Does your partner usually do the culinary work? Is it tempting to call your favourite takeout restaurant instead of cooking a dinner party yourself? Would you like this to change?

Home cooking is easy when you know how, and two of Bermuda’s most celebrated chefs sat down with RG Men to share some simple food preparation tips that will make your gathering go off with a tasty bang.

Chef Chiko

Bolognaise and layered dessert

The first piece of advice for a novice cook from Michiko Campbell, aka Chef Chiko, is to keep it simple. A delicious main course, he said, could be a Bolognaise sauce, with spaghetti and homemade garlic bread.

For the meat sauce he recommended ground hamburger and if you can’t make a tomato sauce from scratch, canned ones are great.

“You can get either the basil, herb, tomato one or you can get the chunky one with the mushrooms in it,” he suggested.

Then, add salt and pepper and a little bit of sugar to “get that acidic taste off”, or some vegetable stock. Bring to the boil, then leave it to the side and finish it off with a blender.

Boil the spaghetti, but don’t overcook it. Cook it only to al dente.

“So as long as it’s got a slight bite to it.” Then strain it, let it sit and add a bit of olive oil.

For the garlic bread, mix some butter with chopped garlic, parsley, salt and pepper. He also likes to add some Mrs Dash mixed blend seasoning to the butter for “a little bit of a twist”. Then, rub the soft butter into sliced baguettes and bake in the oven.

This can be served with a garden salad, and Chef Chiko makes one that includes mixed berries to give it an “exciting taste”. Go for mixed leaves, cucumber, cherry tomatoes, shredded carrots and maybe some red onion beneath, with blueberries and raspberries on top.

For a homemade salad dressing, mix vinegar, Dijon mustard, olive oil, salt and pepper as the base, then add anything else you like. His favourite additions are berries or mango, with honey. Mix everything in a blender and voila!

His dessert is inspired by Eton Mess and is a layered creation of Cool Whip, any fruit and crushed crackers or cookies such as toasted Graham crackers or Nilla wafers. Do a few layers of these, then top it off with whipped marshmallow, ideally slightly torched, perhaps some syrup and fresh mint. Serve in a glass bowl, cup or mason jar, so guests can appreciate the layers.

Chef Chiko’s top tip

To fully enjoy the evening and have everything ready at the right time, knowing your “prep schedule” or, to use the chef’s term, ‘mise en place’.

“When it comes to food, I always tend to prep everything to where it only takes five minutes to put together and be ready for the guests.”

Trevor Johnstone

Delicious plant-based dishes

The most common questions the founder of Plant Based Fuel BDA gets asked by his friends are: “Where do I get my protein from?” and “Am I going to shrivel away if I go vegan?”

“I have to debunk a lot of myths,” he laughed. “All protein originates from plants and that goes across the board with iron, with calcium, with everything,” he said.

For anyone who wants to add more plant-based food into their diet, but doesn’t know where to start, Mr Johnstone is a wealth of knowledge. He specialises in small plates, which are ideal for fun, family-style dinner parties.

Some easy ideas he shared for hosting your first vegan meal are chickpea sandwiches, jackfruit nuggets and fried cauliflower, which are also popular with children.

For the chickpea sandwiches, he takes the chickpeas, cooks, roasts, then smashes them.

“It’s almost like my take on an egg salad sandwich,” he said.

For the jackfruit nuggets, he marinates the jackfruit a few days beforehand. He uses his Jamaican jerk marinade, however you can use any you like. Then, he dips them in a chickpea flour batter, followed by regular flour, and fries them.

He uses the same chickpea flour batter for the fried cauliflower.

“I cut the cauliflower into nice florets and dip them in that and regular flour, and then I fry.”

His favourite desserts are cakes, but instead of eggs he uses “flax seed egg, or chia seeds”. To create this, for every one tablespoon of the seeds, add three tablespoons of water. This causes them to swell up to four times their original size and creates what he describes as a “sticky, gooey type of paste that can be used as a binder agent for baked goods”.

Other binder agents include apple sauce and plant milks such as almond, or an almond and coconut milk mix.

A great first-time dessert is his stuffed apple recipe.

“I take the apple, I peel it, I have a de-corer where I take the core out without cutting the apple.

“Then, I make a gluten-free oat, date, and pecan stuffing in the food processor, with maple syrup and cinnamon and nutmeg. And then I stuff it into the apple. I also coat the apple with brown sugar and cinnamon and then I bake it in the oven until a bit soft.”

These are best served cold, cut into quarters and drizzled with a basic caramel. He makes his own caramel, by putting granulated sugar in a pan over a medium heat, watching it carefully. When the sugar starts to brown, turn the heat down. Then, instead of adding traditional heavy cream, he mixes in coconut fat from a can of full fat coconut milk.

Chef Johnstone’s top tip

Write all your menu items down and a breakdown of what you need to do under each item. Then, the week of the party, schedule what can be prepped ahead of time.

Chef Chiko and Trevor Johnstone both do private catering. For more information, visit: chikosbda.com or plantbasedfuelbda.com.