Restaurant-quality cooking should not need a culinary degree.
Stir & Simmer helps home cooks recreate elegant, restaurant-inspired dishes with straightforward techniques, thoroughly tested recipes, and ingredients you can actually find in a supermarket.
My story
I taught myself to cook the long way round. When I retired in 2006 I needed something to fill the days, so I set about learning properly — one dish at a time, made and remade until it was right. Each keeper went into a ring binder in its own cellophane sleeve, so a single page could be pulled out and propped on the worktop, splashes and all. I called that binder Recipes to Bank — a nod to the day job. When it outgrew its rings it moved to the computer and onto the internet as Great Food Recipes, and in time that became the site you are reading now.
The real education, though, had come earlier, and not from any cookery school. A career in international financial services took me around the world — four years living in Bahrain, and work that carried me across Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand. The lasting souvenir was an understanding of food you cannot get from a book: markets, home kitchens, restaurants and street food, each with its own produce, techniques and flavour logic. That is the thinking behind the Kitchen Atlas, and behind the way every recipe here is built.
Nearly twenty years of cooking, testing and writing later, that ring binder has become 136 recipes — every one made for a real home kitchen.
Every recipe here has a home on the map. The Kitchen Atlas is where the tastes I brought back live now — explore the world’s cuisines and see exactly where each dish comes from.
Explore the Kitchen Atlas →What you’ll find here
- 136 tried-and-tested recipes, from weeknight suppers to weekend showstoppers.
- Cooking guides, grouped into topic hubs — stock and sauces, heat and searing, knife skills, spices and more — that explain the techniques behind the food.
- A Kitchen Atlas of world cuisines, and collections to help you find the right dish for the moment.
How every recipe is tested
- Cooked, and cooked again, until it is reliable
- Written for a home kitchen, not a professional one
- Measured accurately, in grams and millilitres
- Tested with ordinary supermarket ingredients
- Explained with the why as well as the how
Start here
New to Stir & Simmer? Here are three of my own favourites to begin with:
Tuna Linguine with Tomatoes & Olives
Tonno e Fagioli — Roasted Pepper, White Bean and Tuna Salad
Salt Aged Steak with Whisky and Mustard SauceRestaurant-quality recipes. Clearly explained. Thoroughly tested. Made for home cooks.
