Fancy a feast? Well, just foragein your fridge - The Jewish Chronicle

Ashkenazi food has its origins in practicality. Cooks with meagre provisions would transform stringy cheaper cuts of meat into tasty tenderness or feed a family on a tiny smidgeon of herring by chopping it with more frugal ingredients.

"It's a more practical way of cooking - making sure food was not thrown out. It was the way I learned to cook," says Natalia Conroy, former River Café chef, and author of recently published cookbook The Kitchen Orchard: fridge foraging and simple feasts.

Conroy has had a busy year. She married fellow chef, Jonathan Conroy, and prior to that - in October last year - had been forced to close the doors on her tiny Notting Hill café, the Orchard Canteen.

"I had a short lease and the landlady decided not to renew it, which very disappointing."

She had been running the café, open at lunchtime for soups, salads, breads and cakes for just over a year.

Natalia Conroy's kitchen essentials

Natalia has shared the basic foods that are the building blocks in her kitchen. I don't want to get into the domain of telling people what to do - this is just what works for me.
● Fridge door: Eggs, milk and often cream
● Top drawer: Garlic, onions, parsley, dill, mint and, where possible, fresh seasonal herbs.
● Bottom vegetable drawer: Potatoes, celeriac, carrots, Savoy cabbage, leeks, bay leaves, apples and lemons.
● Dry stores: Fennel, caraway and coriander seeds, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, dried chilli, black peppercorns, Maldon sea salt; Also varying quantities of anchovies, dried mushrooms, mustard, capers and rose water.

"It has been a time of change," says the twenty five year old, who left St John's College, Oxford, part way through her course in Russian and German literature to work at the River Café. How did her parents, Eric and Katya Abraham, who both arrived here as immigrants, feel about that?

"It was hard for a parent to see their child leave a university they would aspire to going to, and not finish. But for me it was an obvious decision."

Food was always high on Conroy's agenda. Her university luggage consisted of three suitcases of cookery books and just a carrier bag of papers relating to her studies.

When a summer holiday job bartending and then waitressing at the River Café led to the offer of a kitchen apprenticeship she decided to stay. After two and a half years at the restaurant, she left to set up the Orchard Canteen, which has, in turn led to more foodie opportunities.

"Jonathan and I now cook privately. He has plenty of clients, and many of mine were former Orchard customers."

Another former Orchard diner put her in touch with a literary agent when he heard she had been keeping a diary of recipes for years.

"I'd started writing recipes after university, but it was more of a private affair - my way of being creative. When you work in a restaurant you cook what you are told to. I had no intention of making it a book."

The agent loved it, and within weeks she had a book deal. The recipes largely use simple ingredients that you would find in most homes, and reflect her practical attitude to food.

She terms it "fridge foraging" and the book - not kosher - is organised around the ingredients you would find in the main storage areas of a refrigerator plus the dry store cupboard and any special foods you may happen to have, such as a chicken or leftover cheese.

"It's the way I learned to cook. Cooking with what you have rather than going out and shopping for new food to cook with."

Before her apprenticeship, Conroy learned to cook with mother, Katya - who came to the UK from Slovakia at 17 years of age - and South African father, Eric, who left Capetown in his late teens. The book is dedicated to them.

"My mother is a fantastic cook - her food was all about no fuss cooking. Everything had a lid on and was often given a long slow cook. She makes the most amazing soup from a chicken and roughly chopped vegetables simmered for at least five hours.

"My father cooked less but he taught me to love strong flavours - he has an amazing palate."

Conroy acknowledges the make and mend attitude is true of many Jewish housewives, but she believes that making ingredients go further is a trait of previous generations.

"My Jewish mother does but then so does my non-Jewish mother-in-law."

In the book, she describes how "fruits from the fridge" (as her mother termed them) were "skilfully reinvented" by her mother.

"The remains of yesterday's potato salad would now be a rösti, the pumpkin a fragrant soup using up the last of the chestnuts we'd roasted the night before."

"Fridge foraging is all about opening the fridge and cooking with what you have. It just needs a little creativity."

And a few pointers from Conroy perhaps.