Where our food comes from is a hot topic, and people have lost trust in pre-prepared food - especially after the horsemeat scandal which hit the media in May this year.
Although it might be as much to do with the fact that I've moved house and now have a bigger kitchen, I've certainly been cooking from scratch much more frequently in recent months. As a result, I'm constantly on the look-out for new recipes.
I only have the time and energy (especially during the working week) to cook simple dishes, and in my experience recipes for simple mid-week meals can be hard to come by in recipe books - and long lists of ingredients can also mean the dishes are expensive to make.
So I tend to search for recipes online, and often those I've chosen to make have a limited number of ingredients - or those that can be kept in the store cupboard or freezer until needed.
And I'm not alone. A Freedom Food survey revealed that most people (81% of respondents) would ideally like to cook from scratch*.
In a bid to help people share recipe ideas and get them thinking more about the welfare of the animals that produce our food, Freedom Food has launched the Compassionate Cook competition.
Supported by the Fairtrade Foundation, Compassionate Cook is a 'how to' recipe video contest for cooks who care about good, simple, honest food, where it comes from and the producer behind their ingredients.
All you have to do to for a chance of winning is upload a video of yourself demonstrating how to cook a recipe using a Freedom Food labelled ingredient (and a Fairtrade labelled ingredient if you can) at www.freedomfood.co.uk/cook.
The lucky winner will win a year's worth of grocery shopping for a family of four, worth £4,000, courtesy of The Co-operative Food. Plus two runners up will receive £500 worth of shopping each from The Co-operative.
Competition judge and TV chef Sophie Wright explains how to enter the competition and demonstrates how to make her version of a Nicoise salad using Freedom Food and Fairtrade ingredients in our video.
Please enter and share your tried-and-tested recipes so people like me can give them a go!
*All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 2,008 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between 16th - 19th August 2013. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 18+).