Allegra McEvedy

Delicious and easy recipes, inspired by the beloved stories by Enid Blyton. Bake your own pop-cakes and google buns, and wash them down with homemade ginger beer!

Have you ever dreamed of having picnics with the Famous Five, midnight feasts with the Malory Towers girls or party teas with the Folk of the Faraway Tree? With this cookbook, inspired by Enid Blyton’s stories, you can! Packed full of yummy recipes, lively artwork and extracts from Enid Blyton’s stories, this cookbook will inspire children – and the whole family – to get busy in the kitchen. It’s the perfect way to share the pleasure of making and eating food with your child. There are 42 exciting new recipes designed by top chef and Junior Bake Off TV judge, Allegra McEvedy, with fabulous illustrations by Mark Beech and glorious food photography too.

Inspired by the foxtrot, this new book from chef Allegra McEvedy brings together a variety of tempos and cooking styles to create a unique collection of recipes all based around the rhythm of Quick-Quick-Slow. Each Slow involves an initial input of kitchen time, then the canny cook walks away and lets nature take its course, only returning to whip up the Quicks and make any necessary finishing touches to the long-loved slow. The Slow recipes are about more than low and slow stews bubbling away: they explore how time not only affects flavour and texture but allows for magic to happen. Allegra draws on pickling, proving, curing, pressing, marinating, infusing and preserving as inspiration for the time-takers that are at the heart of each triumvirate. With the slow element underway, Allegra matches each one with a couple of eye-catching Quicks: speedy dishes that can be created in minutes, designed and crafted to complement, and in some cases complete, the accompanying Slow. And it’s this change of tempo within each threesome of Quick Quick Slow that keeps the energy and pace of first the book and then the food that comes out of it both varied and exciting. There are simple suppers, light lunches, plenty of face-free veggie recipes and family feasts; stylish recipes for when you have guests to impress, and fun, flavoursome kid-friendly meals too. With Szechuan Treacle Crusted Pork Belly, Jamaican Oxtail Stew, and Dark & Stormy Gingerbread with Angostura Honeycomb, Allegra’s food foxtrot has the right moves for everyone.

Big Table, Busy Kitchen is the ultimate celebration of food, home, love and life by renowned chef and bestselling food writer Allegra McEvedy. Inspired by her mother’s handed-down recipe collection, the source of so many happy meals and memories, Allegra lovingly created this extraordinary cookbook not only for her own daughter but for all families to turn to and treasure through a lifetime of cooking and eating. This is a delicious journey through 200 glorious recipes, from first bakes to first loves, feeding the family to feeding your friends, compulsory veg to nursery puddings and everything in between. With recipes that are as achievable and delicious as they are inventive and engaging, accompanied by stunning photographs, vibrant page design and charming hand-drawn illustrations that will make you smile, this is everything a family cookbook should be. Chapters include: It Begins with Baking / The New Worker / Just the Two of Us / A Bun in the Oven / The Art of Entertaining / A Week of Sundays / Soup Theory / Nursery Puds.

It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, to any chef worth their salt, knives and ingredients are the most important things. Bought, Borrowed & Stolen brings them together, as they should be, for the first time. This book is an authentic glimpse into food and cultures, and is filled with Allegra’s favourite dishes eaten over 20 years of travelling, tasting and scribbling.As a chef Allegra had developed a healthy admiration for the tools of her trade, and searching for a knife that reflected the country she was currently eating in became her quest. Allegra tells the stories of her travels through the knives she has collected on the way, from aesthetically-crafted filleting knives from Scandinavia to simple, effective and impressive African tools, and includes several recipes inspired by each country. From Spanish pea and ham croquetas and Malawian pumpkin curry to Brazilian breakfast juice and Cuban banana daiquiri’s – these are straightforward and interesting recipes you will have never cooked before but will want to eat again and again.

‘Delicious, thrifty, inspiring’ – Guardian

Featuring over 100 mouth-watering recipes and practical tips, Economy Gastronomy will help you to cook simple, better food, and along the way save you a lot of money.

– Get two, or even three, meals out of one basic ingredient
– Turn leftovers into new and exciting dishes
– Stock your cupboards so there’s always a meal in the house
– Shop seasonally, freeze and store food
– Plan your meals and shrink your food bills

With breakfasts, lunch, dinner, snack and treat ideas, you’ll be making luxurious meals without spending a fortune or discarding surplus food in no time. Recipes include:

– Caramelised onion and Cheshire cheese tart
– Onion bhajis, tarka dahl and almond rice
– Spinach, ham and ricotta gnocchi
– Chinese-style crispy duck

With Economy Gastronomy you’ll learn how to use and spend less, without scrimping on flavour.

The first Leon restaurant, in London’s Carnaby Street, opened its doors in July 2004. For its founders – Henry Dimbleby, John Vincent and Allegra McEvedy – the aim was to change the face of fast food, by bringing fresh, wholesome cooking to the high street. Six months later, Leon was named the Best New Restaurant in Great Britain at the Observer Food Monthly Awards. The menu is based around bold flavours, using simply-cooked fresh, local, natural ingredients with an emphasis on seasonal dishes; it also reflects how our eating habits change as the daylight house get longer and shorter.
This is a book of two halves. The Ingredients Book arms you with everything you need to know about the basic building blocks of any recipe. LEON chooses its ingredients above all for their flavour and healthiness but also with a view to the world we live in, so that such shark-infested waters as sustainable fish are tackled and easy to navigate. LEON’s top 250 fruits, vegetables, fish, meats, dairy and store cupboard ingredients are all given their own entries. Nutrition, a bit of history, flavour and the best way to get the most out of them are all covered, seasoned with a fair amount of random miscellany.

The second half is The Recipe Book, where you can put your newly found knowledge of ingredients to great use with over 140 recipes: some are familiar favourites taken from LEON’s menus such as the Original Superfood Salad, Moroccan Meatballs or Magic Mackerel Couscous and, for LEON Lovers everywhere, at last a recipe for the coveted LEON Better Brownie. Plus there are some recipes from the founders, their friends and those who helped make LEON what it is today, like Fred’s Millennium Octopus and David Dimbleby’s Spanish Omelette.

LEON’s food message is a simple and honest one – cook and eat with the best ingredients available and don’t forget the naughty bits that are so necessary for a fully-rounded life.

Why are most summer berries red, and what does that redness do to you? Why is pink grapefruit more fun than yellow, and blood oranges more appealing than their common cousin? What is our problem with blue food? Allegra explores the significance of the colour of food we eat and, interestingly, how it is connected to the season we eat it in – the oranges, golds and browns of autumnal food, the forest greens of winter, the revitalising yellows and new greens of spring and the vibrant reds and pinks of summer. She found that to ignore this natural system of colour and especially season just doesn’t make sense – a strawberry eaten mid-winter will cost twice the price and contain less than 10 per cent of the iron, vitamin C and antioxidants than in summer, let alone the sacrifice you are making on taste. “Allegra’s Colour Cookbook” contains a chapter for each season, with its own palette of colours, and recipes that use ingredients that are at the top of their game. Enjoy yellow courgettes, broad bean and Fresh pea tartlets in spring or duck and baked plums with pumpkin puree in autumn. At the end of each chapter there’s a run-down on what it is exactly that each season’s produce can do for you, and why adding it to your diet will make you, and those you cook for, feel bouncier and bonnier than before.

Allegra McEvedy is the Head Chef at the Good Cook in Notting Hill’s Tabernacle. In this book, she introduces her particular brand of cooking – deconstructing modern classics with verve and humour. Drawing on experiences that range from cooking for presidents as Head Sous Chef in Robert de Niro’s New York restaurant, learning the hard way in the River Cafe, exploring her Irish heritage and teaching West London school kids that McDonalds is not the only option, Allegra’s book is at once a collection of internationally-embracing recipes, an eulogy to local and organic food and an insight into a warm and endearing personality.