A few words before we cook

There are many pleasures in life, but very few compare with food.

For me, cooking has always been more than simply preparing something to eat. It is curiosity, memory, routine, improvisation, comfort and, occasionally, a little bit of theatre.

Over the years I have used almost every kind of kitchen appliance I could find: rice cookers, pressure cookers, slow cookers, Instant Pots, air fryers, mixers, blenders and machines that promised to make cooking quicker, easier or somehow better. Many of them were useful. Some became regular fixtures in my kitchen.

None, however, gave me quite the same pleasure in cooking as the Thermomix.

What I enjoy most is not simply that it can chop, mix, steam, knead, blend or cook. It is the way it changes how you think about preparing a dish. A sauce, a soup, a filling or a dessert becomes a sequence of controlled steps rather than a collection of separate pans, bowls and appliances. Once you understand the machine, you begin to look at familiar recipes differently.

That is how this book began.

The hundred recipes in this book were developed for it, written from the start for manual cooking on the TM6 and TM7. My part was the part I care about most: I cooked every one of them, and where a recipe did not work in a real kitchen, or could be better, I changed it. The Thermomix should make a recipe better, easier or more enjoyable; there is no reason to use it simply because it happens to be sitting on the worktop.

They are the recipes collected here.

You will find pasta dishes, vegetables, meat and fish, starters, side dishes, drinks and desserts. Some are vegetarian, many are vegan, and others are simply the sort of food my family likes to eat. They are not intended to reproduce the recipes already available through the official Thermomix ecosystem. The purpose of this book is exactly the opposite: to offer another collection of ideas for people who already own and enjoy their machine and would like something different to cook with it.

The recipes have been written for both TM6 and TM7. Where the machines can follow the same method, the instructions remain the same. Where a genuine difference exists, it is made clear.

Most importantly, I hope you treat these recipes as a beginning rather than a set of rules.

Change the herbs. Add more chilli. Leave something out. Use the cheese you already have. Adjust the seasoning. Make the portion larger. Make it yours.

That, after all, is one of the great pleasures of cooking.

And if this book encourages you to use your TM6 or TM7 a little more often, to try something you might not otherwise have cooked, or simply to enjoy an evening in the kitchen a little more than usual, then it has done exactly what I hoped it would do.

Write to me at emilia@emiliacookshere.com.