Allinson - Pinch of Nom

Pinch of Nom started out a few years ago over a cup of tea at the kitchen table. After a decade of working in the restaurant world, we wanted to create a place where we could share our recipes. Now we have a community of over 1.5 million using the site to find easy recipes and enjoy slimming, delicious food. And were loving every moment!

Back when we were working long shifts in a high-pressured restaurant kitchen, it was always easiest to grab unhealthy food on the go. Eventually the time came when we both needed to lose weight, so we decided to join a local weight-loss group. Immediately we noticed a lack of easy and delicious recipe ideas and it was the same online. We were so surprised by how many people were relying on expensive low-cal ready-meals, lacking in flavour and variety.

One day Kate disappeared into the kitchen and came back with cheesecake-stuffed strawberries. So delicious and portable, they were a huge hit with our weight-loss group. After sharing a few more recipes with friends to great success, we had a small idea. What if we put our recipes onto a website and shared them with others? Our mission became to create easy, healthy and tasty dishes for ordinary people to enjoy.

We were amazed at how many people started to visit. Within around 6 months the website was drawing in over sixty thousand people a month. The tiny idea had become big. Bigger than we had ever imagined.

Suddenly, people were starting to lose weight. The Pinch of Nom Facebook group was growing at a rate no one had foreseen. As the group grew, it became apparent that many people who had not yet reached their goal weight and who jumped on and off the weight-loss wagon, felt neglected by the large diet industry companies. Soon others volunteered to join us to form the Pinch of Nom team, and we started to create a space where those who were still on their journey (like us) were just as important as those who had reached their destination.

The aim of this book is to provide delicious, light recipes that dont feel like diet food. If you slip off the wagon, we want to make you feel as if climbing back on isnt so hard! You might put the book down occasionally, but itll be just as easy to pick it right back up again.

Pinch of Nom is now much bigger than the two of us, both in terms of the team that runs it and the community that has grown from it. We are continually blown away by all the support and the love that feeds through that community on a daily basis.

This book wouldnt have existed without every single member of our Facebook group, every visitor to the website and every person who has contributed to Pinch of Nom: team members, volunteers, taste testers and commenters that have provided constructive criticism to improve the recipes and content on the site.

This book is for you. We hope you love cooking the recipes as much as weve loved putting this all together.

As a classically trained chef, Kate has always looked at recipes and dishes, then worked out how to improve or recreate them. Weve worked together on transforming some of our favourite dishes into healthy indulgences including turning high-calorie takeaways into fakeaways that are even tastier than their calorific counterparts.

Switching out a few key ingredients has a massive impact on the calorie, fat or sugar content of food. It tastes just as delicious especially when flavours are enhanced with clever spicing and seasoning.

We have included our most popular recipes from the website in this book, as it wouldnt be a Pinch of Nom book without them! The rest of the recipes are brand-new labours of love that we hope you love as much as we do.

You can prepare most of the recipes in this book in under 30 minutes. It was important to the Pinch of Nom team that the recipes were easily accessible and so weve used ingredients that you can use time and again to save on cost. So many chefs forget that we dont all have a pinch of white truffle at home! We only use less familiar ingredients where they add a unique touch to the dish and weve tried to include them more than once, so you dont have a pile of dusty ingredients at the back of the cupboard.

Early on in the Pinch of Nom history, we decided that our recipes should always be authentic. With so many untested diet recipes floating around using stock photography, we decided that every recipe should be made, tested and photographed without artistic licence, which is the approach weve used for the cookbook.

At Pinch of Nom, we believe in the ethos of everything in moderation. With this in mind, our Everyday Light recipes are those you can have at any time: theyre easy on the calories, filling and perfect for every day. You may notice some of these recipes are higher in calories than those in the other categories. The reason for this is that some calories are used up on vegetables and other ingredients that conform to zero point-style foods applicable to the UKs most popular diet programmes.

These are recipes you can add to your weekly meal plans but have one or two ingredients that make them slightly more indulgent, so should be used in moderation. A good basis of any diet should be that you dont have to miss out on enjoying dinner parties or the odd treat here or there.

Our Special Occasion recipes have your back! Lower in calories than regular desserts, snacks or treats, this section still comes out tops against high-calorie versions. However, the aforementioned ethos of everything in moderation should come to mind with these. Save these recipes for pushing the boat out and for ... you guessed it ... special occasions!

Our calorie counts are all worked out per individual serving. This does not include accompaniments for specific recipes, such as rice or potatoes. This is because we give these notes as a serving suggestion only. You can easily swap out rice and pasta for veggie low-calorie alternatives, such as cauliflower rice.