The Cornershop Cookbook

In spite of our best intentions, we end up making supper out of ingredients hastily bought from our local cornershops more than we like to admit. This can mean tinned soup and cheese toasties or, alarmingly regularly, fish finger sandwiches. Sophie Missing and Caroline Craig understand this and have written The Cornershop Cookbook to cater exactly for these situations, offering up more inspired suggestions for meals that can be made from a Tuesday night trip to Costcutter. Instead of fish finger sandwiches, they suggest fish finger tacos made with tortillas, salad, a quick tomato salsa and guacamole. Somehow this is much more impressive, and even something you could offer to guests, especially alongside some of the other Mexican-inspired dishes they suggest. They also have some tasty recipes for those nights when you are quite tempted to order a takeaway but want to avoid the expense and quite frankly the regret that often accompanies that decision. Foremost amongst these is their recipe for peanut butter noodles made with peanut butter obviously, but also plenty of lime juice (if you can’t find limes, they suggest a splash of vinegar) and DIY garlic chilli oil which cuts through the rich clagginess of it all. In our fantasy world, of course we waft around farmer’s markets sourcing the perfect ingredients for delicious salads, roasts and stews. In reality, we often have to make do with whatever we can forage from Londis on the way back from work, and The Cornershop Cookbook understands that. Hallelujah!

This article originally appeared on a-littlebird.com