Enterprising Rickmansworth School pupil Tom Roberts has pulled off quite a coup in persuading the likes of Keira Knightley, Sir Ian McKellen and Arnold Schwarzenegger to provide recipes for his charity cook book, Meals In The Limelight.

“I started creating the book at the age of 14 and it’s taken me 18 months to collect the recipes and design it,” says Tom, who is just completing the last four of his 18 GCSEs with a view to pursuing a career in medicine.

“I’m raising funds to go to Borneo for a month, where I’ll spend part of my time working in the local community.”

The trip is organised by Rickmansworth School, in conjunction with World Challenge. The month-long trip is from July 10 to August 10 and will see two 15-strong teams of students travel across Sabah in the mountainous rainforests of northern Borneo.

“When we get there we’ve organised a rota of people who will be in charge of buying food, organising travel and accommodation, cooking and keeping our accounts. We’ll be helping out at the Emmanuel Home for underprivileged children with general manual labour tasks and painting a mural to brighten the place up.”

In order to secure their places on the trip, each pupil had to undertake a fundraising activity.

“We had help with ideas from the World Challenge but were basically left to ourselves. Some people got a regular job such as a paper round, one person organised a golf day and barbecue at The Grove and another offered to build websites for local businesses such as Cinnamon Square.

Tom needed £4,000 to cover the trip plus extra money for injections and kit, bringing the total to more than £5,000.

“I did other fundraisers at the beginning . like running Race Nights with videos of horse and car races, plus a raffle. With the book there’s the potential to raise £10,000, which would enable me to help towards a minibus for the home.”

Tom designed the scrap-book style cook book and had help from his father, who is an actor, in securing recipes from famous names.

“My dad was a recurring villain in Charmed and he was in Babylon 5, so we visited a couple of conventions to ask for recipes and we had a great response. James Earl Jones who voiced Darth Vader was the first and then we met Nelsan Ellis from True Blood, Peter Firth who’s in Spooks (see recipe below), John Rhys-Davis, who plays Gimli in Lord of The Rings and Bronson Pelletier who was Jared in the Twilight series.”

Apparently Bernard Cribbins was generous enough to donate three meals and Bill Nighy proferred beans on toast French-style, but I wonder how Tom managed to reel in all the A-listers?

“We got a lot of people through the conventions and I did investigative work emailing PR agents, managers and actors. I also wrote to some actors who were working in the theatre in London, which is how I got Keira Knightley.”

Tom asked each contributor to send in the meal they’d most miss if they went to Borneo and why.

“It’s not just a cookbook. I’ve written stories about how I collected the recipes and the messages people sent with them are nice such as how a cockle sandwich got Julie Walters through her student days.”

Meals in the Limelight, by Tom Roberts is priced £14.99 To buy a copy go to: www.mealsinthelimelight.com www.twitter.com/tom_borneo

Peter Firth's paella

“I lived in Spain during my ‘well spent youth’ and the difficulties of preparing food in the galley of a boat usually prevent anything too sophisticated from emerging. Paella, however, is a spectacular and delicious dish that is prepared in one pan, on one burner! The dish is actually named after the pan; La Paella.”

Paella ingredients

300g arborrio rice

1 white onion

1 red pepper

1g saffron

2 cloves garlic

1 chicken breast

15 tiger prawns

250g mussels

1 large squid

450g monkfish

500ml chicken stock

250ml white wine

100g chorizo

2 bay leaves

Seasoning to taste

2 tbsp flat leaf parsley

Method

Prepare the seafood. Cut the monkfish into bitesize chunks, butterfly the prawns, cut the squid into rings and reserve the tentacles. Boil the mussels in the white wine for 5 minutes until open, strain through a fine sieve and reserve the liquor. Set the mussels to one side.

Finely chop the onion and pepper and fry in 2 5ml olive oil in a heavy based frying pan. Cube the chorizo and add to the pan. Fry to release the oils. Cube the chicken and add once onion and pepper has softened. Add the bay leaf and chopped garlic . Stir for 2 minutes.

Add the rice and saffron and coat in the oil (you may need to add a little more). When coated add the liquor from the mussels and stir until absorbed. Add the monkfish and squid. Keep ladling the stock over the rice one at a time until absorbed. This should take about 20 to 25 minutes to absorb all the stock.

Season throughout to taste.

Add the prawns and mussels five minutes from the end and stir in. Serve on a large platter or from the pan sprinkled with chopped fresh parsley.

(Recipe reproduced by kind permission of MyDish.com ©)