Meet the food blogger Izy who is one savvy cook
Izy Hossack is celebrating finishing her second year at Leeds University, where she studies food science and nutrition, by publishing her second recipe collection, The Savvy Cook.
The 20-year-old foodie is best known for her blog, Top With Cinnamon, and matching Instagram account (229k followers and counting), where she posts beautifully-lit photos of oozing chocolate chip cookies and chunks of pecan-studded brownies.
The Savvy Cook, however, draws on how she went about feeding herself as a first-year student.
“I’d baked a lot, but I hadn’t ever really cooked for myself throughout the whole week, and I had to go food shopping and budget,” recalls Izy. She started menu planning, poolingrecipes from cookbooks and online to “keep it interesting”, and the result is a stack of simple, intriguing recipes that help you plan ahead, cut waste and stick to your budget.
“I always do that thing where you buy a big bag of spinach because you don’t want to buy the tiny one, and then it goes slimy and you never use it up,” admits Izy, so she developed a leftovers section, where anything spare from one recipe can be crossreferenced and with other meals it’ll fit into.
The book is also vegetarian, partly, again, to keep costs down, and partly because Izy watched a glut of Netflix documentaries on the environmental impact of dairy and meat farming. “If I’m going to buy meat, I want to buy highquality stuff,” she explains. “It’s just really hard to fit that into your budget.”
The Savvy Cook offers glutenfree and vegan slants on recipes too, so you can avoid that moment when “you’re cooking for friends and one’s vegan and one’s glutenfree, and you’re just like, ‘I don’t know what to cook you!’”
Food that’s accessible, regardless of income or nutritional needs, is crucial to Izy’s ethos - which means no obscure ingredients, either. In fact (supermarket-friendly) tahini and miso are as exotic as it gets, and they’re featured in multiple recipes, so it’s not like “buy this jar of expensive ingredient and let it sit in your cupboard for the next six months!”
Fads then, are a resounding ‘No!’