Welcome to Fellah Köfte. With roots in Turkish and MIddle Eastern cuisine, it’s a humble kind of a dish using everyday staples that would traditionally have been super-cheap and constantly on hand. Depending on what burghul and semolina cost in your vicino, it’s still pretty cheap to make and if you can get Turkish pepper paste all the better…

Hands up who has memories of their Mum making shepherd’s pie? Us too. Ours minced the cold roast lamb using a hefty metal mincer with a crank handle. It screwed onto the edge of the bench or dining table and made short work of reducing the lamb to teeny tiny bits; yes, kids, there was life before food processors…

Oh. Don’t like lentils? You’re missing out. They’re seriously delicious and are an easy, healthy and cheap way to get filled up. Until you start pairing them with eggs of course, and then everything goes to heck in the budgeting department…

You don’t have to travel in Turkey very far before encountering this dish; it’s popularly served as a mezze. And – here’s a quick language lesson – ‘mercimek’, Turkish for the red lentils, is pronounced ‘mer-ji-mek.’…

Lamb. Soup. North African flavours. I. Am. So. Here. For. These. A soupy-stew with a lot going for it, we’re in love with the lamby, lentil-y, aromatic, nourishing goodness that is harira. Wiki suggests it can be eaten as a ‘light snack’ but this flour-thickened version…