Ingredients

Gather together your 'dry' ingredients: breadcrumbs, peanut butter, chopped nuts, seeds, grated carrot, chopped onion... plus optional cooked rice, left-over pasta, sad mashed potato, spare cooked cauliflower, uneaten bulgar wheat, diced sweet pepper etc etc (what's in your fridge?) You can add grated raw pumpkin, cooked mashed pumpkin, diced pumpkin, pumpkin seeds; the choice is yours!

Now find your 'wet' ingredients, such as tomatoes (fresh or tinned), cooked spinach, leftover soup, curry or stew, baked beans, red wine and optional egg. Egg helps the mix bind together but there may be vegan equivalents, or just a very well blended wet mix should stick together well.

Seasoning can include soy sauce, herbs, mustard, paprika, bouillon, or whatever takes your fancy.

Method

First mix a dollop of peanut butter into the breadcrumbs, wiping them together so they are really well mixed. The back of a spoon seems to work well for this. Then add the dry ingredients and mix well so you have a colourful bowlful.

Now add the moister ingredients, which help stick the crumbly bits together, and mix well. If you put in a lot of wet ingredients, your nutloaf will be very close-textured and dense; if only a few, the texture will be more open and crumbly when finished.

Grease a baking tin or dish with margarine or oil, and I sprinkle a few sunflower or pumpkin seeds into the bowl, where they stick to the fat and help the loaf turn out more easily, as well as look pretty! Spoon the mix into the container and push it down firmly with a fork, making the top as flat as possible.

Cook it initially in the microwave to heat it all the way through, and then turn it out on to a baking tray and pop it in the oven to crisp the outside and cook it through.

The nutloaf mix can also be made into burgers and grilled or fried if you prefer. To make burgers, put a dollop of mix into a circular hummous or cottage cheese tub and push it into the corners. Make a frying pan hot and slam the plastic tub quickly down onto the hot surface (don't leave it there!) and the burger will pop out onto the pan, where it will cook and be burger-shaped. Cook both sides.

I also enjoy doing creative things like a bi-coloured loaf, with a layer of mix with tomato, grated carrot and red pepper, and a layer of the mix with spinach and unloved broccoli florets. Pumpkin will make one layer a pale orange colour, if you fancy a layered result.