This is one of my go-to recipes for using up leftover cooked chicken or pork, but I reckon it would also work well with some prawns, or scallops. You can, of course, make your own Nasi Goreng paste, but this also tends to be a dish I cook when I’d planned a different meal but forgotten to take the main ingredient out of the freezer, so it’s all a bit last minute, thus I use a ready-made paste which I keep in the cupboard for just such occasions. You will need:-

Cooked meat or seafood of your choice
300g long grain rice, cooked and left to go cold
6 shallots, peeled and thinly sliced
2 large eggs
1tbsp tomato puree
1tbsp light soy sauce
Off-the-shelf Nasi Goreng paste
5cm piece of cucumber, quartered lengthways and sliced
8 spring onions, sliced on the diagonal
Oil for frying

• Heat some oil in a frying pan and fry the shallots until crisp and golden brown, then remove them from the pan and leave them to drain on some kitchen paper
• Beat the eggs in a bowl then use them to make three thin omelettes. Roll the omelettes tightly and leave them to go cold
• When the omelettes are cold slice them into thin strips
• Re-heat your frying pan, add your Nasi Goreng paste and cook it, stirring, for one or two minutes until fragrant
• Add the tomato puree and stir-fry briefly
• Add the cold rice and heat through for two or three minutes, then add the shallots, strips of pancake and whatever cooked meat or seafood you have chosen
• When everything is warmed through add the soy sauce, cucumber and most of the spring onions and mix all the ingredients together thoroughly
• Garnish with the remaining spring onions and serve immediately

We eat a lot of chicken and turkey throughout the year so when it comes to Christmas we’re inclined to celebrate with lamb, or beef, slow roasted until you don’t need to carve it, it falls off the bone all of its own accord. This leads to leftovers, of course, but not as many as your average turkey would cause in a household of two! With this year’s lamb leftovers I was prompted by HI to try making rissoles – something I realised I’ve never eaten before – so I went in search of recipes and found this one, and many similar, online. You will need:

250g cooked lamb or beef
1 small onion
40g fresh breadcrumbs
2tbsp chopped parsley
1 clove garlic
1 egg
Flour for coating
Oil for shallow frying

• Chop the meat and onion very finely
• Crush the garlic
• Beat the egg
• Put all of these into a bowl. Add the breadcrumbs and parsley and mix everything together thoroughly
• Divide the mixture into 6 portions and shape into patties
• Coat the patties in the flour
• Heat a little oil in a pan and shallow fry the patties for 4 to 5 minutes on each side until they are warmed through

I found these surprisingly rich and filling, so I would advise serving them with some simple vegetables like cauliflower or carrots and peas rather than what seem to be the traditional accompaniments, chips or mash.

Having bought some “chinese-style” chicken from a local supplier and been very disappointed with its flavour I looked through my recipes and came up with this marinade, which works very well with chicken or pork. You will need:-

• 2.5cm piece of fresh ginger root
• 4 garlic cloves
• 4 tablespoons dark soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon rice wine or dry sherry
• 2 tablespoons clear honey
• 1 teaspoon 5 spice powder
• pinch of sugar

All you need to do is to finely grate the ginger and garlic into a bowl, add all the rest of the ingredients and whisk them together. Add your chosen meat to the bowl and move it around to ensure it is evenly covered by the marinade mixture. Cover the bowl with clingfilm and leave it in the fridge for 24 hours, then cook the meat to your taste.

I’ve heard all sorts of arguments about what constitutes a “proper” hotpot but do you know what? I don’t care! I can’t remember where I first read about adding black pudding to it but I can tell you it makes a big difference to the flavour and the consistency of the gravy. It’s a bit like adding anchovies, ie it melts away so that you can’t recognise what it is but it has a big impact. So, just use your usual lamb and onions but add in a couple of slices of black pudding before putting your potato topping on and see what you think of the results.

Here’s a great recipe for an easy-to-make Ale Gravy for those Autumn, comfort-food recipes which we love. It’s good with slow-roast, fall apart beef brisket and also with sausages and mash. You will need:

• 700g onions
• pinch of sugar
• 2 tablespoons sunflower oil
• 25g butter
• 1 teaspoon flour
• 600ml brown ale
• 600ml beef stock
• half a star anise
• 2 cloves
• 2 bay leaves

Peel and thinly slice the onions. Heat the oil and butter in a heavy-based pan, add the onions and sugar and cook over a low heat until soft and caramelised (about 45 mins). Stir in the flour and cook out for 1 min. Stir in the rest of the ingredients, raise the heat and boil vigorously until the sauce has reduced to a thick, glossy paste (about 20 mins). Remove the star anise, bay leaves and cloves before serving.

This is Rick Stein’s recipe. I found it on the BBC website where you can see more from Rick if you follow this link.

Here is a meatloaf you can put together in less than 15 minutes then leave to cook while you do something more interesting. It is best served cold, so I always make mine the day before I want to eat it then pop it into the fridge. Chilling it makes it easier to slice too! Before you start, preheat your oven to 180/Gas 4 and get out a roasting tin with a trivet to cook your meatloaf in. You will need:-

• 500g Toulouse sausages
• 500g ordinary pork sausagemeat
• 300g chicken fillets
• About 8 rashers of streaky bacon

These quantities make a generous helping for four adults. There’s no chopping onions or herbs – there is plenty of flavour in the sausages already. Just take the pork sausagemeat and use your hands to push it out into a rough oval about 20cms long. Lay the chicken fillets on top of the sausagemeat, trying not to leave any gaps between them. Remove the skins from the Toulouse sausages and squash the meat into a single lump. Shape this meat so that it forms a cover for the layers you have already made. Add the cover, pressing down all round the edges of your oval shape so that the chicken fillets are fully enclosed within the two layers of sausagemeat. Use your streaky bacon rashers to cover the meatloaf, tucking any loose ends underneath. Now put the meatloaf onto the trivet in the roasting tin and cook in the middle of the oven for 1 hour. Test with a skewer to make sure your meatloaf is cooked and give it extra time if you need to (I usually find that an hour and a quarter is the right amount of time, but ovens vary).

Leave the meatloaf to go completely cold then serve with salad, or chips if you prefer.

The idea of warm corned beef had never appealed to me at all until I watched James Martin cooking this Hash on one of his TV shows. It’s really good, and you should try it. James made his own beer-battered onion rings to serve with it – I’m afraid I took mine from the packet I generally keep in the freezer. You will need:-

• 4 floury potatoes
• 1 garlic clove, crushed
• 1 onion, roughly chopped
• 4 tomatoes
• 340g tin of corned beef, roughly chopped
• 1tbsp Worcester Sauce
• 4-5 drops Tabasco Sauce

Peel the potatoes and cut them into cubes. Boil until just tender (about 8 to 10 minutes) then drain and set aside. Fry the onion until softened but not coloured. Add the garlic and the potato cubes to the pan and fry for about 5 minutes. Roughly chop 2 of the tomatoes and add them to the pan. Add the chopped corned beef and continue to fry, stirring, until it is warmed through. Add the Worcester Sauce and Tabasco. Slice the remaining 2 tomatoes and use them as a garnish for the Hash.

I can’t remember now whether it was Shirley Conran or Delia Smith who first said that “life is too short for stuffing mushrooms”, but normally I heartily agree with the statement. I do make one exception, though, which is in the case of big Portobello mushrooms stuffed with some decent sausagemeat. Heat your oven to 180, then take a pack of your favourite posh sausages (I like to use Pork and Leek), remove the skins and roll the meat into balls. Peel the mushrooms and place them upside down in an ovenproof dish. Press a ball of sausagemeat into the cup of each mushroom. Put a splash of water into the dish then place it in the centre of the oven and cook until the sausagemeat is cooked through and the mushrooms have softened (about 30mins). These make a good lunch or snack on their own and also work well as a side dish with roast meat.

On a Sunday when we’ve been out for a drive and lazed around over coffee and a crossword the last thing I want to do in the evening is to start roasting a joint of meat and prepping vegetables, so I have a number of quick and easy (but still tasty) storecupboard meals to fall back on. Here’s one of them. You might need to remember to defrost some of the ingredients earlier in the day, but that’s about as difficult as it gets. You will need:-

• 1x 240g pack raw prawns
• 2x 120g sachets Szechuan Tomato Stirfry Sauce (Blue Dragon make a good one but be aware it’s quite hot)
• 1x 280g pack ready-made Pilau rice
• Naan bread to serve on the side

Heat your oven to Gas 5 or equivalent. Tip the rice into an oven-proof dish and cover it with tinfoil. Tip the Szechuan Tomato sauce into a foil tray, mix the prawns into it and put the lid onto the foil tray. Put the dish of rice and the foil tray onto a baking sheet and place in the centre of the hot oven. Let these cook for about 10 minutes (remember, you don’t want to overcook the prawns because they’ll just shrink up to nothing) then put your Naan breads into the oven to heat through. After another 5 minutes have passed your curry and rice will be hot and your Naans ready to eat.

Do you have days when you get home from work and realise that what you had planned to cook for dinner is either still in the freezer or just far too much trouble for the way you are feeling? I did that yesterday. A few store cupboard standards came to my rescue and the result was received with probably more pleasure than what I was going to cook in the first place! Here’s what I did. You will need:-

• 500g Mince (I used pork – just because that was what I had)
• I onion, roughly chopped
• 2 tablespoons mild curry powder
• 1 x 400g tin of chopped tomatoes
• Water, depending on how runny you want your sauce to be (I used about half the tomato tin full)

Gently fry the onions until they are soft, add the mince and continue frying until it is just beginning to brown. Add the curry powder and stir well to make sure it is evenly distributed. Tip in the tomatoes, stir to mix them through the meat and onions. Bring the mixture to a gentle simmer, cover and leave to cook through. Check every now and then and if you think the mixture is getting too dry add some water.

There; rescued in about 45 minutes with very little trouble. I served mine with noodles.