In for Dinner, Author Article and Cookbook Giveaway

Enter our US/UK giveaway to win one of four copies of In for Dinner: 101 Delicious & Affordable Recipes to Batch Cook, Share and Enjoy by Rosie Kellett. Be sure to check out the author’s US events here.

For the past five years, home cook Rosie Kellett has been living communally with six others, making delicious seasonal food on a budget of £25 per person, per week.

In her first cookbook In for Dinner (published in the UK in May and will be released in the US on the 19th), she shares over 100 low-effort, high-reward, veg-forward recipes for weeknights when you’re counting down to payday, busy workdays with short lunch breaks, mornings that call for hearty yet cheap breakfasts, and special days with your favourite people.

Rosie’s life motto is “delicious food should be possible on any budget’‘ and her cookbook reflects that celebrating food, friendship and community. Whether you feed a family, roommates, prep meals for yourself or hos dinner parties, this book will guide you to creating affordable, delicious recipes to nourish everyone around your table.

There are fourteen online recipes available to try now. This title will be one of our featured books in our Eat Your Books Cookbook Club for October – so try one of the online recipes or better yet buy the book and join us!

Two recipes I tried were the Cacio e pepe and Caramelised banana loaf. The banana loaf was delicious and you cannot go wrong with cacio e pepe. I picked these recipes because I needed a quick dinner one night and the banana loaf – well who doesn’t have aging bananas lying about? I have loads of other recipes tagged to make.

The reason we are doing this promotion is because I reached out to the publishers. I love this cookbook so much – and wanted to share it with our Members. In for Dinner is filled with photographs and lovely illustrations and organized as follows: In for breakfast; In for lunch; In for dinner; and In for Cakies (yes cakies). Rosie shares cooking times, instructions for scaling a recipe and more. She encourages you to trust your gut and if a recipe has an ingredient that you cannot afford or one that you don’t like – of course, substitute away. (She states the recipes are successful as written.) I made a substitution in the banana loaf above. I didn’t have flaxseeds so I googled the replacement quantity for eggs and it worked beautifully.

The UK publisher has shared an author interview with Rosie so that we can get to know this creative, talented cook.

How did you get into cooking and what is your background?

I come from a very creative family, both my parents are musicians, and my siblings are all artists of one kind or another, so I was always encouraged to explore my creativity and a typical 9-5 job was not on the cards. Initially that lead me to acting and writing for theatre, which I did for 10 years. Fresh out of school I moved to LA to work as Samantha Morton’s PA, I did that job for a year and then moved to London. In London I got myself an agent and started auditioning and working within theatre. All the while I was doing that, I was working in food to pay my rent, as a baker at Meringue Girls, front of house at Violet Bakery and later working as Claire Ptak’s PA, where I project managed the Royal wedding cake for Prince Harry & Meghan Markle. Throughout that decade I had a quiet voice in my head telling me that theatre wasn’t the thing for me, it took me a really long time to realise it, but as I approached my 30^th birthday I realised that the only thing that really set my heart on fire was food, cooking for other people, nourishing them with a delicious meal. So having just turned 30, I changed a careers in early 2023 and went full speed ahead into a career in food, starting a supper club with my housemate Virginia, starting to share recipes and more about the way we live in the warehouse online. To my surprise, it really captured the attention of the internet for a moment in the summer of 2023 and my following on Instagram grew from 1,000 to 100,000 in just five days.

How did the idea for your debut book and title come about and how do you hope it will help people?

This book is a love letter to food, community, friendship and family. It’s something I had always fantasised about writing, collating all the delicious recipes we cook in the warehouse day in and day out, selfishly so we had them all in one place, but more importantly to encourage under confident cooks to host their friends and family more regularly. I strongly believe that delicious food is possible on any budget and that living the way we do in the warehouse, sharing food and eating together every night, is better for the planet, your wallet and your health. Whether you are living in a flat share, feeding a family, counting down to payday or stuck in a rut with recipe ideas, this book has a solution for any night of the week. I am fiercely passionate about demystifying the difficulty of cooking for large groups, it’s easy if you know how, and in this book, I want to share my tips and tricks for how to make it not only simple, but joyful too.

I hope to help people who get intimidated cooking for groups confidence to make a casual chilli for all their friends on a Wednesday night because its achievable and affordable, if you know how! In for Dinner is filled with 101 recipes that represent the international make up of our warehouse, with housemates heralding from Italy, Poland, Denmark, Germany, New Zealand, Philipines, Malaysia, China and the UK. It’s jam packed full of warehouse staple dinners, staff meal concoctions from my days in professional kitchens, plus some cherished family recipes from my childhood.

For the title, every day on our group chat the person cooking will ask “Who’s in for dinner” and then depending on how many people are in, they cook dinner for them that night. It felt appropriate to call the book In for Dinner as really, that’s where I want to be day in and day out, round our kitchen table sharing a meal with my friends at the end of the day.

You’ve been living communally with six others for five years, what’s your approach to this and what tips do you have for us about organising your weekly food shop and bill?

Get organised! We do a once weekly online shop that covers all the food we need for a week in the house. This takes a good deal of organisation, attention to what is running low and communication among the housemates. Once you get into the rhythm of doing one big shop a week, you know when you are running low on certain things and which basics you always need to order. Beyond that, it’s about thinking a little further into the future and imagining what you might like to cook in a few days time, so you can make sure the right ingredients make it into the shop. However, what I will say, is that living this way has made us all more intuitive cooks, sometimes the fridge is bare, and you only have pantry ingredients to work with, requiring you to improvise a dinner out of very little. In writing In for Dinner, I have done my level best to impart all my wisdom on how to become a braver, more intuitive and creative cook, who is able to make use of the ingredients on hand, and whip up a quick pasta for six, without having a meltdown.

What is at the heart of your style and ethos of cooking?

I always come back to the idea that delicious food should be possible on any budget, it’s not what you have in the fridge or the cupboards, it’s what you do with it. After a decade of hand to mouth living in London, I have really learned how to make a little go a long way, what to prioritise in my food shop and how to treat ingredients to get the very best out of them. So, I would say, at the heart of my cooking is always and forever, an abundance and generosity. If we have a few extra friends round for dinner unexpectedly, taking the table from 6 to 10, we make sure there is something for everyone to eat.

Please can you give an example of an In for Dinner recipe that is both totally modern but nostalgic as well.

Roasted carrot, cumin & coconut soup with coriander salsa: This soup haunted my childhood, creamy sickly sweet versions on school dinner and café menus across the UK put me off it for life, but this recipe was born out of a hurried staff meal one day at work in a professional kitchen. I had to whip up lunch for 30 people and was snowed under with prep for the weekend brunch menu, all I had to work with was a crate of carrots and coriander. This soup was born, the key to it being so delicious is that all the veg is roasted hot and fast in the oven and then blended with the coconut milk & stock, giving it a deep earthy flavour that’s hard to achieve in a pot on the hob. Topped here with this acidic lime based coriander salsa and it really bring the classic Carrot & Coriander soup to a whole new level.

Savoury sweetcorn French toast with cherry tomato salsa: Eggy bread was a real staple on my house growing up, what the Americans might refer to as French toast. This recipe is inspired by a version my friend and colleague Stacey O’Gorman used to make for our work lunches at Meringue Girls. She had the *genius* idea of blending a can of sweetcorn into the egg mixture, in which the bread is soaked, which gives it a much more interesting texture and flavour. It’s a revolutionary way to level up eggy bread, with the addition of sharp grated cheddar, hot sauce and a cherry tomato salsa, it’s really brought up to present day.

Caramelised banana loaf: Everyone has a banana bread recipe they swear by, this is mine. I’ve been making and tweaking the recipe in the warehouse for the past five years and this is, in my opinion, truly the peak of Banana Bread discourse. It just so happens to be vegan, is beautifully moist and has an almost crackling like crust from the caramelised sugar. When I make a loaf for the warehouse it’s always magically gone by the end of the day.

What advice can you give when cooking for friends who are vegan or don’t eat gluten?

When catering to dietaries, my advice is always to keep it simple. Make a base meal that everyone can eat, that is say, vegan and gluten free, then have a few optional additions to keep everyone happy. So many of the recipes in In for Dinner have simple gluten free and vegan substitutions and when you know how, it’s very easy to make simple swaps that work for everyone. You can look at the index in the back of the book which details every recipe that can be made vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian or gluten free. Sometimes it’s as simple as swapping the dairy milk for a plant based alternative.

What are your top tips on eating heartily on a budget?

Prioritise seasonality, local ingredients and good quality preserved items, like jarred beans and tinned fish. You will be surprised just how fruitful the ingredients in your pantry are with a few fresh produce additions.

You have over 10 years of experience cooking for big groups what advice can you share for success?

I’ve included a cheat sheet on this very topic in the introduction to the book! My main tips are:

• Prepare as much as you can in advance
• Ask for help
• Choose the easy way out
• Don’t overcomplicate things

I go into detail on all these points in the book, but in short, I feel that a lot of the time people feel like they need to cook something super complicated, involved and time consuming to host a good meal. This just isn’t true, there is nothing better than simple food, with good company, beautiful music and a few lit candles. It’s the simple things that make a really good dinner party.

What favourite summer recipe would you suggest we try for a midweek meal when we finish work?

So many things! First comes to mind is Panzanella, it’s so easy, super simple and is ready in no time at all. When tomatoes are in season, I want to eat them at every available opportunity because they are never sweeter or more delicious at the height of summer, and then you have to wait another 6-8 months to taste them again! Another great tomato recipe which is super quick and perfect for a sweltering summers day is the Spring Summer Tomato soup – my version of the Spanish chilled soup Gazpacho. Another great option would be the Citrus Mackerel Spaghetti w/ Pangrattato, Vermicelli Salad, Crispy Tofu & Satay Dressing or Bee’s Flammkuchen.

You are obviously an amazing baker having worked with the Meringue Girls and Claire Ptak at Violet Bakery on the royal wedding cake. Tell us about the cakes and bakes we might expect in the book?

Gosh, there are so many good cakes and bakes! I am not someone with a massive sweet tooth, so I am very particular about my baking and the kind of cakes I want to make and eat. This book has 26 of my ride or die sweet treats, everything from batch baking recipes like my Auntie Rach’s Crunch, to my go to birthday dessert, Raspberry Sponge, right down to a show stopping Sticky Toffee Ginger Pudding. I’ve also included my foolproof meringue recipes, learned from working with Meringue Girls for 8 years – I really know the key to success with meringue and it’s not as hard as you might expect!

Special thanks to the US and UK publishers for providing a total of four copies of this title in our promotion open to Members in the US and UK. (Two winners in each region.) Entry options include answering the following question in the comments section of this blog post.

Which recipe in the index would you like to try first?

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