Claire Thomson: My essential recipes to leave home with

Food writer and chef Claire Thomson has written ‘Dear Grace: Recipes From Your Mother for the Next Chapter in Life’, a cookbook that grew out of exchanges with her college-going daughter

Claire Thomson 

It's coming to the end of the last summer at home for many teenagers. With the first CAO offers on the table, they - and their parents - are discovering what’s going to be happening for the next few years as they go on to take their places in the world. For many, this involves leaving home to study, something that can give parents the real heebie jeebies. How can a child who currently seems incapable of getting up in the morning without being rousted take care of themselves? Can they figure out how to wash their own clothes? (Or will they be back at weekends with a packed rucksack for your washing machine?) How will they manage to do their own shopping? To budget? And what on earth are they going to eat?

After spending the last 17-18 years cooking and baking and trying to include a variety of vegetables in their diets, this is it: they’re off, stabilisers ditched, free wheeling themselves into their own shared kitchens and trying to feed themselves without any backup.

It's an experience shared by a wide community of parents and guardians, as Bristol-based chef and food writer Claire Thomson discovered last autumn when cookery reels aimed at her daughter, Grace, who was starting university in Edinburgh, became an online hit. 

“It's funny,” says Thomson, “because I started those as a little joke between Grace and I… but on the internet. And they went viral. It was insane."

In her tried-and-tested recipes, well-written cookbooks and on social media, Thomson is a warm and helpful presence. With an eye to international food influences, she writes flavour-filled, family-friendly recipes using seasonal ingredients that have often become midweek lifesavers in our house. Many of those basic recipes - lentil soup, pilaf, dal, curry, fluffy basmati rice - are ones that Thomson started passing on to Grace, and her own followers (now 260K), via Instagram.

Like many parents, she was unsure if Grace could actually cook, given the dish that her eldest daughter made most often in their busy household - both Grace’s younger sisters are still in school - was simple tomato toast.  With her dad also a chef working in recipe development, it was "little wonder that she didn't really cook all that much because we cook every day for our jobs," says Thompson. 

But thanks to a process of osmosis, it turned out Grace could cook when she had to. 

Thomson, who spent two weeks working at Ballymaloe Cookery School when she was 22, describes herself as “a chef by trade. I learned to be a chef in my 20s because I wanted to write about food from a position of knowledge. I think it set me in good stead because I worked in restaurants and then I owned a restaurant.” 

It’s this breadth of experience that makes her such a good recipe developer, online communicator and podcaster with the 5 O’Clock Apron Podcast.

Thomson had just launched her 2025 cookbook Mushroom, when Grace left for university and she readily admits that it was a wrench. Making and narrating recipe reels for her daughter, many starting with the line “Dear Grace, it’s your mum,” helped her feel connected with her daughter. It also led directly into this new book, with Grace supplying the foreword. “My publishers were, ‘Gosh, your reels have gone crazy. Can you write a book?’ I was like, ‘Yes, I can!’” says Thomson.

 “I wrote it in real time,” she adds, starting in the early days after Grace left home. “It was a real pang of missing her when I was writing this book. I constantly kept welling up while writing some of the stories because I just missed her so much. I finished it on February 14, and Grace had left home for five months by then. I missed her so much at the beginning, I felt like it was unbearable, but by the time I'd finished the book, I realised that it was natural order and that it was OK.”

As a chef and a mother, Thomson believes strongly in the importance of kitchen skills. “I think cookery is up there with riding a bicycle. It's a life skill. You can hop on a bike and get somewhere quicker. That's the same with cookery. You can make something from your ingredients in your cupboards that won't cost you as much money as getting a takeout. I'm not assuming that all students will be home cooking things every day from scratch all year round in their student halls, because I know that's not true, but I think if they can cook themselves something three times a week, they're going to find value in that for the rest of their lives.”

Designed to be simple, full of flavour and budget friendly, the recipes - all favourites that have been used regularly in the Thomson household - are also written with an eye to getting as much nutrition into them as possible. 

Thinking that students are “probably going to eat one cooked meal a day,” Thomson believes that the meal needs to be able to “pack a punch. If you’re cooking like that, it makes sense to use lentils and pulses and vegetables and everyday ingredients that are cheap to buy, but useful to have to hand. Things like frozen peas and spinach are such a good hack for students. Throwing a ball or two of spinach into a curry is a great way to up your veg and [it’s] still cheap to make.”

Thomson hopes that her book will also enable people to see the importance of cooking as a means of avoiding isolation. “Being able to make food together as an activity that also feeds and nourishes you and provides entertainment in the community is a no-brainer. It just makes sense from a budget sense of view and from a social sense of view,” she says. “If you can do that through food and build community, that's really grounding.” 

Dear Grace is a heartfelt love letter not only to Thomson’s student daughter, but to family, food and cooking, and to that continuing even as things move and change.

• Dear Grace (€28.50) is published by Quadrille. Find Claire Thomson at 5oclockapron.com.

Top tips:

Store cupboard: It’s worth starting with a good stock up. Thomson includes a shopping list of supplies, writing: “if your parents are going to shout you your first shop…you might as well make it a good chunky one.”
Spices: “In student cookery, they’re a no-brainer because they don't cost an awful lot of money and they give you a massive bang for your buck.”
Batch cooking: All recipes in Dear Grace serve four and can be shared with housemates, frozen or kept in the fridge. 
Make the most of jars and condiments: Make eggy bread with kimchi - “it’s a surprising way of cooking eggy bread that people will really love” - and a hot mango pickle curried fish finger sandwich “is just adding a few extra embellishments from your store cupboard to jazz up some pretty ordinary fish fingers.”
Making something sweet with limited equipment: “A frying-pan cookie is so easy. [Invite] your friends around on a wet November Sunday for tea and have a really gooey pudding to eat together.”