Cooking for hungry children

Claire Thomson estimates that she owns around 150 cookbooks. As co-owner of Flinty Red, she gets inspiration from recipes across the world to put on the menu in the Cotham Hill restaurant, but also to cook at home for her family.

Now she has a cookbook written by herself on the shelves in her Bishopston kitchen sandwiched between well-thumbed tomes by Ottolenghi, Hopkinson and Moro.

The hardback – with Claire and one of her three daughters on its cover – may be hefty, but it had small beginnings: her writerly career started within Twitter’s strict 140-character limit.

It was there, amidst the jumble of commentaries on the latest episode of Broadchurch and The Only Way is Essex that Claire began to tweet about the meals she would cook for her children and husband Matt.

Soon amassing more and more followers of @5oclockapron, Claire then turned her tweets into a blog, was swiftly signed up by the Guardian for a column about cooking for children and then snapped up for the cookbook by Ebury – publishers of the likes of Mary Berry and Delia Smith, and closer to home The Ethicurean in Wrington.

That was two years ago, with the book, also called The Five O’Clock Apron, finally published last month.

“I didn’t really find the process very challenging, because everything we cooked we ate,” Claire told me over coffee at Boston Tea Party on Cheltenham Road, a cafe where a lot of the book was written. 

“It wasn’t like I was making special food and then having to write these things. We ate that book, as it were.”

The book is divided into 15 sections, including bread, milk, pulses, rice and vegetables, with Claire and her family photographed throughout the year by Mike Lusmore, whose brother was the first chef hired at Flinty Red.

There is fishing for mackerel in Cornwall, followed by smoking the fish on the beach; and foraging for wild garlic in Leigh Woods in the spring.

“I’m lucky that I’m a chef and I find it easy to be able to look at the contents of my store cupboard and make food out of nothing,” says Claire. “But I don’t think it’s very difficult. I think it’s more difficult to buy some fish fingers, mashed potatoes and peas than to make a good soup. These are the cornerstones of cooking.

“I think that’s what we’ve lost when it comes to feeding children. Knowing how to make delicious food from scratch.”

Claire admits that she is fortunate living where she does in Bristol, within walking distance of shops like Gardners Patch, Murrays The Butcher, The Fish Shop and Bristanbul bakery.

But you don’t have to be a trained chef to cook what Claire does.

Instead, the aim of the book is to encourage parents to view food differently, to refresh their culinary imaginations and find real joy in cooking for their children.

The Five O’Clock Apron is now on sale, published by Ebury Press. For more information, visit www.5oclockapron.com