Author Archives: Annalisa Barbieri

Sticky cinnamon buns

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Buns is a word you simply can’t say enough. If it’s not already, it should be a control word, used by psychologist in experiments, to put people in a good mood. It is a fabulously English word and, even though I try, there isn’t really any alternative in Italian. We have the rather more catch-all phrase meaning, simply, ‘pastries’.

Although we don’t really celebrate Mother’s Day (I really don’t need a day to tell me to appreciate my mum), if you were so minded, these would probably go down a treat if you made them today (as I write, tomorrow is Mothering Sunday), put them in the fridge to prove overnight, then cooked them in the morning.

They take almost no kneading. I got the initial inspiration from Edd Kimber who won the Great British Bake Off five years ago, but I’ve cut the sugar down (with no ill effect) and changed the kneading process so there isn’t really any, Dan Lepard style. I also don’t use currants or any dried fruit because my children don’t like them. I’d never thought of using cream cheese in an icing before but it’s wonderful and entirely Kimber’s idea, not mine. I am not a fan of sugar/water icing and the addition of a protein-rich food really takes the teeth-janglyness out of the icing. It doesn’t make them any less delicious, only more so.

These are life-affirmingly good about half an hour out of the oven, I’ve just eaten one and am in a seriously good mood. I’ve done a lot of gluten/dairy free baking recently and was just about to put up a recipe for a green smoothie, so thank goodness for these. My inner Nigellas and Gwyneths are still fighting but, for today, Nigella wins.

This made 20 for me.

For the buns, you will need:

250ml whole milk (I don’t suppose the world would fall in if you used semi skimmed)

50g unsalted butter

500g strong white bread flour

30g caster sugar

1 teaspoon of salt

7g fast action yeast

1 large egg, beaten – the egg should be at room temperature

vegetable oil for greasing

For the filling, you will need

100g light brown sugar, smash any lumps out

3 tablespoons of cinnamon – yes tablespoons. It seems a lot, but these are cinnamon buns

60g butter, melted

For the topping, you will need

50g soft cream cheese

50g icing sugar

This is what you do

Warm the milk and the butter up in a small pan until the butter has melted then let it cool until it is just luke warm. (If you haven’t taken your egg out of the fridge yet, do it now and set it aside to warm to room temperature.)

The milk/butter is ready when you put a clean finger into it and you can’t really feel hotness or coldness. If it’s too hot or cold it won’t activate the yeast efficiently. If you want to speed up the cooling process, take it out of the pan and put it into a wider-lipped vessel like a bowl.

In the meantime, in a large bowl, mix together the: flour, sugar, salt and yeast.

When the milk and butter mixture is lukewarm, make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients (the flour etc) and pour the milky buttery liquid in, followed by the beaten egg. Mix this all up as best you can using a fork. You’ll have a lumpy dough that will look most unpromising.

Leave it for ten minutes.

Turn out onto an oiled surface and knead gently for a few seconds, cover with a bowl and leave for another ten minutes. Knead again for a few seconds. You should now have a smooth, soft-ish dough (it won’t be super soft and may seem a tad dry). If not, if there’s still obvious ‘bits’ to it, give it another 5-10 minutes rest and another quick ten second knead.

Now, put  it into an oiled bowl and cover with cling film and leave it until it’s doubled. This may take much longer than you think. In my kitchen (which is kept at a Spartan 18C and a humidity level of under 50) this took nearly three hours. In a hotter kitchen it can take as little as an hour. I know this bit is scary – knowing when the dough is ready always used to scare me – but what I do is I put it in a large bowl, so that the dough fills up about half the bowl. This is because, as the dough rises, you can never remember what height it was, can you? So it’s difficult to judge when it’s doubled. But if you choose a bowl where the dough comes up about half way to begin with, and then cover with cling film, you know it’s done when the dough starts to push up the cling film.

At this point tip onto a lightly oiled surface and roll out the mixture until it’s about 40cm x 50cm. It should roll out really quite easily. You may need to oil the rolling pin – I did. You will get rounded edges, no right angles. That’s okay.

Now the mixture: mix together the sugar and cinnamon and set aside for a momentino. Now, with a pastry brush, brush the melted butter all over the slab of dough, right to the edges. This is quite meditative. Think of all the people who have done you wrong whilst you do this and think that they won’t be getting any of your cinnamon buns, the bastards.

Now, on top of the dough, sprinkle the sugar and cinnamon, making sure to go to the edges as best you can. You will spill some onto your work surface, try to pick these up and put them back on or, at the end, gather the up with a clean hand-sweep and sprinkle them on top of the made up rolls.

Now, with the filling all spread, roll up the dough, with the longer end towards you so you get one long cinnamon bun roll. With a sharp knife, trim the edges off, then cut slices of about and inch and a half or so. Place the buns flat down on a lightly oiled tray measuring about 23cm x 33cm (you can even got a bit bigger, but no smaller). There will be a little gap between them, see picture.

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(If you have any sugar/cinnamon stuff left on the work surface, don’t waste it but gather it up and sprinkle it on top at this point.)

You now have a choice. If you fancy eating them soonish, cover them with cling film and leave until they have doubled in size. Anything from 45 mins to a couple of hours. But. I put them in the fridge at this stage and leave them all night. (Also, see update, below.)

Whenever you cook them, you need to a) preheat the oven to 180C b) brush the cinnamon buns with melted butter before they go in the oven (this is important). If you prove them in the fridge you can cook them straight from the fridge, or leave them at room temperature just until the oven warms up. No longer.

Cook for 20-30 minutes (mine took 25).

Whilst they are cooling make the icing, just mix together the icing sugar and the cream cheese until it’s pourable but not too liquidy. It will really seem like it’s not going to work for a bit but then it all comes together. Drizzle on top of the buns (it’s okay to do this when they are about 20 mins out of the oven). Then, prize them apart with a spatula thing and eat with a good coffee whilst making whimpering noises.

(Have napkins handy, these are sticky.)

UPDATE 20 April 2015

Having now made these a few times, I offer these observations:

These buns are fabulous when freshly made, but they go stale disappointingly quickly. Unless you plan to eat them all in one go (!) then what I suggest you do – what I do – is I now cook these in two batches. You can easily keep them in the fridge for that final stage of proving (i.e. the bit just before they go into the oven) for two days. I divide mine up onto two smaller trays and cook them over two days, thus giving me fresh buns for breakfast two days in a row. Just mix up 25g cream cheese and 25g icing sugar for each batch. Which brings me to my next observation:

I think that 50g of cream cheese and 50g of icing sugar is AMPLE icing for these in total so I’ve amended the original recipe above.

Date and ginger biscuits (gluten, refined sugar and dairy free)

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I haven’t gone gluten, or dairy free. I am incredibly fortunate that I can, thus far at least, eat what I want. And I do. Last night I stuffed my face with cheesy Wotsits (I love a flourescent food stuff sometimes). Today, for the first time in eight years, I went into a supermarket and bought a loaf of white sliced and we had toasted sandwiches for Sunday lunch.

But generally, I do eat really well and also, I do like to try new things and double-also I like to have a little biscuit or something every day, and it kinda helps, now that I’m no longer 19 years old and seven stones, to think of my health ‘n’ stuff.

(Whilst I’m vaguely on the subject of healthy eating, has anyone else noticed that saying you’re on a ‘whole food plant based’ diet seems to have replaced saying “I’m vegan”? I’m not saying this recipe is vegan btw, because it’s not – it contains eggs – but I’ve noticed this phrase a lot lately..)

So I found these in Hugh F-W’s new book Light and Easy (which thus far I really like although have only tried a few things). They are choc-full of good-for-you ingredients, have no refined sugar, no dairy, no wheat, no gluten and although they absolutely won’t be to everyone’s taste, they are to mine and also my youngest loves them (incredibly). They are not overly spicy or gingery, and make a great little snack when you need a treat. But are also – thanks to the fibre and protein – rather satisfying and sustaining.

You need:

200g pitted dates

15g peeled ginger, roughly chopped

2 eggs

250g ground almonds (this is not a cheap biscuit recipe..)

a quarter of a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda

One and a half teaspoons of ground Chinese five-spice

Pinch of salt

Flaked almonds for topping if you so wish

What you do:

Oven to 170C. Baking parchment or magic carpet type sheet onto a baking sheet.

Put the dates and ginger into a food processor. Not a blender, but a processor (it’s sticky and if you put this in a blender I wouldn’t want to be you cleaning up afterwards). Whizz up for a couple of minutes until the mixture is really sticky and everything is evenly chopped up. This is also the time you realise you have bought unpitted dates as the processor will start making an awful sound and then start smoking.

When the mixture is all mixy, then you add the eggs and process again until you get a nice sloppy mixture – takes seconds really. Now add all the other ingredients and pulse for a few times until everything is, how can I put this? Mixed. You will have a very sticky dough. Either drop spoonfuls onto the tray or wet your hands slightly, roll into a ball and then flatten – which is what I do. I make mine about 5cm wide. They don’t really spread out so you can pack them fairly tight – but not touching – onto a baking tray. Top with flaked almonds if you so wish (this is my addition).

I bake mine for 15 minutes and this is plenty. Hugh says 20. They should be golden but not too dark and have a ‘slight give’ in the middle. I can lift my straight off the tray, with my hands, onto a wire rack to cool.

That’s it. Eat and feel virtuous.

Adding kefir and oats to sourdough

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Last year I was given some kefir from my friend Becky. Don’t ask me too much about kefir, cos I’m still learning about it. It’s basically something that looks like a small, glutinous brain, which you put in milk (I have milk kefir you can also get water kefir) and it does something to the milk after a day or so which you can then drink or put in smoothies and it has magical qualities.

Something like that.

Every day, however, I fear I am going to poison everyone with sour milk, which is what it tastes like. This isn’t helped by my partner saying “What IS this stuff? Are you sure it’s safe?”

It doesn’t really taste great on its own. I originally started it because my eldest has eczema and it’s a battle to keep her probiotics/prebiotic level high (this is another, long story). But we channel Gwynnie whilst we imbibe it.

The thing with kefir is that you get lots of it to use up. We can only use so much in smoothies so I started thinking what else could I do with it? And then I decided to put it into my sourdough. Not loads, but about 60g (that’s all I get per yield) of it which I used as part of the ‘water’ element (I add 335g of liquid to 500g of flour so my kefir takes up some of the 335g, make sense?) And it works really well. It gives the loaf a lovely rise and you get a wonderfully moist crumb – less air holes I find (see photo below, the main photo shows the crumb after the first slice when there are more air bubbles), but a really nice sourdough for making sandwiches. And it’s tasty. Really tasty.

(I’m not pretending that any of the nutritional qualities of kefir are kept during the baking process.)

The other thing I’ve been adding is oats. I grind them up in my Nutribullet to make oat flour, and I don’t add more than 10% of the total flour content – so no more than 50g of the 500g of flour. (Oats don’t naturally contain gluten, but if you are coeliac do read this.)

Again this adds a lovely dimension to the bread. I made some the other day with oats and my children said the bread was “particularly delicious”.

I’ve also used kefir in place of buttermilk in my prune and almond loaf to great success.

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Towelling turbans

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Swimming is a fairly big thing in our house. I don’t swim in winter, because I am a wuss. But my children do. In the summer, however, I swim every day. Sure you can wrap a towel round your head turban-style. But these (see links below) make the job so much easier, because you can fasten it up so it doesn’t fall off. Also of course, these are super useful every time you wash your hair. Especially now that I have LONG HAIR (almost). Indeed, I am actually writing this post with a turban on my head whilst my hair has a conditioning treatment on it.

Talk about method writing.

I must interrupt this post to tell you about the time I had to go to a party and face my nemesis, an ex girlfriend of my boyfriend who had caused a lot of trouble (this was the first and last time I ever let this happen to me). I took ages getting ready. And I thought I looked great. Except for one problem: I still had my hair all piled up on my head in a towel, turban-style. Without the turban it looked all wrong. Anyway, I went to the party – without a towel on my head – and I faced her and she was actually perfectly nice and we sort-of became friends. There is no moral to this story other than, sometimes, you can demonise people you’ve never met and there are very few people who don’t suit a turban.

Don’t be tempted to buy cheap ones. I have an Aquis Lisse one, which is made of microfibre; I was sent it ages ago when I wrote about beauty. For an adult head I think they can’t be bettered. But they cost £15 odd. For children the Cuddledry ones, £9 odd, are perfect and well worth buying. Once properly secured they pretty much stay put.

Lemon poppy seed cake that can be drizzled if you want

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The first time I made this, I made a mistake. I didn’t read the recipe all the way through. The recipe was just a collection of letters, made into words, that were irrelevant to me until I started actually making the cake when they became vital and important, a means to cake. And then I realised that the sugar quantity was meant to be split in two, 165g of which was meant to be added to the cake mixture and 135g was meant to be reserved for the drizzle. So I never did the drizzle part and, actually, that was the best (to me) version of this cake I’ve ever made. I’m not overly keen on sugary drizzle on a cake. I mean, it’s like the sugar fairy has pissed on a perfectly good cake.

To me a cake should be soft, yielding, maybe creamy; but purposely moist – made moist – just confuses me. I think this is in part because there is an old Italian tradition, when eating stale bread, which is to wet it. A habit that I used to find abhorrent as a child, but then, I had that luxury, having not lived through a war.

So now, I occasionally make this cake the proper way and sometimes make it my way. I give both versions below. It’s a lovely cake to have in, it lasts a good few days and you always have something for guests. But it’s not the sort of cake you want to eat loads of, it’s not a dangerous cake. And it’s the best version of this sort of thing that I’ve ever made/had. I think the addition of ground almonds gives it a certain substance, a certain meatiness. And I like that. It was from Delicious magazine a few years ago.

Ingredients

165g soft, unsalted butter

250g caster sugar – if you intend to make the drizzle then use 165g of sugar in the actual cake and reserve the rest. If you don’t want to do the drizzle then just 165g of sugar is fine

The zest of 3 lemons and the juice of 2 (you only need the juice if you intend to do the drizzle)

2 eggs

165g plain flour (I sometimes put some wholemeal in there, or some oat flour, but not much, maybe 20-30g no more)

half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda

1 teaspoon of baking powder

50g ground almonds

50ml hot water

1 and  half tablespoons of poppy seeds

Method

Preheat the oven to 180C and line a 1litre loaf tin. MIx together the 165g of butter and 165g of sugar and beat until pale and fluffy. Mix in the lemon zest. Now beat in the eggs, a bit at a time, adding a spoon of flour as you go with each egg. Add the rest of the flour/bicarb/baking powder.

Mix in the hot water, the ground almonds and poppy seeds and pour into the tin. Bake for 40-50 minutes. A tester pushed into the cake should come out clean. My oven is very hot so I check after about 38 minutes.

Now, set aside to cool and that’s it if you are not doing the drizzle. If you are, then you now mix the lemon juice with the remaining 85g of sugar and heat in a pan until dissolved. Prick the cake all over whilst it’s still warm and in its tin (but has had about 10 mins to just chill) and then gently spoon the lemony sugar mixture over the top.

Chocolate and nut oat bars

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I live in hope of finding some sort of cereal bar, that I can make, that my children will like. I think a good cereal bar is an excellent thing to be eaten when you don’t have much time, but need something that will keep you going. But so many bought cereal bars are full of crap.

Many years ago, I co-ran a parenting website called I Want My Mum (because that’s all I said when I was pregnant and not long after having my baby, “I want my mum, I want my mum!” I would lament. Luckily she wasn’t far). I posted a recipe on there for some sort of healthy cereal, chewy bar. Loads of people went crazy for it, saying that their children loved it.

Not mine. My children have never liked any sort of bar that I’ve made, but they look at the Kellogg’s Special K Raspberry and Chocolate bars with longing every time they go past them in the supermarket aisle.

So I saw these in my Dale Pinnock Healthy Every Day book. He’s the one I got the chocolate/coffee smoothie idea from. I adapted his recipe, changing the proportions and also, he said you should sandwich the chocolate/peanut butter layer in between the layers of oats. But this didn’t look great to me, and also, in a bid to entice my children, I thought it’d be better to coat the whole lot in chocolate. I even wrapped them up in little bags to make them look shop bought. Did they love them?

No.

The ungrateful bastards. But I really like them (just as well as I have about 18 of them now) and if you need a healthy but delicious, quite treaty snack, you can try these. Or, if you’re lucky, your children might like them.

65g unsalted butter

50g coconut oil

45g raw honey

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

300g porridge oat flakes

125g 70% cocoa chocolate

80g nut butter of choice – not one that’s full of sugar but if your nut butter doesn’t have salt in it you may want to add a pinch

Melt the  butter, coconut oil and honey in a pan. Add a pinch of sea salt if your nut butter doesn’t have it. When melted, add the vanilla extract and the oats, and coat everything.

In a bowl atop another pan of simmering water, melt the chocolate and nut butter. When melted, add to the oat mixture and stir really well.  Tip into a tin (I use one that’s about 20cm square but you can see how much mixture you have so use a tin accordingly. I line mine with baking parchment to make thing easier). Then just chill for an hour or two, cut into slices and offer to your children and when they refuse, sit down and eat the lot yourself whilst writing them out of your will.

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A simple paella

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Spanish folk: don’t judge me too harshly. I know this isn’t authentic. But it’s still delicious.

I first ate paella when I went to Spain with my homegirls, aged 18. What a holiday we had. Insane. Six girls in a non-tourist region of Spain…there was this little restaurant which made absolutely fantastic paella. And chips. The best chips and the best paella. I absolutely adore dishes that you can eat with just a folk, and not have to worry about gristle or bones or fat or nasty bits. Okay so we did have to shell the huge prawns that sat atop their rice deathbed, but stuff like that doesn’t scare me. This recipe doesn’t use shell on prawns so you can sit, cross-legged on the sofa and eat this with one hand, preferably with a fork in it.

Before this, I had never attempted to make paella at home. It seemed so scary, and it involved paella pans that you had to treat with love and care, lest they rust. Then I saw this recipe in Donna Hay’s Simple Dinners and we made it and we loved it. My children aren’t so mad on it, but the beauty of this dish (and oh there are so many beauties to it) is that you can pick out the bits you don’t like and eat those you do.

This is the perfect dish for when you don’t really know what to eat (meat? fish?) and don’t have much time, but still want something relatively healthy and comforting. If you ate everything in it you could get those ‘seafood pie’ mixes from the frozen compartments.  We don’t because my partner can’t eat bi-valves and those things usually have tons of mussels in them. But we did, as sharp eyed readers may note, add squid rings into this one.

Don’t be tempted to use chicken breast meat, it’s all about the tasty thigh meat here.

What you need for four good portions:

1 red onion which you have sliced

1 teaspoon of dried chilli flakes (leave out for those that don’t like it)

1 teaspoon of smoked paprika

Half or so of a chorizo, it really depends how much you like it and what you’ve got

4-6 chicken thighs, de-boned, skin off, made all nice so you can just eat them without fear of scary stuff and cut into bite-sized chunks

250g short grain rice (no expensive paella rice, you don’t need it, but it must be short grain not wild or basmati or anything healthy, save that for another time)

1 litre of chicken stock

A quantity of raw prawns, again depends how much you like them. We use about 150g

A handful of coriander leaves, chopped up

200g or so of cherry tomatoes, halved

Lemon wedges

What you do:

Heat a large, deep non-stick frying pan over a good strong heat. add the onion, chilli if using, paprika and chorizo and cook for 3-5 minutes until it’s all golden looking. Now add the chicken and cook for five minutes, turning it so that all sides get lightly browned. Add the rice and stir until all coated, now add the stock and bring to the boil and cook for ten minutes. Add the prawns and cook for a further five minutes until they are pink and the rice is tender. Serve with the coriander sprinkled on top and the cherry tomatoes and a lemon wedge each.

A chocolatey coffee warming smoothie for the morning

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Something you may not know about me, I eat really healthily a lot of the time. I drink green smoothies with my children when they come home from school. I regularly fast. This is to mitigate when I do eat sugar, butter and flour made into cake and cookie form. But since I got into nutrition in a major way in 2002 even the crap I eat is pretty good. I think what you put into your body is really important.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun and I’m not here to sound super worthy cos I don’t want anyone to visit my blog and feel bad about themselves. I know all about that, too.

Anyway. However much I may like green smoothies, there is no way on God’s earth I am eating one first thing in the morning, in winter. It just all feels too cold and unfriendly. I never feel hungry first thing in the morning, and yet sometimes I must leave the house for a full day of knitting words together into meaningful sentences. And I can’t do that on an empty head. Sometimes I need something nutritious, quick, easy to go down and that, even if it doesn’t fill me up til lunch (few things do), I will know that I’ve had some nutrition that morning.

I got this recipe from Dale Pinnnock’s Healthy Everyday book. I haven’t really made much else from it, but my interest in the book piqued when I read this recipe and it involved both chocolate and coffee. I thought, here is a my kinda book, a man who understands that to be healthy you don’t need to be eating cardboard.

I have adapted it slightly to suit my selfish needs and despite the milk making it ‘cold’, it somehow manages to be warming at the same time.

(no picture yet but there will be soon)

225ml almond milk (this is what I use but oat milk should work well too)

1 banana

1 heaped tablespoon of raw cacao – this is my favourite bit and I really do put a heaped tablespoon in. It’s worth buying raw cacao in bulk as it works out cheaper than really high quality cocoa from the supermarket and it’s much better for you.

2 heaped tablespoons of oats

4 almonds

1 teaspoon of raw honey or maple syrup

1 shot of espresso

a quarter of teaspoon of cayenne pepper (essential!)

You just put the whole lot into a blender (I use a Nutribullet) and whizz up until really smooth and drink it. YUM.

 

Making a tasty biscuit as good as it can be

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Since I’ve had children, I do try my best to change cake/biscuit recipes so I take down the amount of sugar and I try to ramp up the amount of wholemeal flour etc. I’ve made my own choccy lollies with high cocoa content chocolate and pumpkin/sunflower seeds. I’ve cut down the sugar, and sneaked wholemeal flour into a famous Nigella Lawson chocolate loaf. But I know how far to push it. My children start to refuse biscuits and cakes if they go the Gwynnie side of worthy.

Hugh F-W’s Ten Minute Cookies have been our standard biscuit recipe for years now. But over these years, I’ve experimented with taking down the sugar and today, I made them with a third of the flour made up of ground up oats (I whizzed them in a very powerful blender with a mill attachment, I’m sure something similar would work, too). Nobody noticed any difference. They were still delicious. A tiny bit chewy. More substantial. I really liked them. If you’ve never made these biscuits before you may want to start with the original, and work your own way down the sugar scale. Or you may want to jump right in. The original recipe plus amendments, is here.

I think these biscuits are as good as they can be, whilst still being a bit bad. And I think that’s a good thing.

Roast sea bass, with lovely potatoes and vegetables, all done in one tray

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This is a deceptive recipe, taken from the BBC Good Food magazine last year. Deceptive because, despite the relatively simplicity of ingredients, everything mixes together to produce something rather good, rather, as my friend Linda would hate me to say, lovely.

(She is not keen on the word lovely, and now, every time I use it, I think of her and the disdain she must hold me in for not thinking of something better, but, to me, when you need to say something is lovely there is no better word.)

Anyway. The price of seabass doesn’t make this a cheap dish*; nevertheless, what you get is something very tasty and that needs very little further accompaniment, save for some green vegtables. So it’s not the world’s most expensive dish, either, and, I would suggest, you can make this for an alternative to a ‘big roast’ for someone who doesn’t eat meat, or is gluten free, and they wouldn’t feel in any way cheated.

You can, and I have, substituted sea bass for cod – as you can see in my picture where there is a mix of the two – but the bass has the edge here in delicate flavour.

This recipe is for two, but you can double or treble it at will.

300g of red skinned potatoes. Important, the flavour of the potatoes is a valuable scaffold to this dish. Wash and dry the potatoes, you don’t peel them, and then slice them very thinly (don’t be a wuss, you don’t need a mandoline) into rounds.

1 red pepper cut into slices

2 tablespoons of olive oil

1 rosemary sprig, you’re meant to remove the leaves and chop finely. I go into the garden, pick two or three sprigs and shove them in. This does, however, mean that when I made this recently, my youngest asked why I’d put the Christmas tree in the dinner.

2 sea bass fillets

25g pitted black olives, sliced or halved

half a lemon, thinly sliced

basil leaves to scatter (don’t fret if you don’t have them, the dish can survive without)

You need a large baking dish. Note that if you are making this for lots of people, you need lots of oven capacity, and more than one baking tray, as it’s important you space out the potatoes so they crisp up. This doesn’t mean each and every slice needs its own zone, but they shouldn’t be crammed together – gently overlapping is what you’re aiming for. The more crammed together they are, the less the moisture can evaporate and the soggier the potatoes will be. You want something that’s crisp on the outside, soft on the inside and for this to happen the potatoes need space, man.

Oven to 180C.

Lay the sliced potatoes onto the baking tray with the pepper slices. Drizzle over one tablespoon of the oil and scatter over the rosemary, add a pinch of salt and a good grinding (snigger) of pepper. Toss everything together, rearrange so that they take up the maximum amount of tray space and aren’t all bunched together and roast in the oven for 25 minutes. Turn over half way through. If the edges aren’t brown, give it a bit longer than 25 mins.

Then, arrange the fish fillets on top of the potatoes, scatter over the olives, and place lemon slices on each fillet. Drizzle the fish with the remaining oil.

Roast for a further 7-8 minutes and you’re done.

*Waitrose sells frozen farmed seabass fillets for £4.39 for two (at time of going to press).