I love to slow-cook this on a Sunday, ready for the week ahead. My babushka Liana often pairs meat with prunes, a common combination influenced by the Yiddish community that lived in Ukraine. Use any sort of beef or bone stock; I have made this plenty of times with just water. You could also use sweet paprika instead of mustard in this recipe. Serve with potatoes…

Spend an afternoon with a friend making a large batch of these holubtsi. For the filling, a mix of beef and pork mince works well, but I sometimes make these with just beef – I use a really hearty beef mince mixture from one of my butchers that includes liver, heart and other parts. I love to add cayenne pepper, fresh herbs and lots of smetana (see page 15) or soured cream…

Holy banging bangers, Batman; can sausages actually get better than their lovely, snag-y self, or what? We reckon they can and here’s Exhibit A… our sausage ragu. Perfect for tossing through pasta, it’s easy to make and is brilliant during these…

Translating to ‘brothy rice’, this soupy brew is yummo, like all Spanish cooking generally is. Simple, with direct flavours and not a tonne of ingredients, it’s easy to whip up. The Moors brought rice to Spain in the 8th century and today it’s cultivated in Andalucía…

The assignment? To turn a whole heap of English spinach into something everyone would love, and that wasn’t too, you know, spinachy. An overload of spinach tastes ever so slightly metallic. Spinach soup doesn’t ring my bells…

This type of rustic soup, often topped with shreds of the region’s famous radicchio, is popular in the Veneto region of Italy in winter. An example of cucina povera, literally the ‘cooking of the poor’, it speaks to a frugal approach and using what you’ve damned well got on hand…

We genuinely love cooking with lentils, chickpeas, beans et al. They’re not only delish, they’re great contenders for filling, budget-friendly, delish dinners that are perfect for coping with the exhausting, ever-increasing cost of living spikes. We figured it was worth resurrecting the concept of home-made baked beans; yeha they’re cheap to buy…