You want your best, firmest, tastiest medium-size tomatoes for this sandwich as they are sliced very thinly and topped with finely chopped pitted black olives and capers with a drizzle of your best olive oil and another of your finest syrupy balsamic vinegar. I splashed out on Natoora’s so-called winter tomatoes If you can buy…

Many years ago, when I cooked a daily after work recipe for the Evening Standard, I wrote about Katharine Whitehorn’s Cooking in a Bedsitter first published in 1963 and again in 2008. Her pragmatic and amusing style was a breath of fresh air in world where most cookery books were wrapped up in etiquette and…

One of my first kitchen jobs I had as a child was making pastry. I didn’t get to roll it out or drape it around any food, just the least interesting part of pastry making, measuring out the tablespoons of flour, cutting the fat over it and using my fingers to quickly rub the two…

My photo shows the cumin dusted slow-roast shoulder of lamb with cous cous, aubergine, potatoes and shallots from One Pot Wonders, the lamb so soft it can be pulled rather than sliced. This recipe isn’t so photogenic but is far simpler to make, the lamb slow-roasted with onions and carrots, sitting on diced onion to…

If you have leftover roast lamb, this is a interesting way of serving it that is very different from the obvious option of shepherd’s pie. Chunks of lamb are dusted with ground cumin and popped in the oven to heat through, turn slightly crusty and extremely aromatic. This moreish meat is piled over a sloppy,…

I often go for months without eating grapes but there have been summers when the vine in my garden has been so productive it’s forced me to think outside and way beyond the box with what to do with the sweet, little green grapes. I’ve crushed them for squash, cooked them with pigeon, turned them…

Molten, creamy Brie cheese with wafer-thin slivers of pickled cucumber and sweet succulent roasted grapes is a magical combination. I like it between slices cut from a country-style loaf, the outer sides of the sandwich buttered so they crisp and turn golden if the sandwich is going to be made in a toasted sandwich maker….

Borstch for me means a pureed beetroot soup, sometimes with onion and garlic, sometimes with tomatoes and/or red peppers. By fluke, as far as I was concerned, my beetroot order from Ocado (ie M&S) brought two huge turnip-looking beetroot that turned out to be golden inside. I boiled them and the flavour was incredible, very…

This is one of those surprisingly quickly made, hearty stews that simmer away in the background filling the house with tempting smells. It reheats perfectly and could be served with cous cous, as I have done, with rice, with noodles or with green veg and bread to mop up the copious juices. It’s spicy and…

Despite what aficionados will tell you, risotto made with a stock cube instead of tremblingly jellied home made stock will be delicious too. This one is a case in point but flavours are boosted by adding some of the prawns right at the beginning of the cooking with the onion and fennel. Flavours are subtle…