And I'm autistic, which means I can be hyperfocused but also all over the place at the same time. I think I'm very lucky to have found cooking because it's the one area where a brain like mine really thrives.

I remember going on adventures with my older brother and, when I was 11, being allowed to go to the corner shop alone, and filling up a bag with penny chews, Fruit Salads, Bruiser bars and Black Jacks.

My parents tended to cook big batch food because there was always the possibility that other children would turn up with their carrier bag and shoes and we had to gently bring them out of their shells.

I have a surprisingly large appetite anyway and I don't drive, I walk everywhere, I don't sit down at the moment and I pace the hallway when I'm on the phone. I think that if I didn't eat large amounts of carbs and cheese I would wither away into a husk.

If I've learned anything in the last seven or eight years it's that my career flies by the seat of my pants and that every time I'm booked for something, I'm ill, and anything - like a TV opportunity - I treat as my last ever one because it's maybe my swansong.

Because I'm in the media quite a lot now, everyone assumes that everything is fine. People forget I sleep on a mattress on the floor with my son in a house I share with five other people.

I had such a run of bad luck that you lose faith that good things are going to happen any more. I still don't answer the door because I went through so long expecting it to be a bailiff.

Tinned food can be cheaper than buying fresh stuff. Things like tinned carrots, tinned potatoes, mushy peas make a good base for a soup.

I think the thing about cooking from tins for me that I really enjoyed was... the convenience of it, the slight entertainment side of it. Just the surprise of being able to crack open a couple of tins, pour them into a pan, and 15 minutes later you've got a fantastic dinner on the table.

If you consider each individual tin as just the building block for a larger recipe, it doesn't really make much difference whether it comes from a tin, or whether it's fresh because it's just being used in a lot of other things.

You can pretty much make anything with a base of tinned tomatoes. If I don't have tinned tomatoes in my cupboard, I start to panic - it's a genuine thing.

I'm publicist, patron of nine charities, creative director, food consultant, recipe developer - and mum.

I live in a world where I want everyone to be able to put beurre blanc on the table for dinner.

I was a bit of an accident really - I certainly didn't set out to write a cookbook or three. I didn't have a plan. I was unemployed, writing a blog about local politics and a few recipes, and it was more successful than I could ever have imagined it to be.

I can be wildly enthusiastic and want to try to do everything that I feel would be useful and educational and beneficial - but I've crashed and burned a few times.

I think I'll be around as long as there is a market for simple, basic, non-intimidating food.

My politics are food-related - food banks, the living wage, zero hour contracts - and my food is political.

All kids are fussy eaters - they go through phases where they'll only eat red food or they just want to eat porridge. With fussy kids, the best thing to do is use what they do like and work around it.

After you've cut back everything else, food is the last to go. I didn't mind putting an extra jumper on if I had food in the fridge. It was the point where I had an extra jumper on and no food in the fridge that I realised things had gone badly wrong.

I know that I can cook well on a low budget so I can't really justify spending a fortune on food.

I'm well-known for saying unsayable things.

All my politics and campaigning has been around issues that affect women: violence against women, welfare cuts to women.

I'm not going to have any more children. I'm quite confident about that.

I look back and nearly all of my early jobs were in food.

I want to empower people who might have lost their way in the kitchen or never known their way around it in the first place. And just go, this is a thing you can do, you can do this, and if you want I can show you how.

I got over the whole British eating-with-hands phobia very quickly when I was working with Oxfam in Tanzania.

I'm of Cypriot heritage, we have no concept of portion control.

I had no fake ID and looked 14 until my first grey hairs came in a couple of years ago.

I moved back home to Southend in 2015 for a quieter life.

A lot of people don't feel heard. I want to take their concerns to MPs. If I have to stand seven times before I'm elected, I will. Call me Jack Farage.

Politics has become so polarised. We're stuck between the Ukip-lite Tories and Jeremy Corbyn. How is that a choice?

I suffer panic attacks, anxiety attacks, seemingly random triggers that immobilise me, render me useless but simultaneously unable to explain myself.

I have always been an oddball. I was a loner at school, and largely still am, preferring to shut myself away with my work and books than go to parties.

Yet there is clearly something about bold, neurodivergent women and girls that prompts powerful men to scrape the sides of their own putrid barrels of opinion to attack this 'terrifying' otherness.

Tins with ringpulls tend to belong to those with slightly more disposable income; look at the Basics and Value ranges next time you are in the supermarket and you will see that they require a tin opener to get into them.

If the thought of cold tomato soup makes you shudder, take it from a veteran, it's like a creamy gazpacho, but in a decent society, nobody should have to find out.

I tend to tell my readers to go for the cheapest ingredients every time, unless they're unbearable. If so, you only need to have them once and the next week switch up.

I write cheap recipes for struggling families and single people, and have donated 800 copies of my newest cookery book to food banks and other good causes.

Talk to families in poverty and ask them what they need, instead of prescribing it for them. Ask what the barriers are. Ask what would help. And then deliver it.

Austerity is, devastatingly, not a party political issue.

Benefit sanctions have been applied in cases where a person has failed to turn up to the jobcentre because they are in hospital following a heart attack. A woman was sanctioned for attending cancer treatment. A man was sanctioned for attending a funeral.

I remember loving food tech because of the precision and the creativity, the weights and measures, the tiny glimpses of flavour.

I have been cooking vegan recipes for a long time, long before the release of my first cookbook, because in the rubbish old days of scraping by on mismanaged, delayed and suspended benefits, meat and dairy products were often just too expensive, in contrast to their kinder counterparts.

Regular readers will know that curries are my favourite thing, and I wanted to go back to the start and really research the history and philosophy of Indian cuisine, rather than just toasting spices, slow-cooking onions. I was hungry to understand this food that I love so much.

Yes, scrambled eggs are lovely, and I've eaten them, and enjoyed them, and that was OK. Now I don't want to any more, and that's OK too.

I'm doing my bit to encourage people to try vegan by making vegan food affordable and accessible and absolutely delicious.

It would be better to incentivise people into work with secure jobs and decent wages, than to try to starve them into submission.

Gas prices and train fares seem to be the two commodities for modern British life that base their prices on a whim, or numbers plucked out of thin air, without a thought to the real cost to those for whom those price hikes mean unimaginable sacrifices in their day to day lives.

I eventually turned the fridge and freezer off - they were empty anyway - and the boiler, desperate to save money, shocking myself awake in the morning with the shortest, coldest showers, and boiling a kettle of water twice a week to bath my young son.

We hear time and again what a prosperous, affluent country Britain is, the sixth richest in the world. But aren't we ashamed that people who need emergency food handouts are eating cold beans and stewed steak from the tin, or handing it back, because they can't even heat it up?