The first Beyond Baked Beans book was published 11 years ago by Absolute Press in response to my feeling that students were no longer eating the kind of food that you found in the average student cookbook. At least our kids weren't. Like most of their contemporaries they'd travelled a fair bit and eaten out at a variety of different kinds of restaurants so the idea of smothering a can of tuna with a tin of mushroom soup and sprinkling a few smashed up crisps on top didn't really appeal.

The book did far better than we ever could have imagined so was quickly followed by a vegetarian version (Beyond Baked Beans Green) then, in response to the feedback we'd been getting that many students cooked just for themselves, by Beyond Baked Beans Budget. 

A couple of years later we pulled all the best recipes together into The Ultimate Student Cookbook with the help of three then students, Signe Johansen, Guy Millon and James Ramsden who also contributed recipes of their own. Sig and James have gone on to write their own cookbooks, Scandilicious and Small Adventures in Cooking.