Such different chefs, so much camaraderie. And sitting in the front row, in his trademark blue work jacket, was Fergus Henderson. (They say don’t meet your heroes, but being watched by one is a whole other thing. I digress.) I didn’t realise it at the time, but much of the conversation led back to him.

I remember very clearly the first time I walked into St John, how blisteringly different it was to any other restaurant I had ever seen. It was 1999, I had just moved to Clerkenwell and was looking for somewhere to buy my daily loaf. The bold, bald whiteness of it, almost an abbatoir, down the road from the meat market. Serious bread, sold casually from the bar, long before sourdough became something you discussed with your estate agent.

The stripped back language of the menu, the simplicity on the plate. The slippery roast bone marrow you sucked straight from the bone, tossing the oven-hot bone from greasy finger to greasy finger, or spread onto bread if you were more graceful than me. Oh, now I am thinking of their Welsh Rarebit, too; a huge slab, deeply flavoured with stout and mustard and generous with spiced, bubbling cheese.

Looking back, I realise the St John Cookbook was also the first food writing that made me laugh. ‘This is based on a very dour recipe but it is no less delicious for that’ runs the intro to the Pea and Pig’s Ear Soup. And ‘Finished off with a healthy topping of parsley, dropped in the dumper truck style’ for the Onion Soup. Reading it became a bingo moment to me, when I realised that ingredients had characters and could come alive on the page as well as in the pan. It made me want to write about food like that.

More importantly, though, St John, (and a small number of other restaurants at the same time, including the River Café) didn’t just send dishes out into the world. It sent people. Chefs left carrying bits of its DNA with them: terse menus, whole animals, deep respect for ingredients, conviviality, service that was not just lip-service and, perhaps most radically, the idea that a serious kitchen didn’t have to run on fear. Margot said at the time that they didn’t set out to change food culture, they just cooked what they wanted to eat.

Perhaps this is how food culture – any culture in fact – is made. Not by deciding to make one but by enough people doing what they believe in, well enough, that it makes other people begin to do it differently, too.

Which brings me back to Somerset. The county has deeply rooted traditions around food: particularly in dairy, cheddar and cider, and they are on the move. You can see the connections everywhere once you start looking. Charles Dowding has spent decades changing the way people think about growing vegetables and caring for the soil beneath them, influencing a new generation of growers such as Cam at Offgrid Organics. They, in turn, grow produce good enough to change the way chefs cook, believing in the vegetable enough to put it at the centre of the plate, not on the side.

Many dairy farmers here still keep their herds outside for as much of the year as they can, grazing land thick with herbal leys. The milk from herds such as those producing Holy Cow is unlike any milk you can find in a supermarket. It is rich and mild and fresh. What is good for the soil becomes good for the animals, their milk, and then, of course, the cheese. The great cheddar-making farms of the area, Montgomery and Westcombe among them, have held fast to traditional methods; smaller, newer cheesemakers such as Trethowan Brothers are making their own mark with Pitchfork Cheddar alongside, while makers such as White Lake and Buffalicious are adding goat, sheep and buffalo cheeses to the story.

New cooking projects add character, too. Horrell & Horrell cook over charcoal in their barn; restaurants and farm shops such as Teals and Castle Farm put exceptional food on the plate out of agricultural buildings. In some ways, the housemade kale kimchi, wood-oven roasted beets and salt-baked celeriacs are a giant leap from the cracked vinyl sofas of Roger Wilkins’ cider barn, where local farmers eat hunks of cheddar and pickled onions washed down with farmhouse cider. At the same time, they are only taking a small step on. The room may have changed but the instinct hasn’t.

It is impossible to know, when you are standing in the middle of these things, whether you are watching something emerge. You can only notice that people around you are doing what they believe in and doing it exceptionally well – and that other people are beginning to do things differently because of it.

Back in 1999, I was just looking for a good loaf of bread, not consciously witnessing a cultural shift. I ate bone marrow, felt excited by a bare, industrial room, laughed at a cookbook and began to think differently about food. I wonder whether, in thirty years’ time, we will look back and see the moment that a traditional food culture began to take on a new shape. The hope is that Somerset can make room for the new without tidying away the old.

Onions are the GOAT. Conquer them and you will be leagues ahead. They are the single ingredient you will use the most to add flavour. Almost everything is improved by an onion, almost every cuisine uses them. There are different ways to cut them and cook them, and they all have different outcomes. None are hard but they are worth knowing about as quite often, getting them right as a base is the essence of whether the something you are cooking is good or completely terrific.

Cutting Them.The skin is tough and if the knife you are working with is not very sharp, it may slip and cut you, so beware. I’ve said it since you were little and I’ll say it again (I can see you rolling your eyes already) – the most dangerous thing in the kitchen is a blunt knife.

To minimise stingy eyes, cut the bottom tufts off but don’t cut the top, this is where the fumes are mostly concentrated. Instead, use that the top as a sort of handle and cut up towards it. Link below for how to do it. HOWEVER – he cuts the top off rather than the bottom. Try both and see what you think – I’d love to know.

There are 4 ways to cut onions for everyday use:

1. Finely diced (like in the video) – for when you want them to disappear into something rather than be noticeable, like a tomato sauce for a pasta or curry base

2. Chopped – chunkier texture, for when you want to notice them as an ingredient in the finished dish, such as stews, chunky soups, traybakes

3. Finely sliced – this is half-moons, across the grain, when you want them to remain recognisably an onion. These can become a sauce/topping in themselves. About the thickness of a £1 coin (remember them?).

4. Halved or quartered – trim less so they can hold their shape. This is when you want them to give flavour but not be part of the final dish, such as in stocks or eg when you are cooking pulses from dried.

Cooking Them. Then there are 3 main stages to the cooking which all have different uses and outcomes. Most recipes LIE about how long each stage] needs because everyone wants cooking to be quick. To be good, really good, it takes time and there is no way around this. However, you can batch cook and freeze in portions which is what I always mean to do. Pulling out a cooked, sweet, soft onion from the freezer is like winning the lottery.

1. Soft and Pale (usually ‘sweat’). This is where they go translucent and soft but don’t colour. Put them in a pan with some oil or butter and a pinch of salt (always salt) and start the heat on medium. Once there is a little sizzle, turn down. Stir from time to time but not constantly. About 8-10 minutes.

2. Golden and savoury (usually just ‘fry’). This is the most used and the basis for most dishes. You can have the heat on medium. They will sizzle more but keep heat on medium so they don’t ‘catch’ (ie burn). Use your nose and ears as well as your eyes. A constant sizzle is good but if it starts to sound a bit hectic, the water in the onion is burning off quickly and that is when it will catch. About 15 minutes. It will halve in volune, so one good size onion per tin of tomato sauce, but a second, cooked properly, will become an ingredient in itself.

3. Deeply golden and sweet (‘Caramelised’). This is the most delicious version but also the most dangerous as it’s a big time investment and easy to burn. Usually you do this with sliced rather than chopped onions which turn to mush. Start as above, with extra fat, but once they are sweated, turn right down and leave to cook. And cook. Read your book, keeping half and eye on them. Stir occasionally. The point to these is that they basically become dinner: toss them with pasta, parmesan and a little pasta water. Pile them over lentils. Hide them under cheese on toast. Add to an omelette. Cover with stock and you are well on your way to onion soup. On thing to not is that the volume will seriously reduce, eg a medium onion will become a tablespoon of golden string. 2 onions per person if they are to become a sauce. 40-50 minutes.

My general rules:

-Start them a notch higher heat to get them going and once they begin to sizzle turn them down appropriately (details below).

-Start with more than you think you’ll need. If you are cooking them down, they will lose at least half their volume.

-Salt at the start, it helps to draw out the water.

-Add garlic only when onions are basically ready, it cooks faster and burns quickly.

Troubleshooting

Browning but still crunchy: pan is too hot

Sitting in water: pan too small and crowded

Catching on the bottom: a bit sticky is fine, burnt is not. Add a little water and scrape up the tasty goo then reduce the heat and keep going

Yikes, there are burnt bits: if not too many, pick them out and keep going

I’ve added my garlic and it is burning but the onions aren’t cooked: garlic burns very quickly so only add it when the onions are basically done.

They’re taking bloody ages. They do. Read a book.

How do I know they’re done? Taste them. Taste everything, all the time. Taste, taste, taste. Just don’t double dip if you are cooking for others. Or at least, don’t let them see you.

You are a really good instinctive cook with a great palate. Get it wrong, get it wrong all the time, you will learn the most from getting it wrong. Same in all areas of life. Be totally unashamed. Live without fear. Ask for help. Love you to the moon and back xoxox MUM

It is 4.50 in the morning and I am lying in bed, awake for no explicable reason. At home with no-one but the dog and a querulous cat, I could do anything I like. I could get up and cook eggs or watch tv or dance expressively in the kitchen. Instead, I lie here wondering if I can still get away with bright clothes and trainers and whether I should stop dyeing my hair. I hover over Not Really/ Am I Grown Up Now and Be More Prue.

For various reasons educational and professional, we, the fam unit, will not be at home much over the coming months. I am not ready to call this a permanent state. Uni, sixth form away, work that pulls back towards the city. Life is changing shape. It is uncomfortable. I can feel my heart, swollen against my ribs. Perhaps that is what’s making my red jumpsuit a bit small, a bit less appropriate. Will home still be home if we are not all in it?

Looking up at the ceiling from where I lie, I can see the ghost of a patch of hardened green gunk from where Billy threw his Christmas goo as high as he could aged 7, and it got stuck and never completely came off. I know the exact place where I can find his baby writing on the skirting, declaring his and cousin Samuel’s existence. In the cupboard under the stairs sit May’s boxes of wool from the pom-pom years and her Beavers uniform with all the badges. In the kitchen, the mini disco lights are still clipped onto the shelf, hopeful.

Later today, I will pick the apples for pressing and boil up the plums for jamming. The mince in the fridge still needs turning into bolognese, just for the freezer rather than the plate. I will wonder what to do with the crook-necked squash that they turned into an homage to Yayoi Kusuma. Clothes are strewn over their rooms, old things discarded in readiness to move on, sort of in piles and yet not really. I find (but not before the mice have) under their beds, sticky plates with toast crumbs, empty sweet wrappers, coffee now a shiny veneer on the inside of cups, raggedy old soft toys, stacks of books. Lives in the thick of living. I remember it, suddenly, that whoosh of youth, how you keep moving, in a breath, from one life into the next, a movie montage. Of course they are going. It’s the thing I most want for them. To be out there, hearts forward, thinking, loving, laughing, dancing, doing. Of course I want it. It’s just.

For years, I wondered what you were supposed to do with the dead hours of 6-8pm. The teen boredom to fill with Neighbours and homework morphed into college pints in the pub. Time picked up its pace; drinks after work or was there time to go home and change before the show? Jump-cut again and aha, here come the babies, kids’ tea-bath-stories on repeat. Then driving, driving, late clubs after school, ferrying kids to each other, to versions of their future selves. Boom! Twenty, thirty years pass and cocktail hour is back. The Negroni has a point.

Christmas floats into my head. Why am I thinking about it now? I never plan Christmas, at least not till it’s almost too late. But in the stillness of the house, I understand why. Of course, I already knew it was not the presents or even the food, the good games or the bad crackers. The point of Christmas is that it is something to come home for. They will come back, with dirty washing and weird hours, to leave crisp packets down the back of the sofa and wine bottles under the sink for some mystery fairy to recycle.

So home changes shape from a place to leave to a place to come back to. Less, but back. They are where they should be. We are where we should be. Perhaps I will wear the red jumpsuit at Christmas.

‘Love you, Mum,’ she said, giving me a hug as we set off on our different paths. ‘And by the way, you do know I still can’t cook, don’t you?’ Major mike drop.

Having slept on it, it’s not perhaps as bad as it sounds. She is a terrific eater. Broad-ranging and brave; a relatively unfussy vegetarian with a penchant for the many hot sauces of the world. I know that she can in fact make (very well) an Ottolenghi dish involving sweet potato and chilli-spiked crumbled tofu because she made it about 1,000 times a couple of years ago. So frequently none of us will ever be able to face it again. Mugcakes aside, it was her single flare of interest.

And so I am home, with many, many washing machine loads to get through and an uncannily quiet kitchen. Of course I should leave the washing for her to do. And yet and yet, I am compelled to be useful. More than the washing, the most useful thing I can do is figure out what she needs to learn in the kitchen to be able to feed herself – and hopefully others – when she sets off for uni in September.

Bug, here’s the first of an irregular series for you. I love you very much. Xoxox Mum

On Protein for Vegetarians

It always starts with protein, doesn’t it? Protein availability is how the nutritional health of the world is measured. We in the privileged West are mostly over-proteined whilst developing nations struggle for it. It is one of the great global imbalances and nothing can truly get better until it is fixed. I am not a fan of meat alternatives so I’m going to stay focused on a few ideas for some things to keep in the cupboard to eat with everything. A few set-up thoughts:

1. You are no longer growing and you don’t need as much protein as the wellbeing movement will tell you.

2. Protein comes in lots of different guises, it’s not just a thing on a plate in its own category. It can be a snack and it can be a pudding. Even what looks like carbohydrate can be have a decent protein content. Seeded loafs and rolls. Nut cakes. Porridge. Greek yoghurt. Pasta. It’s all over the place. You don’t need to worry too much about it unless you take up sport in a major way.

3. Think of your balance of food over the course of a few days not within each meal or even across one day. If you’ve hit day 3 of plain rice and you’re feeling knackered, you might want to do something about variety.

Dukkah

Nuts, seeds and spices. Lasts in a jar for ages, bags of flavour, great for protein, gut health and crunch. Scatter over salad, veg, eggs, soup, dips, dhal, into sandwiches, you name it.

150g blanched hazelnuts (or whatever nuts you can get your hands on)

4 tbs sunflower seeds

3 tbs sesame seeds

3 tbs coriander seeds

2 tbs cumin seeds

1 tsp flaky salt

2 tsp paprika

To pimp, eg: fennel seeds, chilli flakes, sumac

Oven to 180. Spread hazelnuts on a tray and roast for 5 mins, shake to turn and add sunflower seeds. Roast for another 5-10 minutes till golden and start to pop. Meanwhile in a dry pan over a medium heat, add the sesame seeds. Toast for a minute, then add the cumin and coriander and toast again for about 1 minute until they pop and smell fragrant. Allow to cool then briefly crush everything together, either in a processor or with pestle and mortar till you have a rough crumble (but beware not to let it become a paste). Stir through the salt and paprika. When fully cooled, transfer to a sealable container. Goes with everything (but not cereal).

Soy-toasted Seeds

Sunflower seeds are cheaper than pumpkin but I do love a pumpkin seed. Great for snacks or to scatter over most things when you get fed up with Dukkah. Eat them all the time in between everything else. When you are very bored try to eat one at a time to prevent scoffing.

To make: cover the bottom of a pan with your seed of choice and toast over a medium flame, shaking, till golden and popping. Working quickly, add a dash or two of soy sauce, stirring all the time till the seeds are coated, crisp and dry. Immediately tip out onto a plate and allow to cool. Fab as snacks and over salads, see above.

Marinaded Chickpeas

The queen of complete foods: protein+fibre+carb in one. They will make houmous, they will make curry, they will go into salad, rice, anything. Never be without. Very simple, cheaper and nicer to batch-cook from dried if you have the time, space and patience. I urge you to have a go. Otherwise, look for the larger ones as they will have a nicer texture and go for ones canned simply in water rather than preservatives. If you can find jarred Spanish ones in big international food shops, they are much nicer and will not be as expensive as the English versions now everywhere. Here’s a dressing/marinade that will continue to improve for a few days if you can wait. Will keep for a week in the fridge.

2 tins chickpeas

60ml olive oil

6 tbsp sherry or cider vinegar

5 spring onions, topped, tailed and finely sliced or 1 minced shallot

1 fat garlic clove, finely minced or pressed through a garlic press

Generous pinch of salt and scramble of fresh pepper

Strain off the chickpea liquid and combine all the ingredients together.

Where others may think, when idling, about their next holiday, the state of the world, how to capture more rainwater, whether a rewilded garden would be less work or whether they’ll ever fit into Those Jeans again, I mostly think about food waste. I mean, I think about all those things too, but I think about Food Waste even more. My somewhat obsessive thought patterns around the subject range from prep waste to leftovers to unbought produce in the market and come to alight, like an overfed butterfly, on packaging. The grotesque mountains of packaging from supermarkets and even more on Grab’n’Go (do you hate that phrase as much as me?) mobile food which seems to have taken over our world. But let’s not dwell for too long, it’s both horrendous and at the same time not at all interesting.

Food waste in our house shows itself in various ways – unlabelled or perhaps worse, mislabelled containers filled with food stuffs that only I can identify. Yesterday, Ed defrosted what he thought was bolognese for supper and he ended up eating spaghetti with black dhal. I keep a beady eye on our own compost bin as well as the community one that accepts cooked food. The only relief I get from my obsession is when the fridge is empty. No-food = no waste. But there are unfortunate ramifications to the empty fridge strategy, particularly when the house is full and it’s time for lunch.

There is a weird anomaly around raw food waste and cooked food which is that more you cook from scratch, the more you create, but I have stopped counting peelings and other offcuts that can go onto the compost as they do least become food again. This is a great relief to me. Ed once suggested that we could reduce our food waste by weighing it. I agreed that would be an excellent thing to do if you didn’t actually have a life to live. I’m not even going to dwell on the impact that would have on my mental state. Weight of waste = weight of guilt.

If you live in a rural space and have a compost heap and a veg patch or allotment, you get to take a couple of big steps ahead. If you can find a local allotments or anyone else who might want your trimmings, you’ll feel better, believe me. If you have a garden and enough room for a wormery or a hot compost bin and are willing to process it and face the maggots, you will be so smug.

But it’s packaging which makes me most testy. It came to the fore a few years ago, when we went for a year to live in Bath (it was a school thing). It was heaven. So much less work. You get to walk around, buy food only for the day itself. No planning! No driving! It was straight out of the 1950s but with yoga. And instead of bins every 3 weeks, out, they were collected 3 times a week, just whisking away your shame, spit spot, and sending you out to gaily buy more take-away coffee.

So where do I actually stand on food waste? I mean to be a a very good girl. Buy and cook as many wholefoods as possible, try to use them all up, be immaculate about sorting the detritus. Be smart with leftovers. Label correctly. But more than that, I’ve come to believe that what it mostly comes down to is humility. Remembering how little is required to make a meal and having several of these a week. My wonderful chef friend, Nicole Pisani, who I started Chefs in Schools with, came over one evening and made dinner from half a cabbage, a shrivelled knob of ginger, quarter of a chilli and some pasta. It was delicious. Squeeze the fridge, stores and freezer for everything you’ve got before you restock.

In order to do this, perhaps it takes stepping back a few decades in order to leap forwards, right over Big Food’s trickery and just Do The Work. Buy the whole chicken. Make the stock. Turn the carrot tops into pesto. Fry up the cauliflower leaves.

It’s on my mind, that balance between the work of the kitchen and the reward, the nourishment, the waste. It’s always on my mind.

I find it syrupy and oversweet; even the good ones leave a sticky feeling around my mouth. To add to that, I don’t think fruit suits being cold. Ice cream, however, is the bomb. The real thing, the shangri-la, the n’est plus ultra. If happiness comes down to small pleasures, ice cream is top of my list.

To say you love ice cream is a bit like saying you love the sea. It’s annoying - everyone loves the sea. But ice cream obsession runs in our family. My 95-year-old Dad eats ice cream daily and you can see the pleasure it brings him all over his face - literally. The generations unfold and now May and I seek it out with single-minded focus whenever we are together. We are competitive about our flavour combinations. Last week, a saffron rice ice cream with coconut sorbet. It was, to say the least, weird. There was the liquorice and lavender cone in Florence last year that is still haunting me. And, come to think of it, an unforgettable toasted black sesame scoop, too. In fact, I can probably recall holidays via ice cream better than any other way. When I was pregnant, I used to make Ed take detours to find me good ice cream. He’d try to fob me off with a Magnum at the garage but there’s an emotional intensity about being pregnant that ensured we’d usually set off on a five-mile detour if I muttered ‘artisanal’.

For the most part, I’m not a snob about ice cream. There’s room for it all. I’m cross about how processed it’s become but when I look back through the ice cream story of my life, it is the milky ices on a stick I have always loved the most. Mini Milk, Toffee Crumble, Fab (the white bit with the crisp chocolate coating). On childhood holidays in Corfu, we were allowed to go around the back of the restaurant to choose our own ice cream for dessert. I remember distinctly the noisy throb of the cicadas and the bright lights of the plug in ice cream chiller lit up from within in the velvet darkness. It is the only moment of childhood that I remember exercising choice. Would it be a frozen scooped out orange or lemon filled with its sorbet or creamy vanilla you sucked out the sides of the wafer sandwich.

What is it about ice cream that is so compelling? Is it ice cream as metaphor, a comment on the ephemeral nature of life: grab those moments when you can, everything – good, bad, indifferent – will melt away in the end. Is it that when all else fails, there will still be ice cream? Or that when you eat ice cream, you are entirely present in that moment, you are coping with the mess of it, you are giving in to your senses. For sure, some kind of return to pre-conscious childhood where all in your little world was well and safe. Perhaps all these things can be true at the same time.

Ice cream is a home for paradoxes: It is the most fleeting of pleasures and at the same time, eternal and unchanging. It is of its time and place yet unbound by years and times zones. It is both incredibly simple and deeply complex. It is at the same time so damn important and so damn unimportant. It is a refuge from real life, a place to play, an echo of a simpler times. It is, more than anything else, utterly, ravishingly, irresistibly delicious.

When the world is in flames, I find it useful to have something absorbing and distracting and practical to make with my hands. So I’m working my way through Kitty Travers’s classic La Grotta Ices book. Right now, I’m gripped by her version of gelato which she calls milk ice. It is thickened a little with cornstarch but still very light and allows the most delicate of flavours to sing through. It’s the Tinkerbell of ice creams, the tutu of ice creams, the ice cream of dreams. So far, I’ve succeeded with peach leaf with apricot ripple, fresh mint stracciatella and hojicha milk tea. I’ll know when things get even worse out there because I’ll take on something complicated like a darkly burnt caramel or some kind of brittle. For now, I’ll stick to simple. Maybe rose and geranium; we could all eat more flowers. But simple ice creams. Not sorbets.

Rose Geranium Milk Ices

(Based on Kitty Travers’s milk ice method)

Have a large bowl of ice water ready to cool the mixture.

550ml milk

100ml double cream

3 tbsp cornflour

120g sugar

10 rose geranium leaves

A few unsprayed rose petals (optional)

Heat the milk and cream together in a saucepan until it is barely breaking a simmer. Mix the corn flour and sugar in a bowl, whisk in the hot milk in a steady stream then return all the mixture to the saucepan and continue cooking over a low heat, stirring constantly until it is just starting to simmer. Stir very well to make sure the cornflour is absorbed and sugar dissolved. Remove from the heat and stir in the rose geranium leaves.

Plunge pan into a bath of ice water and allow to steep for 15 minutes. Remove the leaves, squeezing them out, then push through a fine sieve and refrigerate the mixture for at least 4 hours or preferably overnight.

Churn for 30 minutes in an ice cream maker then transfer to Tupperware and store in the freezer. Eat scattered with rose petals

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Nearly two decades later and we have surely earned the right to claim it as our own. We have moved it around, planted and replanted, fought slugs and weeds, pruned and mulched and repathed and reseeded it. We have built a new kitchen which needed a different kind of garden, added generous new beds (honestly, how we could have thought that a good idea?). Yet the bones of it and most of the trees, shrubs and bulbs that anchored that first summer remain.

It is impossible not to be marked by a garden you have lived with over a long period of time. I’m not a natural gardener; it has taken me years to absorb any knowledge and understanding of how to make it thrive and as often as not, I fail. And yet, and yet, I am compelled to not just keep it alive but to try to help it flourish.

It has taken time, sometimes, it feels, stolen time. I have help - but still, so much time. Year after year, I have promised myself to read those books, see those friends, get to a play, a gig – or just to watch telly. And yet and yet, I tend to the garden. I cannot bear not to.

SO here we are, on a damn hot week many years later, roses and peonies blooming with all their might, irises just hanging on, a sea of cow parsley gently waving under the apple trees. In these perfect days, I try very hard not to think of the time spent on my knees at the altar of weeds, the lugging of compost, the nurturing of seeds. The unrelenting hour of watering at the end of the day. Of the books I’d like to have read, the paintings I could have seen, the work I might have done. Because yes, lucky me. Of course, lucky me. Instead, I give in to the heavy, honeyed air under the honeysuckle arch and the citrus-sweet scent of the philadelphus bursting into bloom. I listen to a thousand bees buzzing under the deep blue dome of the ceanothus and watch the swallows dip and swirl to the backdrop of an azure sky.

The drive to keep things alive is not something I noticed until I became a parent. You don’t, do you? Unless something awful disrupts it, the urge to extend existence is not a conscious thing; it is the buried drumbeat of a day. And then, one day, you find yourelf with a cat or a plant, or a tree, or some bees, or a scoby, or a child, or a sourdough starter – or, indeed, a garden – and your world changes.

Yes, the stakes are different, but the impulse is the same. Watch and listen, feed and water, be strict with boundaries, allow them space. Open the windows, open the doors, make mistakes, learn. It changes you, a garden. You are forced into a relationship with the seasons and the weather. You have to take control but also cede it. When your babies thrive, you shine with joy and pride. You fail, all the time. And then you try again.

So what will I be trying again this summer? I will be trying not to get wound up by 16 year old social (probably) smoking and I will try to make a plan for successional planting that actually works. I will try to give more produce away rather than leave it to bolt, and not sulk over a rejected suggestion of a dog walk. I will label my tomatoes but not their friends. I will keep seeds but not hoard family detritus. I will celebrate successes in a lowkey highkey way and try to dress appropriately. I will try not to dig too much. I will try keep my touch light and nimble. And every morning, I will try to take a few moments to wonder at it all.

Let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start. Which to me, is radishes. Radishes, the easiest, most reliable of crops, fast and bright and right at the start of the new season. This year, got my numbers wrong all over the place. I wanted a bumper crop for a fundraiser for wonder charity Chefs in Schools (that I helped to establish with brilliant, brave chef Nicole Pisani back in 2018. But that’s another story). I grew them with the bright hope that they would be ready to use instead of flowers in little glass milk bottles for the table. The idea was that you would see the bright pink radish inside the bottle and that a great plume of green would be sticking out the top. Original, I thought (feeling a bit smug) and visually effective and most importantly - almost free. Anyway. I counted back 35 days, planted them half in the green house in the hope that they would definitely grow – this was March, we were still getting hard frosts - and half outside in a veg bed, for useful comparison.

I planted Sparklers and French Breakfast and Big Purple and some unidentifiable generic ‘mix’. I planted a lot of them, hundreds, just in case. And then I watched as they didn’t grow. What grew instead were suspicious holes in the top of the compost inside the greenhouse– and nothing at all outside. After a week of watching the pattern of dents, I realised that a mouse probably was coming every night and fishing out the seeds for its supper. Yum. Still, there was time to replant – this time, I went for 18-day Radish, the classic breakfast radish, long and slender – not so visually, globule-y satisfying, but still, a radish. I planted them, and I this time I covered them in mesh. They germinated, hooray. Inside first, as expected, double hooray. And then, they grew very very slowly. At 18 days they were tiny roots with the occasional one plumped out to the size of an Alice In Wonderland skittle. Suffice to say, we picked flowers for the party instead.

Three weeks later, I can report that radishes are most definitely a spring outside crop. The ones inside never really flourished. They clearly prefer to be cold and they take 30-35 days to fully develop – even 18 day ones. So now I have hundreds of radishes outside and no one in the family much likes radishes. Double problem being that the leaves of the nost varieties are inedibly prickly – I had assumed they would make great early salad crop. I have pickled some (good trick here: reuse the pickle juice from any bought pickles, it can happily hang around for months in the fridge. I have an obsession currently with the soy-pickled cucumbers made by Cultjar x Koya Omiyage, but the kids mostly love Mrs Hamisha’s sandwich pickles which they eat with everything and mostly out of the jar).

So I have started to cook them, fresh little sweeties on the plate that go deliciously with pretty much everything. Like chard, they are almost 2 vegetables: the radish itself, which goes halved (to more easily pick up some colour) into the pan first, to braise and caramelise for a few minutes, followed by their greens, to wilt for a couple of minutes, the heat and steam softening the prickles and making them edible.

It is a lesson to take to many vegetables. That, for the most part, that all of veg are edible, even the humbler parts, we have just become a bit spoilt by years of plenty. Cauliflower leaves, chard stalks, broccoli stems, parsley stalks, carrot tops, root vegetable peelings – they all have an honest contribution to make and a rough beauty on the plate. I will return to each of them in due course. In the meantime, to the radishes:

A Happy Cooked Radish

Thoroughly wash your radishes and separate the leaves, keeping both. Halve the radishes – lengthways looks prettier. Warm some butter and/or olive oil in a pan and first add the radishes. Cover and allow to braise and colour for 3 or 4 minutes, tossing a couple of times. Chopped spring onions and/or fresh ginger also great to add at this point if you have some. Then add the leaves and cover again for a minute or two till they collapse, turning once. Strain off any liquid to serve, finishing with a swirl of olive oil and a scrunch of salt. Great as part of a warm salad, alongside some protein or simply with some cooked quinoa and or lentils.

So this is where I’ve got to - still a work in progress but getting there. It’s unrealistic to think I can hit all of them every time but I’d like to think I could to touch more than one in any plate of food.

1. Cook and Eat with others - your family, your flatmates, your friends

Shared food tastes better. Eating in company is in the very nature of our being. The root of the word ‘com-pan-y’ means ‘with bread’. When we dispense with the bother of gathering to eat, when we rush through lunch solo, wrapped up in our separate screen worlds, not attending to the miracle of each grown thing, we lose our connection with the earth under our feet, with the world around us; with each other, with ourselves.

2. Know where your food comes from, try to put a face to it

The closer you can get to the actual source of your food, the more you can know about how it was grown. If you know who grew it, then you know whether chemicals were used in the process, what that has done to the soil, whether it has travelled very far to get to you. Not all carrots are equal.

3. Plants at the centre, as wide a variety as possible; meat or fish on the side.

By and large, we are still stuck in the meat and two veg mentality in this country. (A generation into having one of the most interesting food and restaurant cultures in the world, how is this possible?) The expectation around a hunk of meat with starch and veg arranged around it, as taught to children in schools in the form of the ‘Eatwell plate’, has not helped. Why does protein have to be separate and animal derived? Why does it even have to be the main dish? The miseducation around what a balanced day’s eating looks like is a juicy topic and you can count on me to return to it, and often.

4. Waste not. Buy thoughtfully; be smart with leftovers

My own personal obsession. If “Food Waste” were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest emitter of CO2 after China and the US. Sometimes I think about weighing our food waste. It would be messy and wouldn’t really work as an indicator, but I have thought about it. There are several different points at which you reduce waste: how you shop; how you store; how you cook; what you do with leftovers. With practice, you get better at it. Helpful ideas to follow.

5. Cut Ultra Processed Food.

I have chewed over whether this should just be ‘reduce’ UPF but how long is that piece of spaghetti? This is not food at all, it is matter masquerading as food and we have no idea what it will do to us. Avoid it as far as you possibly can. It’s impossible not to fail at this all the time because it is so clever, but try.

Everyone measures time differently. For some it’s in races won, exams endured, candles on a birthday cake. For me, it is suppers at our kitchen table. Chick Fric and Tomato Pasta, Green Risotto and Roast Chicken. Then, bolder: Summer Rolls and Black Dal, Fattee and Satay.

All of a sudden, here we four are, perched at the edge of the kids’ adulthood, hoping like hell that as they take flight, their wings are broad and tough enough to soar. But hold! Because, yikes, I have not handed over on the cooking yet. Part know-it-all, part greedy eater, I have held on tightly in the kitchen, tsking and clucking and taking over. Whilst I grumble about the work, I appear not to want to give it up.

So how much of it do they really know how to do, our two? Do they know the difference between sweating and frying an onion, and why it matters? What a bread dough feels like when it’s ready to bake? Why bother making at loaf at all? In fact, why bother cooking anything from scratch when you can find it ready for the oven, bish bosh and back to life. I must ask, later.

In the meantime, this is the place I will gather it together. That patchwork of recipes skills, hacks and tricks that that make up a cooking life. I’ll never be a tik tok-er, so words and pictures (when I remember) will have to do.

Because every time I pick up a knife and wipe down a board to cook something, I feel like it matters. Cooking is an act of love and also protest. But mostly? Because it means that people I love will gather at our table, and that is what matters most of all.

(And Kate? You know who you are. Yes, there will be recipes, just not every time.)

End of the summer holidays. Norman F***ing Rockwell, as Lana del Rey would say. Huge shoes and empty crisp packets everywhere. Wet towels on the floor, beds which never get made, sheets tangled in such a way that you can’t even imagine how they got slept in. All the good real estate on the sofa, stolen. Excessively long feet blocking the tv and a dog grab – but not ever when it comes to walks. The bomb that hits the kitchen between 11pm and 6am. Never enough milk in the fridge, too many hopeful vegetables, uneaten. And then they do something genius and completely unexpected like caramelise bananas for breakfast

It has been just so lovely having them around, these teens. Amidst the chaos and the piles of washing, glorious D&Ms, touching regressions (seriously, Minions, again?), unexpected fears shared. You cannot pin them down. Like twisters, they slip from your grasp, dancing up dust clouds in front of you

And then, the junk food. Never has food - or rather ‘food’ - been so accessible (and I write this in full awareness that in many parts of the world it is desperately beyond reach) for most of us, at least in this country. Grabbable, affordable, irresistibly crinkly bags of scran. Not real food, pretend food that is designed by Big Food to addict. I had intended not to allow it into our lives. But it sneaks in, doesn’t it?

I could, if I didn’t have to ever leave the kitchen, do better. I could roast yesterday’s pitta with rosemary and garlic, and toast seeds in soy. I could smash out crepes to order, and popcorn from scratch, dusting it with chilli-sugar-salt. What I can no longer do is pretend that an apple is more appealing than a packet of crisps. How do you fight it? The best I have been able to do this summer is everything on (really good) bread: torn bread roasted on rosemary whips, plums roasted with butter and sugar on bread, dates and peanut butter on toast – and still, far too many crisps.

Tomorrow, the house will be too quiet again, the fridge will fill again with lentils, and I will miss them, all the time.