Fresh flavours

Restaurant chain Leon has won a string of awards for its tasty, healthy fast food since it opened in 2004.

All this week, we have exclusive recipes from its first cookbook. Today, founder and G2 chef Allegra McEvedy explains how to make some of the dishes that became instant favourites. Introduction by Jay Rayner

From The Guardian, Monday October 6 2008

Allegra McEvedy is the sort of person who has always been famous; doubtless, at nursery other kids used to trail after her, hoping for crumbs of attention. I'm sure she dispensed them. She's a generous soul, Allegra.

Guardian readers who follow her weekly columns, and those who have taken part in her regular cookery workshops on our Word of Mouth food blog, will already have a sense of her: encouraging, jolly, noisy and, above all, enthusiastic. In person, she is all these things, and tactile to boot. At a party she will always be at the head of her own little herd, identified by the gales of rude throaty laughter.

In short, McEvedy won't bloody shut up, and nor, thank God, will her food. When she cooks, it's always big-fisted stuff. It's the enemy of prissiness, friend to flavour. Sure, she's done her time at the pass in fancy restaurants; she once led the kitchens at Robert De Niro's Tribeca Grill in New York. She has done stints at the Groucho club - from which she was sacked for being found in the shower with a friend and a bottle - and the famed River Cafe. But it is the role she has now, as the food queen for the nine-strong, quality, seasonal fast-food chain Leon, that suits her best. Its slogan - "food which tastes good and does you good" - speaks to the woman's instinctive need to nurture.

The recipes brought together in the new Leon cookbook, which we begin serialising today, make it obvious that this is a whole lot more than bald, corporate sloganeering. Allegra and her team at Leon mean it.

There really is no arguing with her recipes for butterbean and chorizo stew or her butternut and bacon chowder, her chilli con carne made with braised hunks of chuck steak rather than crumbly mince, or her Moroccan chicken tagine, which has been a Leon bestseller for years. And for good reason. It's fantastic, gutsy, Technicolor stuff.

Sure, none of her dishes is exactly elegant. Allegra doesn't do elegant, or at least not in the classical sense. (No one who has seen her in her trademark tweed trilby would argue.) But most of the time that's not what we want from dinner. We just need sustenance, stuff that tastes great and makes us feel good about both ourselves, and the fields that supplied the ingredients that fed us. All of that is what McEvedy does best. Enjoy.

To read the rest of the story and get the first of her recipes link to the Guardian online.

Ingredients and Recipes, by Allegra McEvedy,

published by Conran Octopus on October 13, price £20