I want to start off by saying I highly recommend this fourth Pinch of Nom book – Comfort Food. A great collection of recipes for anyone that already loves to cook and wants to make lower calorie comfort food, or someone needing that inspiration to start enjoying making meals from scratch.

We have been fans of PON since book one, however I think we have made more recipes from this new book in the last three weeks that we have owned it than from the others for the rest of the year! The book goes really well with the calorie counting and fasting that we are doing long-term to maintain a balanced diet, because we can enjoy great tasting food with the transparency of the calorie content to be able to plan our meals and when we can enjoy a bit more of a treat.

As someone that loves to try out different cuisines and cooking from scratch, tweaking various recipes to create my own, these PON recipes are a great place to start and do provide real satisfying meals that are lower in calories than most other recipes for similar meals or ready-made shop bought dinners.

Not only have we made evening meals, we have also enjoyed some lovely soups, breakfast and lunch-time dishes from this book too. I do sometimes amend recipes slightly to taste or to portion size but we have enjoyed every recipe inspiration we have made from this book up to now. See below what we have tried so far and our thoughts…(in no particular order).

Tipsy BBQ Chicken (Bakes & Roasts) 190 calories – An easy, yummy and comforting meal to make & enjoy on any evening. I added homemade chips, salad and topped with a bit of cheese for a treat as I could afford the extra calories 🙂

Breakfast Calzones (Breakfast) 173 calories – If you don’t mind making more of an effort on a weekend morning for something a bit different and indulgent for breakfast, this is a good one. It’s probably a better idea to make these for more than 2 people at a time as not a lot of ingredients are needed at all and I wouldn’t want food to be thrown away. We used anything leftover to make a mini breakfast the next day.

Halloumi Couscous Burgers with Salsa (Fakeaways) 401 calories – A really tasty veggie burger with lovely, fresh salsa. On it’s own I would say it’s more of a lunch-time meal and the calories noted are only the burger and salsa with no bun etc, so I added homemade chips and some salad as well as serving in a bun. Perfect!

Caribbean Lamb Curry (Fakeaways) 321 calories – I made the slow cooker version whilst working from home recovering from Covid, and I am so glad that my taste has returned for this! Hot, delicious, perfect! I didn’t change the recipe I just enjoyed it as it was!

Greek Potato Stew (Stews & Soups) 215 calories – A stunning, meat free meal! I doubled the ingredients for an evening meal (still only 430 calories which is amazing) and had some leftover green beans from the Lamb Curry above so shoved them in too!

Curried Chicken & Rice Soup (Stews & Soups) 274 calories – Worth every calorie for this filling & warming lunch that we took to work.

German Potato Soup (Stews & Soups) 161 calories – A surprisingly delicious soup, perfect to batch cook and take to work for lunch.

Tachos (Fakeaways) 326 calories – Taco/nachos – and I’ll be honest we didn’t think one portion was enough, but two was very, very filling! A really good comfort dish for a weekend fakeaway.

Paprika Chicken (Batch Cook) 273 calories – This tastes like Spanish chicken type dish. Rich sauce, quite a quick and dish to cook with a small list of ingredients but still comes out very nice.

Curried Sausages (Batch Cook) 394 calories – We had some sausages and veg to use up and we always like a curry so this was a good recipe to use up some ingredients. I might have put a little bit too much sweet potato in though as the sauce when blitzed came out really thick and I had to keep adding water to the pan. We had these with the garlicky green beans (another PON recipe on their website).

I Can’t Believe it’s not Butter Chicken (Fakeaways) 320 calories – A really good curry packed full of vegetables and the few herbs & spices really make a delicious base sauce. We had all the veg apart from mushrooms in and I wouldn’t have had them in a curry anyway so I put in extra courgette. Oh and I added 2 chillies as I like mine spicy!! Really enjoyed this.

So as you can see, I’m already a big fan! It was definitely worth the buy. Please check out Pinch of Nom’s website here for more info.

For more of my cookbook reviews (need to do more of these), click here. Please hit like if you enjoyed this review and let me know of any other cookbooks or comforting recipes you think I should try.

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Happy munching 

🙂

Jen@jensfoodblog

#jensfoodblog

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