Cooking Easy Food

Roasting vegetables - cut the vegetables into largish chunks about 3" (sweet peppers [not chilli peppers], courgettes, carrots, leeks, whole tomatoes, potatoes - including sweet potatoes, butternut squash, parsnips, turnips and put them in a dish, use your hands to just cover the vegetables in a light coat of olive oil, add sea salt and black pepper on top and underneath veg. Put them on a baking tray or roasting dish in the oven.

Lovely on their own or in addition to meat, fish.

How to wash leeks - cut right through leek lengthwise starting from about 1" from white bulb end to top of leek. Turn the leek so that you have one of the uncut sides uppermost and do the same again - you will be left with four leaf sections. With leek pointing downwards, run under cold water opening the leek leaves slightly to remove all grit. Believe it or not, although leek leaves are quite tightly packed, grit gets down between the leaves.

Food preparation

Vegetables and fruit should always be rinsed in clean water and dried. Think about what happens to your food and who handles it.

Roasting - see roasting vegetables.

When substituting ingredients remember to look at the recipe and the ingredient that you need to replace. You shouldn't replace vegetables or fruit that are totally different in texture and density e.g. replacing carrot with tomato would be inappropriate because carrot is a much thicker denser vegetable than tomato. Watery, fleshy vegetables cook faster and need less time than denser vegetables. Think of what you want to do with that particular ingredient and pick a similar substitute - i.e.