At Christmastime I love to cook dishes that are full of Christmas colours; this dish is the perfect example.

This is the perfect salad to prepare the day before Christmas.

A tart is perfect for a Christmas buffet as it can be prepared well ahead of Christmas Day and served either cold or warmed through.

These treats are a much healthier version of a Christmas pudding and one you can make with or without the brandy.

Cookies are a great way to get your kids involved in the kitchen as it doesn’t involve any hot pans or lots of knife work. I’ve kept this recipe simple and cut the cookies into round shapes, but you could use Christmas cookie cutters to make these cookies even more festive.

This is such a fun dish to make, one you could save until Christmas Day and make with all of the kids in the family. Make sure you use fruit that is firm and not too ripe, otherwise it won’t hold its shape once it’s skewered.

This is a really fun and simple recipe that kids can help you prepare at Christmas time.

This frittata will provide you with everything you need from a meal in just one slice. It’s packed full of protein, carbohydrates, good fats and a healthy serve of vegetables. I’ll often make this on a Sunday afternoon in preparation for the week ahead. A slice of this is great for any meal of the day and fits perfectly into kids’ lunchboxes.

I can’t tell you how important it is to follow a soaking process when preparing any legumes or pulses. If you have a careful look at your soaked legumes after 24 hours, you begin to see the sprouting shoots pop up underneath the skin. This sprouting process reduces the amount of phytic acid in legumes, which makes them much easier to digest. Phytic acid can also bind to essential nutrients, making them less available to the body. Reducing phytic acid levels releases more of these essential nutrients to the body. I find it easiest to soak, sprout and cook a lot of chickpeas at once. Then I freeze them into smaller containers and have them ready for use in a dish like this.

This ginger cake is absolutely divine. The combination of fresh ginger, dried ginger and the crystallised ginger creates a very warming and spicy cake, perfect for all ginger fans. I’ve used a special combination of gluten-free flours: potato starch, buckwheat flour, brown-rice flour and almond meal. That creates a really light and fluffy cake that doesn’t taste or look gluten-free at all. You’ll be able to buy these flours at your local health food store or a bulk food store.

These bliss balls are the perfect sweet treat and the spices add a lovely warm and heated flavour. These would also be delicious with some dried ginger powder to create a ginger-nut flavour.

Beetroot may seem like an unusual ingredient in these brownies but it adds a lovely sweetness to the brownies as well as keeping them really moist. Trust me when I say you definitely can’t taste the beetroot in this brownie!