SIMPLE TASTES

Deliciously Ella's new plant-based recipes will make dinner a doddle. ELLA WALKER learns more

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BARELY have time to moan about how little time you have? Amid the manic work deadlines, school pickup, the big shop and keeping the dog alive, it’s easy to forget to feed yourself properly.

So if you've eaten too many fish finger sandwiches, ready meals and packets of crisps, Ella Mills, aka Deliciously Ella, can help.

Her new cookbook, Quick Wins: Healthy Cooking For Busy Lives, was written to make mealtimes easier and more nutritious.

"I'd never been someone who'd mapped out what I was going to cook for the week, but then suddenly, you get home and it's like, 'What's for dinner?' and it's like, 'I don't know, I don't have the headspace to figure out what's for dinner," she says, remembering a couple of years ago when her business was crazy busy.

She'd get home and have herself, her husband Matthew Mills (son of the late politician Tessa Jowell) and their daughters, Skye and May, to feed and they were all getting sick of the same meals on rotation.

The Rugby-born food entrepreneur’s answer was to start “gently mapping” out dinner ideas for the week ahead and doing some Sunday batch-cooking. “Life was just suddenly so much easier. There was just an ease in getting home being like, ‘Right, tonight, we’re making fancy beans, and I have the ingredients. I know what I’m going to do. It’s going to take me 15 minutes,” she says.