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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm well-known for saying unsayable things.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.