Share the love with four simple recipes from Skye McAlpine's new cookbook

Even the most food-besotted recipe writer finds some kitchen jobs tiresome. "I loathe chopping ... and I'm hopeless at it," Skye McAlpine confesses in her latest cookbook, A Table Full of Love. "I don't much like peeling either, and I definitely don't enjoy washing up."

But taking the time to cook even a simple dish for someone can be an act of love, she believes. "What matters is to cook something rather than perhaps trying to make ... ever more challenging, food and then stumbling or losing heart along the way."

Here are four do-able dishes, made with easily accessible (albeit sometimes seasonal) ingredients, designed to comfort, seduce, nourish or spoil your loved ones, as well as yourself.

Pollo alla pizzaiola

While chicken breast is undoubtedly an easy, quick and uncontroversial option for supper, I find it often to be quite disappointing: a little bland, usually dry and just a bit boring. Except when cooked this way: the meat is browned, then lightly poached in rich tomato sugo so it stays exquisitely tender, and each piece comes enrobed in a blanket of melting mozzarella cheese. Absolutely essential with this is some crusty bread for wiping up all the juices on your plate. And depending on your mood, you might also want a light salad or a few greens.

INGREDIENTS

• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 4 chicken breasts
• 460ml tomato pasta sauce (sugo)
• 2-3 tbsp capers
• leaves from a small bunch of basil, chopped
• 200g mozzarella cheese, sliced
• sea salt flakes and freshly ground black pepper

METHOD

1. Heat the olive oil in a large frypan that has a lid; you want a pan that is large enough to fit the 4 chicken breasts. Brown the meat on both sides over a medium heat, then take the pan off the heat. Take the breasts out of the pan, set on a plate and season them generously with salt and pepper.
2. Put the tomato pasta sauce in the frypan while the pan is still off the heat, so the difference in temperature between sauce and hot pan doesn't cause the sauce to spit, then put the pan back over the heat to warm through. Add the capers and basil. When the tomato begins to bubble, nestle the seasoned chicken in the pan.
3. Cook the chicken in the pan over a medium heat for 7-8 minutes, turning the breasts every now and then, until cooked through.
4. Lay a slice or 2 of mozzarella over each piece of chicken and cover the pan with its lid, or, if you don't have a lid big enough, you can cover the pan with foil. Cook for a further minute or 2, until the cheese is melted. Serve immediately.

Serves 4

Lemony chickpea and walnut salad

Store in an airtight box or glass jar for two or three days in the fridge. As well as a welcome doorstep gift, this makes a lovely dish for picnics or packed lunches. And if I'm craving something more substantial, I'll add a tin of meaty tuna (drained, of course), or a boiled egg – the yolk still sunshine-yellow and jammy in the middle – to the dish.

INGREDIENTS

• 210g jar of chickpeas
• 1½ tbsp olive oil
• 1 small onion, chopped
• finely grated zest and juice of ⅓ lemon
• leaves from a small bunch of parsley, chopped
• handful of walnuts
• sea salt flakes and freshly ground black pepper

METHOD

1. Drain the chickpeas in a colander and run them under cold water to wash them clean. Keep running water over them until the water is clear and no longer frothy.
2. Heat the olive oil in a saucepan over a medium heat. Add the chopped onion and a generous pinch of salt. Fry gently for 3-5 minutes until the onion softens and turns translucent.
3. Add the chickpeas and toss together in the pan, just long enough to heat through.
4. Now, remove from the heat and add the lemon zest and juice. Toss together. Lastly, sprinkle over the parsley and crumble in the walnuts.
5. Toss together for a final time, season to taste and serve warm or at room temperature, as you like.

Serves 1

Pasta con panna e piselli

Pasta cooked this way, swimming in a sauce of cream, juicy almost-sugar-sweet peas and freshly ground black pepper, is one of my strongest happy memories from childhood. And I still love to eat it now. It's one of those effortless dishes that everyone loves: effortless in the sense that it's quick and easy to make, of course, but effortless also in the sense that the flavours are innately comforting, intuitive to enjoy at all stages of life. If you wanted, you could fry some cubed pancetta with the onion and add it, salty and dripping with fat, to the white creamy sauce. Or you might want to add a dash of ground saffron to the cream to give it extra warmth, colour and a punch of flavour. This is one of those sauces that works well with all pasta shapes, though convention would stipulate a short pasta of some kind, be it penne or fusilli or rigatoni rather than spaghetti or linguine (though if that's what you have to hand, use it). I have a soft spot for farfalle, the little butterflies, if only because it's such a joyful, playful shape.

INGREDIENTS

• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 250g frozen peas
• ½ vegetable stock cube
• 320g farfalle, or another (ideally short) pasta
• 250ml single cream
• sea salt flakes and freshly ground black pepper
• parmesan cheese, finely grated, to serve

METHOD

1. Bring a large saucepan of generously salted water to the boil.
2. Heat the oil in a large pan – large enough to hold the cooked pasta – over a medium-low heat. Add the onion with a pinch of salt and cook for 3-5 minutes, until soft and translucent. Tip the peas into the pan with the onion, giving everything a good stir. Add a ladleful of the salted water from the pasta saucepan, crumble in the half stock cube, increase the heat and cook for 10-15 minutes, until the liquid has cooked right down and the peas taste sweet and are almost mushy in texture.
3. Meanwhile add the pasta to the pan of boiling water, which should by now be at a galloping boil, and cook al dente, according to the packet instructions.
4. Pour the cream into the pan with the peas, give everything a good stir and reduce the heat. Cook gently for a few minutes to warm the cream all the way through.
5. Drain the pasta, reserving a cup of the cooking water. Toss the pasta into the pan with the sauce and a splash of the reserved cooking water. Mix everything together so all the pasta is coated in the creamy sauce.
6. Season with a little salt, plenty of pepper and a little grated parmesan to taste.

Serves 4

Rhubarb and almond cake

The idea to throw chopped rhubarb into cake batter, raw, like little sticks of pink Brighton rock, comes to me via my friend Sarah Standing. It is sheer genius. I've taken a version of the River Cafe's inimitable recipe for polenta cake as my base, which is equal parts buttery and crumbly and a pleasing golden yellow hue, and through it you get shards of sour rhubarb, pops of intense pink colour and flavour. By the same principle, you could throw some raspberries (frozen or fresh), blackberries or even blueberries in there. Though candy-pink rhubarb, when in season, will always have my heart. And this is a hearty cake.

INGREDIENTS

• 370g salted butter, softened, plus more for the tin
• 370g caster sugar
• 370g ground almonds
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 5 eggs
• 3 tbsp milk
• 190g polenta
• 1½ tsp baking powder
• 300g rhubarb, chopped into 2cm pieces
• sea salt flakes

METHOD

1. Heat the oven to 170C fan-forced (190C conventional). Butter a 23cm springform cake tin and line it with baking paper.
2. Beat the butter and sugar together until pale and light. Stir in the ground almonds and vanilla. Now beat in the eggs, one at a time, followed by the milk. Lastly, fold in the polenta, baking powder and 1⁄2 tsp salt.
3. Spoon the batter into the prepared cake tin, then drop in the chunks of rhubarb, scattering them evenly though the cake.
4. Bake in the oven for 1 hour 10 minutes to 1 hour 15 minutes, until the cake is set and brown on top. Let cool in the tin, then turn the cake out on to a dish or stand. Packaged up in a cake box or tin it will keep happily for two to three days.

Serves 10

This is an edited extract from A Table Full of Love by Skye McAlpine, published by Bloomsbury. Photography by Skye McAlpine. RRP $52.99. Buy now