River Cottage Good Comfort: Best-Loved Favourites Made Better for You

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We can have all those things and they can be truly delicious - and yet better for us than perhaps some of the old-school or conventional versions of those recipes." Indulge your taste buds and boost your health at the same time with these delicious new recipes, including: Enjoying something which not only do we love to eat, but has some kind of resonance and a little bit of emotional goodness to it."

Flavour bombs (optional): 1-2tsp curry paste or powder, or sliced olives, capers and/or chopped anchovies It can be whipped up easily (and on demand) from store-cupboard ingredients. Briefly baked until set on the outside but still gooey in the middle, it is excellent served with some fruit to cut the richness.” It becomes tougher sometimes to find the ingredients and turn on the oven - all those things are becoming harder and more expensive. But we still need to do that, because it's what keeps us sane and warm and together." His early smallholding experiences were shown in the Channel 4 River Cottage series and led to the publication of The River Cottage Cookbook (2001), which won the Glenfiddich Trophy and the André Simon Food Book of the Year awards.And don't worry - the desserts are still sweet. After all, this is the person who admits to whipping up boxes of chocolates as a child. During River Cottage Spring (2008) Hugh helped a group of Bristol families start a smallholding on derelict council land. He has just finished filming his most recent series, which accompanies his most recent book, River Cottage Every Day. In River Cottage Great Roasts, all you will need are good ingredients, an oven and some simple bakeware to create easy weeknight dinners, showstopping Sunday roasts, fuss-free breakfasts, tea-time treats and indulgent puds. To enjoy a taste of River Cottage at home you can choose from the collection of River Cottage cookbooks and handbooks...

When the cake is nicely browned underneath, flip it over with a spatula and cook the other side. (If you are scaling up quantities, and making a larger cake – one that pretty much fills the pan – you can cut it into halves or quarters when the first side is crisped, and flip over each half or quarter, one at a time.) Start to finish, your S and B might take 20 minutes or more. We've been conned into eating more sugar than we even have a genuine appetite for," he says, good-natured outrage bubbling from his words. Last time we had friends over for dinner, I made a dessert of home-made avocado ice-cream, with brownies. I should have taken a photo because it was scrumptious, despite the recipe's claim that the brownies had only 91 kcal per serve because they were made with yoghurt instead of butter. I don't care about calories, but I do try to offer desserts that are healthy-ish. OTOH if I'm only going to make brownies once or twice a year, I want them to taste decadent.

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Put the chocolate and butter into a saucepan and melt gently over a very low heat, watching all the time and stirring often so that the chocolate doesn't get too hot. Set aside to cool a little. Preheat the oven to 190C/170C Fan/Gas 5 and butter a small oven dish. Dialling down the sugar and the refined ingredients is part of it, but dialling up the whole ingredients is what the book's more about," Fearnley-Whittingstall adds. So I am pleased to add River Cottage Good Comfort, to our recipe book collection. (That's the British River Cottage TV series with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (HFW), not the Australian adaptation with Paul West.) In this book, Hugh ramps up the veg content, delivering more 180 new recipes bursting with vigour, freshness and flavour. This is all part of the 57-year-old chef and food writer's mission to get us eating a bit more healthily - and that doesn't mean you have to miss out on your favourite, stodgy comfort foods.

Maybe they are planning a River Cottage Vegan Baking handbook, like they have the Gluten Free one and other food-group specific handbooks like Mushrooms. There is more and more great technical advice out there from the likes of the aforementioned Vegan Baking Bible, and Philip Khoury's upcoming A New Way to Bake, on restaurant-grade patisserie, with restaurant-grade ingredients you can also see listed under his YT videos. But so far as I can tell, there still isn't a high-quality, trustworthy book focused on vegan baking with the sort of fruit and veg grown in the UK and on vegan versions of traditional British sweet recipes. Turn the mixer down to a low speed and, with the motor running, slowly pour in the tepid melted chocolate and butter mixture (or whisk it gently by hand). Use a rubber spatula to scrape the last drops of chocolate into the mix, and then to fold the mixture fully together. I'm already onboard with reducing sugar: I find most modern recipes and storebought cakes have far too much sugar for my taste. My cakes, biscuits and puddings mostly come from battered recipe books from decades ago. HFW's other mission is to encourage cooks to use a variety of good ingredients, which is my culinary mission too. And Good Comfort is in every way generous, as Hugh makes our favourite foods healthier not by taking stuff out of them, but by putting more the best whole ingredients, celebrated in all their colourful and seasonal diversity. I also love the presentation and design; neo-70s you might call it. It has tones reminiscent of 1970s to early-80s books, but is glossier and more visually appealing, and with cleaner lines. Therefore more appetising, than, say, my mum's copy of Cookery in Colour by Marguerite Patten, which I used to look through as a kid. It's an early-autumn colour scheme, with lots of green and brown: the start of my favourite time of year, and also when keen cooks are gearing up to make exactly this kind of food.Actually, we can have both on the same plate and both in the same dish. We can enjoy treats, foods that are really well balanced - they've got lots of good things in them. Often that means a few little tweaks, and sometimes there are some bigger tweaks, but it's all very doable."

But where this book does fall down is in not giving any general advice in the introduction about preferred dairy substitutes, and in which dishes they do and don't work - and in having very few cakes and puddings with vegan options. I don't bother to find fault with older omni cookbooks for being full of dairy with no substitution ideas; it was just the norm before the last few years. But as HFW and River Cottage have already produced a fully vegan book ( Much More Veg), and even early Nigella books happen to contain a few more dairy free or even accidentally-vegan cakes than this one does, I definitely think they could do better in this area. There are people who actually prefer the taste of the healthier versions that are implicitly denigrated by entrepreneurial millennial vegans like Tegelaar and these café owners. The last time I made a cake with the full amount of suggested sugar, I found it pretty unpleasant, and sugar totally overwhelmed the other flavours. The introduction in Good Comfort, when mentioning reducing sugar in their café cakes, at least recognises people like us exist and are worth catering to: "the few guests who notice this change invariably comment positively: 'I really like that it isn't too sweet'". We shouldn't be guilt-tripping people into eating healthy food, we should be tempting people to healthy food," he says.People used to making recipes dairy-free or vegan will already have their own preferred method of making standards like batter, but this book seems likely to interest omni households who cater for vegan guests from time-to-time, or who may have one (perhaps newly) vegan resident who isn't the main cook. (The recipes really suit a relaxed family dinner.) For these circumstances , it would be a good idea to consistently include advice for such things, as is done for the lasagna.