If the idea of communal living brings to mind passive-aggressive fridge notes and existential dread over the washing up, Rosie Kellett is here to recalibrate your expectations. For the past five years, she’s lived with six others in a warehouse in London who cook communally for one another each evening. Each person puts £25 into a kitty each week and every night someone cooks for whoever’s around.
Her debut cookbook, In for Dinner, is a record of that rhythm. It documents 101 veg-forward, low-effort recipes designed for real life: shrinking London budgets, dietary requirements, and unpredictable schedules. The sort of deceptively simple meals you can make from tins, jars hanging out at the back of your fridge.
She’s since been evicted from the warehouse – thank you, London housing market – but the instinct to cook communally remains strong for Kellett. In an age where community feels increasingly out of reach, In for Dinner makes a quiet but persuasive case for the joy, generosity and everyday necessity of feeding others – whether you live in a sizeable house share, alone, or with family.
In for Dinner by Rosie Kellett is published by Square Peg (£27), available to purchase here
Confit cherry tomatoes and labneh on toast
Preserve the best of this summer’s tomatoes by making this jammy, sweet tomato confit that’s perfect paired with slightly sour labneh and a crusty slice of sourdough toast. Brunch, lunch and dinner party approved
Confit cherry tomatoes and Labneh on toast
Benedikte Klüver
Serves 4-6
Preparation time 10 minutes
Cooking time 1-3 hours
When we think of preserves, our minds often jump to strawberry jam or marmalade. But summer’s tomatoes can be just as easy to bottle. This confit recipe captures their sun-soaked sweetness, ready to enjoy long after the season’s passed. And once the tomatoes are gone, don’t throw out the oil – it’s perfect for salad dressings, roasting vegetables or frying eggs.
“Once confited, these tomatoes will keep for up to one month in the fridge. Once you have made the labneh and confited the tomatoes, you can whip up this meal in seconds, so it’s a great one to prep for the week and come to when you are short on time,” says Kellett. “It’s not just breakfast: the tomatoes are good on everything from savoury pancakes to eggs, pasta to couscous and polenta - use them far and wide.”
Ingredients
400g cherry tomatoes
200ml olive oil
a pinch of sea salt
700ml full-fat yoghurt
zest of 1 lemon
½ tsp sea salt
Method
Put the cherry tomatoes, olive oil and a pinch of sea salt into a medium saucepan over the lowest heat possible and leave to confit for at least 1 hour, and anywhere up to 3 hours.
To make the labneh, mix the yoghurt with the lemon zest and ½ tsp sea salt.
Place a sieve over a bowl and line the sieve with a large, clean piece of cheesecloth, muslin or a fresh dishcloth. Pour the labneh into the lined sieve and tuck the mixture in with the excess cloth.
Leave to strain like this in the fridge overnight. In the morning the bowl will have collected all the milky excess liquid from the yoghurt (which you can discard), and you will have a thick labneh in the lined sieve.
When you are ready to serve, toast the bread and rub it lightly with the garlic clove. Top with the labneh and then the tomatoes, a drizzle of extra confit oil and sprinkling with salt and pepper.
Citrus mackerel spaghetti with pangrattato
Sometimes all you need to make a delicious dinner is a tin of fish at the back of your cupboard and a knob of stale bread to blitz up. This citrussy spaghetti is tangy, sharp, spicy and slurpable in equal measures
Cirtrus mackerel spaghetti with pangrattato
Benedikte Klüver
Serves 6
Preparation time 10 minutes
Cooking time 10 minutes
A reliable store-cupboard pasta is essential for those nights when the fridge is empty, you’ve had a long day, and Deliveroo is calling. This recipe makes the most of affordable, flavour-packed staples like tinned mackerel, capers and chilli flakes, finished with a crisp pangrattato – golden fried breadcrumbs that add crunch and make good use of any stale slices.
"This recipe was born, like the rest of them, out of necessity. While living with my first boyfriend in my early twenties, we existed almost exclusively off BLTs and a version of this pasta,” says Kellett. “It’s for the cash-poor and the time-poor, yet it’s serving big-time flavour. It’s made up of pantry staples and will be on the table in less than half an hour.”
Ingredients
200g stale bread
100ml extra virgin olive oil
1 clove of garlic, minced
500g dried spaghetti
4 x 125g tins of mackerel in olive oil, drained and broken up
1 x 180g jar of capers, drained
Method
First make the pangrattato by blitzing the bread into breadcrumbs in a food processor.
In a frying pan, over a medium heat, heat a tablespoon of the olive oil and fry the breadcrumbs with the garlic until golden brown and crisp. I like to take them pretty dark, bordering on a little burned, but you do you.
Cook the spaghetti in well-salted, boiling water until al dente.
Put the mackerel, capers, chilli flakes, lemon zest and juice, most of the parsley and half the olive oil into a large mixing bowl and combine thoroughly.
Drain the pasta, reserving a little of the water, and add it to the mackerel mixture.
Mix vigorously, adding a little pasta water and more olive oil if it seems too dry. You should end up with a glossy sauce that clings to the pasta.
Serve on a large platter, topped with the pangrattato and accompanied with the rest of the chopped parsley.
Panzanella
If you’re looking for a salad that screams summer, look no further than a panzanella buoyant with market-fresh tomatoes, olives, basil and capers
Panzanella
Benedikte Klüver
Serves 6-8
Preparation time 15 minutes
Cooking time 15 minutes
All bread-eating cultures have a thrifty trick for reviving those sad, stale tranches. In Britain, it’s bread and butter pudding. In the Levant, fattoush. Spain has salmorejo. And the Italians? Panzanella. Hailing from Tuscany and Umbria, this punchy salad makes a hero of ripe summer tomatoes, doused in red wine vinegar, scattered with capers, olives, torn basil and hunks of bread roasted till golden and crisp. It’s the kind of thing you throw together and plonk down in the middle of the table at a lazy lunch, best mates round, rosé sweating in a jug.
“In summer, when tomatoes come into season, the first thing I do is slice one open, sprinkle it with a little salt, eat it whole and die a death of happiness,” says Kellett. “The second thing I do is make panzanella. It’s the perfect summer salad, letting tomatoes really shine, and it uses up your stale end- of-loaf bits of bread.”
Ingredients
1.2kg of the best ripe tomatoes you can find – a mix of varieties is perfect
3 tsp sea salt
½ loaf of bread, torn intobite-size pieces
120ml extra virgin olive oil, plus extra for drizzling
2 banana shallots, thinly sliced
2 cloves of garlic, minced
3 tbsp red wine vinegar
½ tsp ground black pepper
A large bunch of basil, leaves picked, half thinly sliced, half reserved whole
2 tbsp capers
160g Kalamata olives, pitted
Method
Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan/gas mark 4.
Roughly chop your tomatoes into bite-size pieces. Toss them with the salt, then transfer them to a large colander, set over a bowl, to drain for 30 minutes. The tomatoes will release a lot of their juices and the salty, tomatoey liquid that gathers in the bowl will be the base of your dressing, so don’t discard this; it is liquid gold! You can weigh the tomatoes down with another clean bowl, to speed along the liquid gathering.
While your tomatoes are draining, toss the bread with a little olive oil on a large baking tray and toast in the oven for 15 minutes. You want the pieces to be starting to crisp up on the outside and take on a little colour, but still be squashy in the middle.
To make the dressing, take 2 tablespoons of the salty tomato liquid in the bowl and whisk in the shallots, garlic, red wine vinegar, black pepper and olive oil.
Browned butter, almond summer fruit cake
A fudgy and fuss-free cake made from peaches and almonds that’s a tried-and-tested crowd pleaser, designed for those lazy summer soirées alfresco with friends
Browned butter and almond summer fruit cake
Benedikte Klüver
Serves 8
Preparation time 30 minutes
Cooking time 1hr 15min
After a sun-soaked summer feast, dessert can sometimes feel like an afterthought. You could reach for a tub of vanilla Häagen-Dazs, or you could take it up a notch with this browned butter and almond summer fruit cake. Made with fresh or tinned peaches, it’s rich, nutty, and just the right balance of sweetness.
“This cake is the epitome of summer: it’s sticky, jammy, fresh and not too sweet,” says Kellett. “The browned butter and ground almonds give it a beautiful toasty flavour, and it’s just dreamy with a dollop of creme fraiche on top on a warm summer’s day.”
Ingredients
250g unsalted butter
370g icing sugar, sifted
200g ground almonds
80g plain flour
A pinch of sea salt
220g egg whites (save the egg yolks for tiramisu)
3 tsp vanilla extract
10g berries
1 ripe peach, sliced into half-moons (tinned also work well)
Creme fraiche, to serve
Method
Preheat the oven to 170°C/150°C fan/gas mark 3. Grease and line a 21cm round tin.
Melt the butter in a saucepan over a medium-high heat and continue to cook until it starts to brown, swirling the pan and keeping an eye on it so it doesn’t turn from brown to burnt. Once the milk solids have gone a nutty brown, take the pan off the heat and leave to cool.
Whisk together the icing sugar, ground almonds, plain flour and salt in a large mixing bowl.
Add the egg whites and vanilla and stir until combined, then add the cooled brown butter and mix again.
Pour the batter into the tin and put the tin into the fridge for 15 minutes until the batter has slightly firmed up.
Sprinkle the fruit on top, pressing the berries and slices of peach halfway into the batter.
Bake for 1 hour 15 minutes, covering loosely with foil after 50 minutes so it doesn’t brown too much on top.
Let the cake cool completely in the tin, then serve with a light dusting of icing sugar and a dollop of creme fraiche.
