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. January and February is most likely. These oranges look unpromising, small with…

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…

Other people’s kitchens are a bit like other people’s wardrobes, full of surprises and fascinating. Mine is at the rear of a typical Victorian two-up, two-down terrace house with a back extension and postage stamp London garden. I bought the house as a wreck after my marriage broke down and have subsequently lived through all…