My drive, moving forward is to make as many of the things I eat as possible! I’m sure they’ll be healthier, have less additives, and just make me feel really good about myself! All good! So I thought this weekend I’d try one of our Friday night favs vegetable crisps! I mean how hard can it be! Not hard at all it turns out.

You’re going to need a mandolin – not the stringed instrument (!) but one of the slicing things from the kitchen utensils section. I got mine in Sainsbury’s for £10 – bargain! The one in the picture on the right. Then you are going to need whatever vegetables you want to crisp. I went for beetroot, celeriac, and carrots – just because that’s what I had in. I also did some normal potatoes but they need a slightly different approach – so more on that at the end.

I set the oven to 150 degrees and got slicing. There are 3 settings on the mandolin and I used the middle one. I sliced up the vegetables and the best advice is to slice long slivers as they crisp to nothing in the oven! They will reduce in size by about half. I laid the vegetables out on baking trays all separate – i.e. not overlapping – and popped them in the oven. The carrots, beetroot and celeriac all cooked at about the same rate. You will need to turn them a couple of times and some needed to be prized gently from the tray. Some recipes I looked at suggested spraying the tray with oil – I didn’t do that and none stuck. They took about 20 to 30 minutes to be crisp.

I used 3 trays and needed to do 3 batches to fill an average sized plastic lunch box and that took 2 small beet, half a celeriac and 3 carrots…. I can see why the ones in the shop are as expensive!

I’m going to experiment with flavours but for these I ground up some chilli flakes and salt in my pestle and then sprinkled. They taste gorgeous!! I’m thinking of adding dried herbs, maybe rosemary, to the next batch. I’m also going to try putting the salt and chilli on them while they are still in the oven and a little moist to get it to stick better – maybe you could give that a go and tell me how you get on!?

I also did some normal potatoes and I found I had to cut them a little thicker to get them to be like crisps. But apart from that, and they took a little longer in the oven with being thicker, the idea was the same!

Give it a go and let me know how you get on! Homemade has got to be better!!