The last time I celebrated a special occasion, I hashed together a paella with some chicken, some frozen veg, long-grain rice, chilli and a shake of turmeric for colour - and it didn't disappoint.

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.

Don't say things about people that aren't true... because there are consequences for that.

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.

I left home at 18, I thought I knew everything. It was fun for a while and then it wasn't fun any more.

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.

When I was at my lowest point I had a lot of help from charities, food banks, to see me through so it is nice to start to give something back.

I'm very careful with the money I have, I pay myself the living wage, and I try to save the rest, because if life has taught me one thing it's that you never know what is around the corner.

I put my son's nutritional needs first, and existed on pasta and thin air more times than I would dare to admit.

You don't see very many Irish-Cypriot pop-up restaurants kicking about!

For some people, pronouns are a very important part of how they identify. I completely understand that. For me, I have more of a looser interpretation.

My bark is far, far worse than my bite.

I think as much as people moan at things like award ceremonies, it gives people role models. It provides real positive reinforcement that you can be who you are and still massively achieve.

When I was born my parents lived in a flat so small that it now legally can't be rented out as a dwelling.

I've had success, but I'm still haunted by the fear of being hungry. Once you've lived it it never leaves you.

Party politics are quite upsetting. I've been a member of the Labour party, the Green party, the Women's Equality Party, the National Health Action Party and now I'm not a member of any.

As a kid we would eat moussaka with mash. We had a real fusion of two cultures that no-one has dared to fuse since.

I never learned to cook, so I've got no rules. I'll put things together just because I think they belong together.

And I'm autistic, which means I can be hyperfocused but also all over the place at the same time. I think I'm very lucky to have found cooking because it's the one area where a brain like mine really thrives.

I remember going on adventures with my older brother and, when I was 11, being allowed to go to the corner shop alone, and filling up a bag with penny chews, Fruit Salads, Bruiser bars and Black Jacks.

My parents tended to cook big batch food because there was always the possibility that other children would turn up with their carrier bag and shoes and we had to gently bring them out of their shells.

I have a surprisingly large appetite anyway and I don't drive, I walk everywhere, I don't sit down at the moment and I pace the hallway when I'm on the phone. I think that if I didn't eat large amounts of carbs and cheese I would wither away into a husk.

If I've learned anything in the last seven or eight years it's that my career flies by the seat of my pants and that every time I'm booked for something, I'm ill, and anything - like a TV opportunity - I treat as my last ever one because it's maybe my swansong.

Because I'm in the media quite a lot now, everyone assumes that everything is fine. People forget I sleep on a mattress on the floor with my son in a house I share with five other people.

I had such a run of bad luck that you lose faith that good things are going to happen any more. I still don't answer the door because I went through so long expecting it to be a bailiff.

Tinned food can be cheaper than buying fresh stuff. Things like tinned carrots, tinned potatoes, mushy peas make a good base for a soup.

I think the thing about cooking from tins for me that I really enjoyed was... the convenience of it, the slight entertainment side of it. Just the surprise of being able to crack open a couple of tins, pour them into a pan, and 15 minutes later you've got a fantastic dinner on the table.

If you consider each individual tin as just the building block for a larger recipe, it doesn't really make much difference whether it comes from a tin, or whether it's fresh because it's just being used in a lot of other things.

You can pretty much make anything with a base of tinned tomatoes. If I don't have tinned tomatoes in my cupboard, I start to panic - it's a genuine thing.

I'm publicist, patron of nine charities, creative director, food consultant, recipe developer - and mum.

I live in a world where I want everyone to be able to put beurre blanc on the table for dinner.

I was a bit of an accident really - I certainly didn't set out to write a cookbook or three. I didn't have a plan. I was unemployed, writing a blog about local politics and a few recipes, and it was more successful than I could ever have imagined it to be.

I can be wildly enthusiastic and want to try to do everything that I feel would be useful and educational and beneficial - but I've crashed and burned a few times.

I think I'll be around as long as there is a market for simple, basic, non-intimidating food.

My politics are food-related - food banks, the living wage, zero hour contracts - and my food is political.

All kids are fussy eaters - they go through phases where they'll only eat red food or they just want to eat porridge. With fussy kids, the best thing to do is use what they do like and work around it.

After you've cut back everything else, food is the last to go. I didn't mind putting an extra jumper on if I had food in the fridge. It was the point where I had an extra jumper on and no food in the fridge that I realised things had gone badly wrong.

I know that I can cook well on a low budget so I can't really justify spending a fortune on food.

I'm well-known for saying unsayable things.

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.

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.

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 suffer panic attacks, anxiety attacks, seemingly random triggers that immobilise me, render me useless but simultaneously unable to explain myself.