A kitchen table that grew into a recipe box
Easy Ladle is a small, independent online publication. We write, cook and re-cook every recipe ourselves, and we explain plainly how we decide what goes on the page.
Supper for two people who had stopped enjoying supper
A few years ago our founder, Rosalind, began driving to her parents' house three evenings a week to cook. Her father had lost interest in food after a long spell in hospital, and her mother found standing at the hob for an hour tiring. The cookbooks on their shelf assumed a family of six, a full spice rack and a lot of patience.
So Rosalind started writing her own cards: big letters, one job per line, eight-ish ingredients, and portions that didn't leave a week of leftovers. Her mother pinned them inside a cupboard door. Friends from her parents' church asked for copies, then their children did, and the little stack of cards became the first version of this site.
We still write with that cupboard door in mind. If a recipe would annoy someone with tired hands, a small appetite or reading glasses perched on the end of their nose, we go back and make it simpler.
From a rough idea to a recipe you can trust
Nothing goes live because it looked lovely in a photograph. Every recipe passes through the same five stages, and any of them can send it back to the start.
- We start with a reader's problem. Most recipes begin with a message: "something soft for after dental work", "a breakfast that isn't toast again", "a supper I can make sitting down". We write a short brief before anyone picks up a knife.
- A first cook in a normal kitchen. Rosalind develops the dish with ordinary supermarket ingredients, a standard oven and the kind of pans most people already own. No blowtorches, no specialist gadgets.
- A cold test by someone else. Tomás then cooks it from the written method alone, without asking questions. Wherever he hesitates, guesses or reaches for a second pan, the wording changes. If his result doesn't match ours, the recipe goes back for another round.
- A nutrition and safety read. Priya checks the nutrition note against public guidance, works out approximate values per serving from standard food-composition data, and flags anything that needs a clear warning, such as raw eggs, common allergens or very high salt.
- An edit for eyes and hands. Owen reads every page aloud and prints it at home. Steps that run longer than a breath, fractions that are easy to misread and tiny print in notes all get rewritten before we publish.
Cooking times are what we actually measured, and we say so when ovens or hobs are likely to vary. Calorie and nutrient figures are estimates, rounded, and meant as a rough guide rather than a precise count.
Four of us, one shared byline
We're a deliberately small team, so we publish fewer recipes than the big food sites, but each one has been argued over, cooked more than once and read by all four of us. We sign our work as Easy Ladle because no recipe here belongs to one person, and we use first names only to keep our private lives private.
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Rosalind — founder & recipe developer
Spent years cooking for her parents and still writes every recipe as though they'll be the ones reading it. Keen on soups, sheet-pan suppers and anything that freezes in single portions.
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Tomás — recipe tester
A retired school caretaker and enthusiastic home cook who tests each recipe from the page alone. If an instruction can be misread, he will find it, and he will tell us.
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Priya — nutrition writer
Comes from a public-health background and writes our Eating Well guides. She turns official dietary guidance into kitchen-sized advice and is firm that we never promise more than the evidence supports.
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Owen — editor & readability
Looks after clarity, layout and accessibility. He checks type sizes, contrast and printouts, and answers most of the letters that arrive in our inbox.
Where our facts come from, and what happens when we get one wrong
When we write about nutrition, we lean on public, openly published guidance rather than headlines or single studies. Typical starting points include:
- national dietary guidelines, such as the NHS Eatwell Guide and the Dietary Guidelines for Americans;
- public-health bodies, including the World Health Organization and national institutes that study ageing;
- official food-safety advice on storage, reheating and cooking temperatures;
- standard food-composition tables for our approximate nutrition figures.
We don't accept payment to feature products, we don't sell supplements, and no brand sees an article before it goes live. If that ever changes, any sponsored or affiliate content will be labelled clearly at the top of the page.
Corrections. If you spot a mistake, from a wrong oven temperature to an out-of-date guideline, please tell us. We check every report, fix confirmed errors as quickly as we can and add a short note at the end of the page explaining what changed and when.
Four promises we keep to every reader
They shape what we choose to publish, and just as often, what we choose to leave out.
Pleasure comes first
Food that is good for you but joyless won't get eaten. Flavour, comfort and a bit of colour matter as much as any nutrient.
No fear, no fads
We don't ban foods, push "superfoods" or claim that a recipe can cure anything. Calm, balanced eating is the whole message.
Respect for experience
Our readers have been cooking for decades. We offer shortcuts and ideas, never lectures, and we assume you know your own kitchen best.
Readable by design
Generous type, plain words and pages that print cleanly. If something is hard to follow, that's our fault to fix, not yours.
Cook something with us this week
Start with a recipe from the box, or let us send the free Easy Ladle Cookbook to your inbox along with a short letter every other week. And if there's a dish you miss, or one you'd love made simpler, write and tell us. Many of our recipes began exactly that way.