Lovejoy Tim - The Sunday Brunch cookbook: 100 of our super tasty, really easy, best-ever recipes

Weve been sitting alongside each other at Sunday Brunch school for six years now. Each week the show starts in exactly the same way: our floor manager, Seb (the guy who laughs off-camera at our bad jokes), tells us theres one minute until were on air, we then look at each other, realise that we dont know what were doing and proceed to wing it for the next three hours. Presenting Sunday Brunch is undoubtedly the best job in the world. We get to hang out with our mates. We cook great food. We sample fantastic drinks.

We meet amazing guests and experts. Then, at the end of the show, we enjoy live music from top bands and artists, who perform whilst sitting on our sofas and standing on our rug. Our single overriding aim is that we want to create recipes for everyone, dishes that we can all cook easily at home. On each episode we cook three or four recipes with our guests for everyone to enjoy. A bit of basic maths tells us that, in the history of the show, weve cooked well over a thousand different dishes on TV. You might be able to imagine how tricky it was for us to whittle down all the recipes weve ever cooked onscreen to our top 100.

However, there are some memorable dishes that stand out, and then there are those recipes that take on a life of their own and simply cannot be ignored. More than anything else, we want the people sat at home watching us cook to think to themselves, Yep, I want to make that. Im going to give it a go. And now that weve collected our 100 best-ever recipes into this book, we hope even more of you feel inspired and encouraged to get into the kitchen. Cooking on TV falls into one of two camps. The clever cheffy stuff superb food, waaaaaay too tricky ever to attempt at home or the I could do that camp, which is where we sit.

Simple, tasty food made from, in the main, easy-to-get-hold-of ingredients. For all our Sunday Brunch recipes, accessibility is key. When writing recipes, we never forget that our viewers are going to see these dishes for the first time on a Sunday morning, perhaps when theyre hungover or having a relaxing day on the sofa in front of the TV. So you want food that is simple, tasty, maybe with a bit of a twist (or Simons drunken recipes, as Tim calls them) and, hopefully, something that becomes a firm family favourite. The importance of ingredients is one of the very first things Simon taught Tim about good cooking. Pretty much all the ingredients used to make the recipes in this book can be picked up from a decent supermarket, and then for the odd piece of fish or cut of meat it really is worth seeking out a reliable fishmonger or butcher.

Picking up a few basic skills and an understanding of flavours, gives you the kitchen confidence to go on and experiment. Tim here. Even though Ive always enjoyed cooking, Im the first to admit that, when I stepped into a kitchen together with Simon, I wasnt the most adventurous or most accomplished chef. But standing next to my mate each week and helping to cook such a variety of foods, Ive taken away plenty of tips and techniques that Ive translated into my own home cooking. Nowadays, I would never dream of using a shop-bought jar of pasta sauce, tub of pesto or bottle of salad dressing as Ive learnt just how easy it is to make all these things myself and the taste of your own homemade version is incomparable. When Simon plans a dish, he thinks about building layers of flavour, balancing acidity with the salty and the sweet, and incorporating contrasting textures.

Combining a few key Asian ingredients, like soy sauce, fish sauce, rice vinegar, lime and honey into a marinade for fish and meat, understanding how to balance the acidity, heat, salt and sweetness, was my first step towards creating my now legendary Kung Fu Tuna (see ), which went on to produce the mantra, Be the Tuna. Simon here. I have been a chef for nearly 30 years, man and boy, but I am continually excited by food and by cooking. During our time on Sunday Brunch, the better cooking gospel according to Saint Simon has included:

1. Bring the meat or fish up to room temperature before cooking.
2. Oil the meat or fish and not the pan.
3. Dont shake mushrooms in the pan until you hear them squeak.
4. Everything tastes better when deep fried/with cheese/with chilli.
5. Butter and salt make things taste nice.
6. Cook out your tomato pure for 68 minutes before moving on.
7. Adding a teaspoon of vinegar at the end of cooking any non-cream based casserole is a winner (it opens your tastebuds).

Other nuggets I would add to this list are use the best produce you can, be patient, season carefully and taste as you go. And never get into a discussion with Tim about coriander. Spices and herbs, along with garlic, salt and pepper, are so important.

They are ingredients that do all the heavy lifting in the kitchen. By that we mean, its these flavoursome fellas that really bring out the accents in our food. A handful of grassy parsley scattered over a plate or stirred through a stew at the end of the cooking really elevates a dish, brightening all the flavours. But we dont agree that every herb should be used so liberally. Anyone who has ever watched Sunday Brunch might just have picked up on the fact that Tim hates coriander. Theres no persuading him.

To Tim coriander is soapy poison. End of discussion. Personal coriander preferences aside, food is a great leveller. Sharing a delicious meal is something that connects everyone, no matter who you are. Weve had an incredibly varied range of guests cook with us in our studio kitchen. Weve had knight of the realm Sir Ian McKellen pop on a Sunday Brunch apron to cook mackerel, weve had Hollywood legend and velvet-voiced chanteuse Kathleen Turner sizzle in the kitchen while cooking meatballs, and then weve had fictional telly pub landlord and all-round top geezer Danny Dyer who could forget him folding the life out of that cake mix.

The best thing is when a guest gets stuck into the cooking so much so that they forget whatever it is theyve come on the show to promote. Weve seen some unorthodox cooking techniques over the episodes (were looking at you, Richard Blackwood), but our advice to every home cook is to spend a bit of time learning how to chop correctly with the right knife. Learning how to hold a knife and slice an onion safely will stand you in good stead. Bearing in mind that pretty much every savoury dish starts with a chopped onion, itll speed up your cooking. We use special celebrity onions that never make our guests eyes water. Were very lucky that the producers of Sunday Brunch dont set any parameters on the dishes that we cook with our guests each week.

Weve come to understand the type of food that not only pleases us, but that our guests and more importantly our viewers also love. The Sunday Brunch audience is our harshest critic but also our greatest inspiration. Please keep cooking our recipes. And please keep sharing photos of the dishes you cook from any of our recipes. If you make a recipe from this book, post it online with #SundayBrunchCookbook so that we can share in it too. And if you want to, go ahead and pose with the dish.

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