Salads and chilled soups are my solution to avoiding having to cook during a heatwave. Big, multi-textural salads with grains like cous cous, bulgar and barley, roasted and boiled vegetables, sometimes nuts, olives, capers and interesting dressings like creamed feta or orange and lemon vinaigrette. Roasted tomato halves are something to get ahead with early…

I love strawberry jam. Over the past week I’ve made four batches, and I’ll be at it again as soon as I can scrounge more jam jars. Actually, I’m finding it hard to keep up with the prolificacy of my strawberry patch this year and my local street market is virtually giving strawberries away. You’d…

I’m so used to rustling up last-minute, speedy suppers that I’m almost luxuriating in making meals early in the day, dishes that can be heated up later or twiddled at the last moment. This regime took hold during Lock Down but is particularly apposite this week because I’m up stunningly early and supper isn’t required…

     Quite by accident I came across this article I wrote for my masterclass column in the Times in July 2009 when I was looking for a simple bread recipe. It was prompted by the Real Bread Campaign about to launch Baking A Local Loaf for Lammas, part of a four year initiative to get…

Porridge is a food that divides people. I was brought up to cook it in water with a generous pinch of salt until thickened and almost solid. We then sprinkled it with dark muscovado sugar and poured very cold milk round the edge. The trick was to devour the porridge before the milk lost its chill,…

Each year I aim to make enough marmalade for my family’s needs through the year, with plenty of smaller jars to give away. It’s easy to miss the Seville orange season because it’s short and sharp and seems to be getting earlier every year. January and February is most likely. These oranges look unpromising, small…

I’m one of those people, and I suspect we are in the majority, who prefer the Christmas feast leftovers to the meal itself. Don’t get me wrong, I love turkey with all the trimmings, but late on Christmas night, you’ll find me picking at the half eaten bird, making a sandwich with stuffing and cold…

Pride of place in my kitchen is a big bowl of lemons. I get twitchy if there’s less than three or four left because I get through a phenomenal amount, probably two or three a day. One of them is sliced with ginger for my early morning cuppa but looking back over what I’ve eaten…

I’ve lost count of the number of cookbooks I own but I have thousands, all ordered by type of cuisine, specialist subjects, and by chef and food writers. They are crammed into floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in my study and take up most of the book space in a corner of my sitting room. The biggest concentration…

My front garden is tiny, the soil lousy and half the patch is taken up with the roots of a vigorous magnolia tree. It is, though, a sun-trap and shielded by a tall fence. Last summer, as an experiment, I planted five courgette plants, three types of French beans and five beetroot plants. There were…