The Heat Is On

Nicky Corbishley from Congleton, founder of Kitchen Sanctuary, gives us four winter salads to warm us up without fattening us up

- Nicky Corbishley

Nicky Corbishley and her husband Chris regularly get up at 4.30am. ‘On the days that we’re filming our recipes we get up super-early so we can start before the kids are awake and can be finished before they get home from school,’ she explains. ‘We actually work more hours than we did in our old jobs. But we love it and the flexibility means we have a much better family life.’

This is the life of a successful food blogger. Though to call Nicky a mere blogger is to do her a disservice. Nicky is the founder and creator of kitchensanctuary.com, where you’ll find a treasure trove of recipes of every meal type you can imagine, all created, tested, photographed and videoed by Nicky and Chris, as well as the author of her new recipe book, Seriously Good Salads. The site regularly gets a million hits per month.

Nicky had always had a passion for food and started blogging as a way of diarising the recipes she’d created for her family – she and Chris share two children, Gracey, 13 and Lewis, nine. Then five years ago she took voluntary redundancy from her corporate IT job. ‘I gave myself a year for the blog to make some money,’ Nicky Corbishley she says. It did. In fact, it began to make so much money that two years ago Chris was able to quit his IT job (that’s how they met) and join Nicky. They run a side hustle, coaching others how to make money from blogging, and so are open about their income. ‘It varies but on an average month we bring in between £10-15,000. The bulk of that is from advertising on the site.’

The greatest pay off is the life it’s given them. ‘We can work around the kids and they love what we do,’ says Nicky. ‘Yesterday they took Korean bao buns into school in their lunchbox and it’s lovely when they have friends around to play and suddenly they all come running in to taste test some orange chocolate churros.’