickly coated that it's hard to see the green leafy veg that lies within. They're no longer a super-trendy snack, but I still make them. I like them and it's a great way to use up the massive bags of kale that regularly come in my weekly veg box.

• bunch of kale
• oil to coat - either poured from a bottle or sprayed on
• salt and freshly ground black pepper
• dried chilli flakes (optional)
• smoked paprika (optional)
• garlic powder (optional)  

Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6. Wash the kale leaves and dry very well with kitchen paper, pressing into the crinkles. Cut or tear the kale leaves into pieces, drizzle or spray with a little oil and toss with your hands to coat all the pieces.

Spread on a baking tray so that the leaves aren’t touching. Bake for 10 mins and take a look. The edges of the leaves need to be brown and frizzled without being burnt. Exactly how long this takes depends on the moisture content of the kale, so keep checking, on what seems a ridiculously frequent basis. Some pieces will cook faster than others, all to do with their relative surface area according to how 'curly' your curly kale is. When the majority of the leaves are browned, take the tray out of the oven. Season and sprinkle with the flavouring of your choice (any or all of the above) and serve immediately.

More of my recipes
Super-speedy spinach and coconut soup
Make pickled beetroot

Halloween on a smaller scale

I like to mark the seasons. Since I was a child I've celebrated Halloween by making a pumpkin lantern. But that's it, I don't festoon the house with cobwebs, and spend hours crafting hardboiled eggs into eyeballs.

This year, I've written features on easy ideas for Halloween decorations and how to carve a Halloween pumpkin lantern (with alternatives that don't require the use of a sharp knife). Among the alternatives to pumpkins are turnips (traditional but hard work to cut), and tangerines (not hollowed out, just decorated).

Because I can be trusted with a sharp knife, I have a large and small pumpkin, which I'll be carving with faces in the usual way.

But this year I've got a new idea: the tiniest-ever Halloween lantern.

It's made from a physalis, or Cape gooseberry (beloved of so many Come Dine with Me contestants as a dessert decoration), decorated with a black felt-tip face.

It would be great for places where you can't leave a candle burning, like the office. You could also decorate several physalis on a stem to put it in a vase.

How to make pickled beetroot

Beetroot keeps turning up in my weekly organic veg box. Recently I've been spiralising it, and serving it with candied walnuts, goat's cheese and a dash of balsamic vinegar, which is a great mix of texture, taste and colour.

But this week I wanted to do something different. Cleaning out the fridge, I came across an ancient jar of home-pickled home-grown beetroot, well past its eat-by date. So I thought I'd make some more.

And it's so easy. I used BBC Good Food's recipe. This calls for wrapping each beetroot in foil and baking it, then unwrapping and peeling. And this calls for pink fingers, as you can see (right).

Next you make the pickling juice (below left) by simmering spices in vinegar. Once the beetroot are cold, slice or cut them into chunks, put into a sterilised jar, pour over the vinegar, add some sea salt and screw on the lid (below right). Ready in two weeks!

Spinach and coconut soup

'This was a recipe born out of desperation from what food writers like to call store cupboard standbys.' I wrote it for the wonderful website I worked on for seven years.

This tasty soup recipe is so quick to make, using frozen spinach, coconut milk and lots of flavour!

• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 1tbsp oil
• 500g frozen spinach
• 500ml vegetable stock
• 400ml can coconut milk
• ½ tsp ground nutmeg
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Gently fry the onion and garlic in the oil until softened and golden.

Stir in the spinach, stirring to break up the frozen chunks.

Add the stock and bring to a boil.

Reduce to a simmer, stir in the coconut milk, nutmeg and seasoning. Blend until smooth and serve.

This recipe first appeared on Allaboutyou.com, where I used to work. It was a great website, with lots of top-quality content, including a few recipes by me. Unfortunately, it was closed in January 2015

Cooking shakshouka

I've been meaning to make shakshuka since I got Yotam Ottolenghi's book, 'Plenty'. It seems to have started a trend: I've seen this recipe or variations of it everywhere, from magazines to menus and everyone I know seems to eat it all the time. I exaggerate slightly. Finally I got round to it last weekend and although it takes a little longer than my normal breakfast to cook, we agreed it was well worth the wait. It's a delicious slow-cooked mix of spiced peppers and tomatoes with eggs broken into the pan.
See Yotam Ottolenghi's shakshuka recipe here

I've grown an aubergine!

It may be small but it's glossy and darkest purple. And tonight, it gets eaten, along with... one or two ripe red tomatoes. I haven't managed to get them to turn red naturally for years without resorting to windowsills, brown paper bags and bananas.

One of the wonders of nature

Looking too good to eat, marvel at the swirling geometry of this Romanesco broccoli... fractals in food. According to Wikipedia: 'The head of Romanesco broccoli is a visually striking example of an approximate fractal in nature. The pattern is only an approximate fractal since the pattern eventually terminates when the feature size becomes sufficiently small. In computer graphics, its pattern has been modelled as a recursive helical arrangement of cones.' And the number of spirals is a Fibonacci number. You can read the definition of Fibonacci number here, but although I'm good at functional maths, I stopped at O level.

A baker's dozen of tomatoes

Sometimes I don't know why I bother growing tomatoes: here's the whole harvest from a patioful of plants. Pathetic, innit? Still, at least I don't have to deal with a glut! (I'm thinking cherries)