…well simple if you have marsala and decent chicken stock to hand. Luckily I had the former as we are Nigella sluts and I had the latter as we had roast chicken yesterday and I cannot roast a chicken without making stock.

This is a simplified version of Nigella’s Chicken, Mushroom and Bacon pie. I wanted to use left-over cooked chicken instead of cooking fresh, so this is what I used:

• Bowl full of cooked chicken meat – about 500g
• 4 rashers of bacon
• half a box of chestnut mushrooms
• 2 tablespoons of Marsala wine
• 500ml of hot chicken stock
• roll of ready-made shortcrust pastry (though in hindsight I wish I’d made my own)
• splash of olive oil
• 1 clove of garlic
• 3 spoons of plain flour
• dried mixed herbs

Preheat oven to 200 degrees C or a little hotter. Put a glug of olive oil in a pan. Slice a clove of garlic in half and push it round the pan while the oil warms up. Chuck the garlic away before it burns. Cut the bacon into little strips and fry. When it begins to catch, toss in the sliced mushrooms.

Chop the chicken into small chunks and chuck in the pan along with a couple of teaspoons of dried mixed herbs – she said to use thyme, but I never ever have enough thyme. Sprinkle over a few dessert spoons of plain white four. When the mushrooms are cooked, add the marsala and the hot chicken stock. Season with salt and pepper. Simmer for 5 or 10 minutes until thickening.

Put the mixture in a dish and cover with pastry. I put the children’s initials on top with the left-over pastry for a bit of fun, but this proved to be a very good move. Tilly had earlier in the afternoon declared that chicken pie was “disgusting” and she wouldn’t eat it – but of course she just had to have the piece with the letter T on, and she ate loads.

Bake for half an hour. Serve with new potatoes, peas and sweetcorn. Delicious. It all went. Nothing left for Mr Freezer.

The trick here is to use the cheapest jaffa cakes you can get – generic, basic supermarket ones – and the best vanilla ice cream you can find. We made this with Kelly’s Cornish clotted cream ice cream.

Ingredients:

• Jaffa Cakes
• Vanilla ice cream

Method:

Put the jaffa cakes in the freezer for an hour or so. Take the ice cream out of the freezer to soften, and stir to make what my children call ‘ice cream cream’. Remove jaffa cakes when frozen and smash with a rolling pin. Fold the jaffa cake bits into the ice cream.

I would have included a photo but it didn’t last long enough to take one.