Years of Practice



Big family, small budget

This blog has been percolating for many years but I’ve struggled to find the right angle. Should I be positioning myself as a frugal cook, a fusion cook, a busy working mother or a scavenger trying to balance time, health and money? Eventually I homed in on what defines my adult identity: I am a wife, a mother of four and a teacher. The title ‘Years of Practice’ has been my typical response when asked by one of you ‘How do you know how to…?’

So here is a distillation of years of practice in the kitchen, drawing together what I want to pass on to my sons and daughters about the stories and methods behind the food you have eaten as you have grown up. You are all adept cooks yourselves who already have many of these recipes in your repertoire, and you haven’t relished everything I’ve served up to you. Some of my more unpalatable offerings have been banished to the dustbin of family legend, never to be repeated (whisky risotto, the ‘lean’ venison that turned out to be lamb’s liver, caramel salmon). The guiding principle behind my selection has been to record meals which have been enjoyed more than twice by at least two members of our family of six.

I’ll be sharing 100+ recipes, posting weekly over the next two years.

January 2020

Sticky toffee pudding

A quintessential British pudding, this is real winter comfort food, but we’ve also been known to wolf it down at the end of a Sunday lunch in May. The recipe here, to which I’ve made very small tweaks, jumped out to me on Instagram (@gastronomybyjonathan) back in January and has rapidly qualified for family-favourite status.…

by motherrach

Portobello steaks & butter bean mash

Occasionally, a new addition to the repertoire is rapidly elevated to family-favourite status. Such is this superb recipe, for which I’m indebted to Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfrage: it was published in their wonderful book Flavour at the end of 2020. This is a perfect meal to serve to vegetarians (vegans, in fact) and meat-eaters…

by motherrach

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Mother Rach invents: have been making various iterations of this cheap & hearty meal on repeat - a bean, spicy sausage & potato stew that’s a great vehicle for throwing together bits and pieces from fridge and store cupboard. Hungarian kolbász is as good as (better?) than chorizo, and any beans or pulses will do. It’s also very quick - ready in under 30 minutes. Chocolate babka: it’s not only sweet baking that goes on chez Collier, I promise…but here is the very pleasing product of today’s experiments in the kitchen, a mash-up of two BBC Good Food recipes. I’d been charged with reproducing something Zita ate recently and also needed it to be nut-free (for school). It took 8 hours in total, with kneading, shaping and proving offering welcome distractions throughout a desk-bound Sunday. Very little action in the kitchen recently (new job is all-consuming) but here is a creation rustled up last weekend: a small plum frangipane based on an old recipe (see blog). The tweak was the addition of a layer of jam below the almond paste - jam home-made from cherry plums found on Wormwood Scrubs. Pie and remaining jam have disappeared very quickly.

Instagram (@mother_rach_cooks) records efforts in repertoire expansion.

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