Rukmini Iyer - The roasting tin around the world global one dish dinners

Rukmini Iyer is the bestselling author of the Roasting Tin Series. She is a recipe writer, food stylist and formerly a lawyer. She loves creating delicious and easy recipes with minimum fuss and maximum flavour. Rukmini believes family dinners are an integral part of the day and is passionate about helping people make it possible.

Rukmini grew up in Cambridgeshire with the best of three food cultures: Bengali and South Indian food from her parents Indian heritage, along with classic 80s mac & cheese, sponge puddings and cheese & pineapple on sticks. Rukminis career began with a training contract at a leading law firm, but she realised that as she spent all day thinking about food, all evening cooking, and most of her law lectures or time in the office scribbling down ideas for new dishes in the margins of her notebook, a career in food was a sensible move. She decided to retrain as a food stylist, so after cookery school and a summer working at a Michelin-starred restaurant to learn the ropes, she began work as a food stylist. Surrounded by food all day on photo shoots, she noticed the meals she made at home grew simpler, often just in a roasting tin, and that there were ways of packing in flavour and interest to the dishes with an absolute minimum effort - this became the inspiration for the series.

As well as writing cookbooks, Rukmini styles and writes recipes for numerous brands and publications, including Waitrose, The Guardian and Fortnum & Mason. When not working with food, she can usually be found walking her beautiful border collie Pepper by the riverside in East London, entertaining at home or filling her balcony and flat with more plants than they can hold. Rukmini runs an occasional series of supper-clubs for charities including Oxfam and Womens Aid.

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I was the kind of fifteen-year-old who took a few bites of a new dish on holiday and experienced the sort of heady rush that Id later recognise in Remy from Ratatouille. Hollandaise sauce with salmon and asparagus in Mauritius magical! A paella, cooked on an open flame at the table next to us in Granada, downing tiny cups of hot soup or interesting pastry confections pre-starter in Seville, taking pizza by the slice from an open window in Florence that was unlike any pizza Id had before and realising in those moments that eating food abroad was the best thing. The only dish I remember returning was squid ink pasta in Rome jet-black, complete with tentacles ordered on the basis that sepia pasta, of which Id never heard, sounded like a painting; what arrived didnt look like one. Visiting family in California, I could (and did) wander round supermarkets in a sort of ecstatic daze, admiring the perfect fresh produce just as much as the aisles of bright, unfamiliarly packaged biscuits, cereal and cake mix. Trips to India included my insistence on a return visit to a less than salubrious hotel in the South, on the basis that they had served the best doughnuts (cardamom scented; perfect) on a visit many years earlier. We arrived to find that they were no longer on the menu and this was met with howls. I was 23 years old. But I still think about those doughnuts.

Luckily for this book, my most dedicated attempts to Marie Kondo the house havent shifted the drawerful of collected round-the-world recipes some kitchen-smudged and handed over by harried but kind chefs, some beautifully typed up and presented in envelopes from hotels, and more recently scrawled down in my travel notebooks, as restaurants seem surprisingly unwilling to give out recipes to young women with an intent cheffy glint in their eye. So the Creole crab tarts on , and travelling through Beijing and Shanghai as a student was mind-expanding in learning about different types of Chinese cooking, some of which are included in the Asian chapter.

What I wanted to recreate in this Roasting Tin book was that feeling of amazement that I had in trying dishes from abroad for the first time, but presented in a way that was accessible for easy weeknight cooking. So this is a new collection of recipes that wont take any more effort than your average chop-and-chuck traybake, but will give you a whole new set of globally influenced flavours some based on old favourites, like the steak and ale pie with mushrooms and rosemary on that its worth the minor inconvenience of buying from a specialist online retailer or even, dare I say it, Amazon.

Ovens are not the traditional cooking method of many of the food cultures in this book. As lots of readers will know, for Thai, Indian and other dishes, the spice-paste and onions are carefully fried in a pan until the oil separates before youre allowed to add any further ingredients. But I love the luxury of leaving food to cook itself without my attention, and didnt want to lose out on the incredible flavours that you get in recipes from these countries. It occurred to me that with dishes like the Thai beef panang with coconut and chilli on are even easier, as the spices melt happily into the dishes without needing the two stages. While the authentic versions, which may require several pans and different steps, are unquestionably delicious, the idea behind converting these into one-tin dishes was as ever to make life easier on those days when you just dont have the time or inclination to stand in the kitchen stirring. When there are other things requiring attention children, dogs, deadlines, friends arriving for dinner in twenty minutes much as I love food and have a keen interest in traditional world cooking, if I can knock out a globally inspired dish thatll have family and friends amazed at the complexity of flavours, while I rather smugly know theres only one tin and a tableful of wineglasses to wash up after theyve left, then Ill happily do that.

This book is a whistle-stop tour through dishes from around the world I imagine it would be the size of Encyclopaedia Britannica were I able to convert every recipe into a tin format.

So I have limited myself to personal favourites, and those which work best in a roasting tin. Some dishes, like the Korean aubergines on ), the black beans, garlic and onion cook along with the rice in just 30 minutes, and I add a sharp lime, radish and avocado salsa to serve perfect for a quick midweek meal or for lunchboxes. In case you find yourself eating one of the dishes and wanting to learn more about the food culture behind it, Ive included a bibliography at the back for further reading which will point you in the direction of the authentic recipes from which Ive drawn inspiration, along with cooking methods and fascinating stories from the countries covered in this book. I hope these recipes bring some of the excitement of travelling and trying new dishes into your kitchen, showing just what you can do with standard storecupboard ingredients, or, if youre feeling adventurous, one or two new ones. Raid the supermarket, dust off the spices from the back of the cupboard, and then, as ever, kick back and let the oven do the work.