Can 'can't cook' Sonia get kitchen confident?

With plenty of deceptively easy recipes and fantastic tips, Lorraine shows people with no kitchen confidence how to pull off an impressive meal for friends and family.

In this episode she helps Sonia Harwood, a mother of three and foster carer, who would love to create homemade family meals but ends up relying on frozen food. Lorraine shows her how easy cooking with fresh ingredients can be, demonstrating recipes including courgette fritters, a quick seafood linguine and an impressive baked ricotta cheesecake.

Meet Sonia

"When I was growing up my mum and dad cooked everything from scratch and food always tasted so delicious. My dad put a lot of Italian influence into pretty much everything he cooked and we used to have really tasty Italian food at my grandparents house when we visited them.

Now I have a family of my own, my other half David does all of the cooking as I just never had the confidence to be able to. I can throw together things from the freezer for the children, but they do get bored by chips/pizza/nuggets and so do I.

As well as having our own three children we are both full time foster carers and have lots of different children staying at our house. I suppose I have always found it easy to rely on David to cook as I always felt I needed peace and quiet in the kitchen for me to cook as I used to get so stressed whilst doing it.

When I saw the advert for the Lorraine show, I jumped at the chance to get some help. Mainly I think I needed my confidence boosting, to make me feel it was alright to have a go and learn as I went along. It has definitely opened my eyes as to how much fun I can actually have cooking and I really enjoyed the experience.

Since the show I have started to offer to cook, something David is still getting used to. I would say David still does the lions share of the cooking but I am getting there as my confidence grows. I made a cake recently which went down well, and was great because for some reason David doesn't seem able to bake so that made me smile.

I have also started doing a meal plan for the week, finding simple recipes that don't look too scary and then trying to add my own touch to them. It is work in progress, but I am improving all the time. It does give me a huge amount of satisfaction to see the children clear their plates when I have made the dinner. Thank you so much to Lorraine and the team."

Catch the episode, Friday 26th September, 7:30pm on BBC Two.