All my politics and campaigning has been around issues that affect women: violence against women, welfare cuts to women.
I'm not going to have any more children. I'm quite confident about that.
I look back and nearly all of my early jobs were in food.
I want to empower people who might have lost their way in the kitchen or never known their way around it in the first place. And just go, this is a thing you can do, you can do this, and if you want I can show you how.
There's all kinds of research that shows children operate best if they start the day with some proper food inside them - it's a no-brainer.
I got over the whole British eating-with-hands phobia very quickly when I was working with Oxfam in Tanzania.
I'm of Cypriot heritage, we have no concept of portion control.
I had no fake ID and looked 14 until my first grey hairs came in a couple of years ago.
Working behind the cocktail bar was a different kind of escapism, a creative outlet with a newfound respect for alcohol. I didn't drink as I was also working day shifts in a coffee shop and, later, the fire service, and needed my wits about me to pull off my 60-hour working weeks.
I moved back home to Southend in 2015 for a quieter life.
A lot of people don't feel heard. I want to take their concerns to MPs. If I have to stand seven times before I'm elected, I will. Call me Jack Farage.
Politics has become so polarised. We're stuck between the Ukip-lite Tories and Jeremy Corbyn. How is that a choice?
I'm not the spring chicken everyone wants. I've got a debilitating illness. The brave face is 'I'm busy with work' but I've sort of chucked myself on the scrapheap. That's why I'm single. I've resigned myself to being a difficult woman.
Poverty took me from being the girl who was always the lead in the school play, to a woman who can't open her own front door.
I suffer panic attacks, anxiety attacks, seemingly random triggers that immobilise me, render me useless but simultaneously unable to explain myself.
At 11, following comprehensive psychiatric and cognitive assessments, an educational psychiatrist appointed by my high school recommended that I attend a school for 'gifted and talented' children.
I have always been an oddball. I was a loner at school, and largely still am, preferring to shut myself away with my work and books than go to parties.
Yet there is clearly something about bold, neurodivergent women and girls that prompts powerful men to scrape the sides of their own putrid barrels of opinion to attack this 'terrifying' otherness.
Tins with ringpulls tend to belong to those with slightly more disposable income; look at the Basics and Value ranges next time you are in the supermarket and you will see that they require a tin opener to get into them.
We have an odd culinary relationship with tinned food. In higher society, rare and supposedly exquisite goods such as tinned baby octopus, foie gras and caviar come in beautifully crafted, artistically designed tins.
Sweetcorn, mushy peas, beans, lentils, are all basic staples that can be thrown together into a variety of surprising meals.
If the thought of cold tomato soup makes you shudder, take it from a veteran, it's like a creamy gazpacho, but in a decent society, nobody should have to find out.
Cheese is one of the world's great foodstuffs and I speak as someone who would once happily snarf a packet of American-style cheese singles in front of the telly on my own.
I tend to tell my readers to go for the cheapest ingredients every time, unless they're unbearable. If so, you only need to have them once and the next week switch up.
I put my son's nutritional needs first, and existed on pasta and thin air more times than I would dare to admit.
I write cheap recipes for struggling families and single people, and have donated 800 copies of my newest cookery book to food banks and other good causes.
Talk to families in poverty and ask them what they need, instead of prescribing it for them. Ask what the barriers are. Ask what would help. And then deliver it.
Not all Tories are atrocious heartless fiends, I concede. But those who wield hunger as a weapon while claiming their own meals on expenses, are beyond satire.
Austerity is, devastatingly, not a party political issue.
Food is a weapon in austerity Britain. Hunger, the threat of and the reality of, is used to coerce and control.
Benefit sanctions have been applied in cases where a person has failed to turn up to the jobcentre because they are in hospital following a heart attack. A woman was sanctioned for attending cancer treatment. A man was sanctioned for attending a funeral.
It's definitely not the case that every child living in poverty is eligible for free school lunches.
Many families teeter on the edges, not qualifying for the little support on offer, unwilling to seek it for fear of drawing attention to a household barely holding the pieces together, or hit by unexpected bills.
A startling confession for a food writer: all through high school, I struggled with a severe eating disorder.
I'm not organised, and I don't cope well with deadlines, structure and routine. I'm chaotic. Always have been.
I remember loving food tech because of the precision and the creativity, the weights and measures, the tiny glimpses of flavour.
I have been cooking vegan recipes for a long time, long before the release of my first cookbook, because in the rubbish old days of scraping by on mismanaged, delayed and suspended benefits, meat and dairy products were often just too expensive, in contrast to their kinder counterparts.
Regular readers will know that curries are my favourite thing, and I wanted to go back to the start and really research the history and philosophy of Indian cuisine, rather than just toasting spices, slow-cooking onions. I was hungry to understand this food that I love so much.
Yes, scrambled eggs are lovely, and I've eaten them, and enjoyed them, and that was OK. Now I don't want to any more, and that's OK too.
In my experience, yelling at people that they are wrong and disgusting rarely wins the argument, nor changes point of view.
I'm doing my bit to encourage people to try vegan by making vegan food affordable and accessible and absolutely delicious.
During my time at Essex county fire and rescue service, barely a shift went by without receiving a call from an elderly person who had fallen in their home, or from their concerned neighbour or carer.
Those of us referred to food banks are the lucky ones with a good doctor or health visitor who knows us well enough to recognise that something has gone seriously wrong.
We need to aim to get rid of food banks altogether, and replace charitable intervention with a fairer, more equal society.
It would be better to incentivise people into work with secure jobs and decent wages, than to try to starve them into submission.
But it's a disgrace that food banks are needed in the first place, patching up the holes left by an inefficient and downright barbaric attack on the meagre safety net of what remains of a notion of 'social security'.
Gas prices and train fares seem to be the two commodities for modern British life that base their prices on a whim, or numbers plucked out of thin air, without a thought to the real cost to those for whom those price hikes mean unimaginable sacrifices in their day to day lives.
I eventually turned the fridge and freezer off - they were empty anyway - and the boiler, desperate to save money, shocking myself awake in the morning with the shortest, coldest showers, and boiling a kettle of water twice a week to bath my young son.
We hear time and again what a prosperous, affluent country Britain is, the sixth richest in the world. But aren't we ashamed that people who need emergency food handouts are eating cold beans and stewed steak from the tin, or handing it back, because they can't even heat it up?