CHEF Tony Tobin appeared in 300 episodes of Ready, Steady, Cook.

At 14 he started cooking in a Warwickshire pub-restaurant and later trained under Brian Turner at Capital Hotel. He currently runs The Dining Room in Reigate.

Do you have a top tip for people cooking at home?

Simplicity is the most beautiful thing, they say. And it is with cooking as well.
If you are cooking at home for a dinner party and you are nervous about it then give yourself plenty of time, prep in advance and know your menu. Don’t attempt something for the first time.

Do you have any advice for people coming home after a long day, for something they can make quickly?

If you get home from work and you don’t feel like cooking, especially at this time of year, you can have salads and stuff.

You take the basis of leaves and you can buy so many dressings now if you can’t be a**** to make them yourself.

Things like flaked, smoked fish, hot smoked salmon - lots of stuff like that which you can just flake and go through.

Or, at the beginning of the week, what we do in the summer months is make a big bowl of couscous and each day you add different ingredients to it – you can put rocket salad through that and smoked salmon, eggs and stuff.

That’s what we had for our lunch yesterday. Little things like that – you can make the couscous on a Monday and each night you can return to it.

Do you have a kitchen tool or gadget you can’t live without?

It is a lifter. I call it a guzzunder because it goes under everything. It is like a big fat pallette thing. [it is called a step spatula according to fellow celeb chef Nick Nairn] Is it? Guzzunder sounds better.

Tony is part of the Ready, Steady, Cook Live tour which comes to The Churchill Theatre in Bromley on Sunday, October 27. Go to atgtickets.com/Bromley for information.