ONE CLICK MASTERCHEF

Gill Levett was just like many of us – she wanted to cook healthy, tasty meals for her family but ended up relying on convenience foods just because – well, you do, don’t you?

One day, after seeing a ‘well known celebrity chef’ on TV extolling the virtues of trying something new, and becoming fed up with trying to avoid bumping into anyone she recognised in the supermarket, because her trolley had so many packet meals in it, she decided that she was going to REALLY try something different, and the seed of an idea was planted.

One year on Gill has created a masterpiece of a website from a really simple idea. 1click2cook takes all the stress out of creating home made, quick and easy meals after a hard day. It plans your evening meals for a week at a time based on your own likes and dislikes. All the ingredients are easy to find, you can pick and choose the foods you like and tailor every aspect of the site to your own needs. Then, after creating a menu for you, it even works out your shopping list!

Here, Gill tells Relentlessly Positive how it all happened!

How did you get from the concept "I want to cook from scratch" to the full on version of 1click2cook that we see now?

I thought about what I would want this hypothetical site to be able to do.I wanted it to be able to tell me what to cook, and to suit my needs, ability and budget for the following week. I also wanted it to write my shopping list. The idea was…how can I save myself the time and aggravation of this weekly job?

I had a friend who knew an experienced programmer, so I researched similar services and found that there wasn’t anything as service-orientated as 1click2cook. At this point, I asked my friend Trudy to help me out, with her excellent IT skills. We worked together to enlist friends and family, then asked our programmer to set up a test version with about 30 recipes, to see if the programme worked.

 It did! So we asked some more friends and friends of friends (people we didn’t know) to help us test it, whilst refining the ‘user friendly’ angle….the programme is very clever and we struggled at first, to make it easy enough for busy people, who may not be naturally au fait with their computer, to feel confident enough to use it.

By the end of 2006 the site was ready to launch and we tested the product on a wider range of people still, to be sure we had everything in place. We decided that it was important to make users aware of the great local food in their area, so I met with producers and encouraged them to become involved with the site, which has been very successful for everyone. We started ‘selling' the product at the end of Feb 2007. We now have nearly 1000 users on the site, from all over the UK.

2. What would you say to people like me who get in from work exhausted, have a small kitchen and limited cooking ability?

The site is devised for midweek cooking…nothing ridiculously fancy, just really quite  basic products…mince, chicken, pasta, tuna and vegetarian meals, as examples, but we encourage you to put something with them to liven them up while keeping it simple. My partner Trudy, was a truly unadventurous cook, - and you can read her synopsis on the site, but she has revolutionised her cooking skills and both she and her husband actually look forward to finding out what's on the menu for dinner now.

3. Who devises the menus and recipes for the site?

I have been cooking for my family for nearly 20 years, and many of the recipes are my own.. However some of the sites partners submit recipes, as do users of the site,  friends and family…a real mixture of fun midweek food

There are around 300 recipes, all of them main courses…so there are plenty to choose from. Our favourites  include ‘cod with spicy lentils’…..the kids said ‘yuk’ when they heard what was for dinner the first time we tried it…but absolutely loved it! Now it’s a regular. We also  love the herby pork fillet….easy, cheap and a great way to eat broccoli.

4. Are you going to be expanding the local fresh food partners to include other areas of the UK?

Yes, the plan is to expand to all of the UK, and we are working on two further ideas for the site…

• Student survival – this was inspired by my son, who’s off to university…Mums who use the site, can buy their darlings this package, which gives young adults the skills  to cook  -101 ways with mince, eggs and 2 spatulas!
• Lunch in a box - you provide the box and we tell you what to put in it every of the week, and have fun at lunchtime. No more marmite sarnies five days a week!