Feeding Your Family, written by Nicole Pisani and Joanna Weinberg, is a cookbook aimed at parents and children encouraging them to eat nourishing family meals. The writers worked with the charity Chefs in Schools that operates in over 80 schools over the country in order to feed more that 30,000 students at school each day. All profits from the book go to the charity. Chefs in Schools aims to help teach children to understand and love food cooked with fresh ingredients and learn how to make the food they eat. The team at Chefs in Schools are restaurant trained chefs who work in the schools and train the school cooks to improve the school dinners and teach the pupils how to cook. The team includes many renowned chefs and food campaigners such as Prue Leith, Henry Dimbleby, Thomas Miers and Yotam Ottolenghi, some of whom have contributed recipes to the book. Their mission is to improve the health of children through better eating and food education, since teaching kids about food is how they learn to eat well. I made two recipes from the book for my family: prawn toast and the crispy chicken thighs with broccoli. I found the recipes quite straightforward and easy to make. It took me 40 minutes to cook everything. I enjoyed making and trying the prawn toast as I had never had it homemade and using ingredients I wouldn’t use normally. My family said that they really enjoyed the meal and thought it was different to our usual diners.

Nicole Pisane is the co-founder and executive head chef at Chefs in Schools. She grew up in Malta and before she joined the charity, she was the head chef at Ottolenghi’s Nopi restaurant in Central London. She describes how she joined the organisation, “I was itching to tackle a new challenge when I aw a tweet from Henry Dimbleby (co-founder of Leon Restaurants and co-author of the School Food Plan) calling for an inspiring chef to turn around the food at his children’s school in Hackney. I though, Yes! – a chance to put my skills forward and inspire a new generation of eaters.”

But it hasn’t all been plain sailing, Nicole’s co-author the food writer Joanna Weinberg says, “We’ve had plenty of disasters too. There was the lunch hour which Nicole spent weeping over (and sweeping up) 500 rejected portions of fresh mushroom tagliatelle she’d been making since 6am.”

I won’t be making mushroom tagliatelle as my sister won’t eat mushrooms and my mum doesn’t like pasta, but I am looking forward to trying the homemade yogurt and fruit that I made earlier at breakfast tomorrow.