A little late this month, courtesy of a rather unpleasant bout of flu!

From a weirdly humid start to the month (mosquitoes in October? What is this travesty!?) to a sudden drop in temperatures reminding me that winter is on its way, October was a funny old month.

I have mixed feelings about autumn, as I do every year. The sadness of saying goodbye to summer, the dread of the long dark months ahead. But then I remember there are pumpkins waiting to be carved, hot chocolate ready to be drunk, and the urge to put on Hocus Pocus, curl into a blanket den and cry, “Winnie, take me to the window!” (Perhaps that last one’s just me.)

For anyone feeling even slightly dreadful about the approaching winter, I suggest a long walk somewhere where the trees are changing colour. Take a hot drink with you, stomp on the especially crunchy leaves, and bring a couple home to press and dry (I just sandwich mine between paper towels and pop them inside a heavy book. No special equipment is required).

Then light a few candles, make something warming to drink, and perhaps treat yourself to a couple of those ridiculously tiny pumpkins that are everywhere right now and are perfect for decorating your table. You know, the ones that aren’t even the size of your hand. So twee. So adorable. I must resist buying them, given how often we move housesits at the moment.

I suppose October is the month when nature finally puts its foot down. Summer is over, whether we like it or not.

What I’ve Been Cooking Lately

For the first two-thirds of the month, we found ourselves housesitting in Hastings, in a place that unfortunately lacked an oven (my lengthy rant about that particular experience can be found here). This somewhat stymied my culinary ambitions.

A dim kitchen, a sparse collection of utensils and a yowling cat determined to trip me up at every opportunity didn’t especially help matters. I understand many kitchens in Japan don’t have ovens. I now know that this would really not be for me.

The aforementioned kitchen menace. No remorse whatsoever.

But there have been bright spots.

I’ve discovered chai teabags (if anyone knows of a particularly good brand, please tell me, I’m hooked) and feel deliciously autumnal every time I make a cup, curling up on the couch with my fingers wrapped around the steaming mug.

The last of the plums, a little too far gone to be enjoyable fresh, were stewed into sticky purple deliciousness, spooned over the first porridge of the season with cinnamon or mixed spice.

And, despite my rather uninspiring kitchen, I managed a few good meals. An extravagantly loaded baked potato and some delicious scallops were the highlights, both of which felt deliciously autumnal.

After our Hastings sit came to an end, we headed off to Menorca to celebrate my birthday. I took a break from cooking, but boy did we eat. I quickly became re-addicted to my old friend pan con tomate.

I know I harp on about seasonal ingredients doing the bulk of the work, but pan con tomate really is the perfect example of this. The trick is really good olive oil and really good tomatoes. Aside from that, it’s literally salt, garlic and bread, though I’d argue a tiny splash of vinegar really elevates the tomatoes too. But at its heart, it’s bread and tomato. There’s nothing better.

We also ate some of the best grilled octopus of my life. Crispy on the outside, smoky, wonderfully tender on the inside and served on a bed of creamy mash... take me back.

If I could give you the recipe for that Menorcan octopus, I would (I wish I had it!) Instead, I’m sharing my creamy scallops, which I think will do rather nicely.

Autumn makes me want food that feels like a hug. Creamy, warming delicious food in a bowl. Enter the scallops.

Recipe of the Month

Creamy Scallops with Mash and Asparagus

Serves 2

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Autumn calls to mind stews and braises, slow-cooked casseroles and crumbles. Sticky, bubbling things pulled from the oven, filling the house with delicious smells and creating great impatience for dinner time. (Does the meat really need six hours to cook, you exclaim, mouth watering?)

I was extremely put out, then, to discover that our housesit for the month of October doesn’t have a working oven. A detail the homeowners had apparently forgotten to mention. Unfortunately, sometimes it do be like this.

I love housesitting. I love the cats and all their different personalities (the ones that pee on the couch slightly less so). Cosy lounges, unfamiliar kitchens, views of gardens or cities or towns, new walks, new neighbourhoods, new coffee shops: I’ve seen so much of England that I never would have otherwise.

But it comes with downsides.

There’s the constant search for new sits and the occasional wondering whether you’ll have a roof over your head next week. There was the house with the possessed dolls in the spare room. The countless spices and sauces that expired in 2006 yet remain faithfully in their cupboards. Perhaps they’re family heirlooms? Then there was the outside tap we couldn’t figure out how to turn off, the mysterious lack of a chopping board, and the really blunt knives.

At this place, it’s the oven.

And, well, the kitchen isn’t great either. The extractor fan is also broken, so my clothes smell like whatever I’ve cooked and I live in fear of the smoke alarms. There is one very small pot, which is no use for making soup. It doesn’t have a lid. In fact, none of the pans do. There is no peeler. (I discovered this midway through making mash. I do not recommend peeling potatoes with a knife.)

The view from the living room is gorgeous, at least. We’re up on a hill overlooking Hastings, with the castle ruins in the distance and brightly coloured houses scattered across the opposite hillside, making me hum “Little Boxes” every time I see them. There are pink skies at sunset and foggy mornings.

I’ve been eating M&S soup and grumbling only slightly. My latest trick is adding half a jar of Bold Bean Co beans to bulk it out. Particularly good in the minestrone, with a topping of grated Parmesan. Suddenly things look slightly less bleak.

But living here has made me realise quite how much I rely on my oven. I roast vegetables without thinking. I shove things in there to crisp up while I get on with something else. Roasts and gratins, golden and crusty under the grill. I bake, obviously. Crumbles and tarts, biscuits and tortes. When the weather turns cold, the oven becomes another radiator, warming the kitchen while something delicious slowly transforms inside it.

Take it away and suddenly I have to think about how I cook.

At first, I sulked.

“We could make—oh no, we couldn’t” became the constant refrain of the first week.

Do I really make that many things in the oven? I wondered.

Apparently so.

The un-baked potato was a good starting point. No crispy skin for me, but the microwave did the trick quick smart. I shoved in some cheese and had a respectable dinner, if not quite the jacket potato of my dreams.

I did try topping one with English baked beans, which brings me to my bone to pick: I tried Heinz. Perhaps that was my first mistake? Where is my beloved New Zealand Wattie’s?? Suggestions welcome, because baked beans should not be both mushy and watery at the same time. Ugh.

Then I thought about cabbage.

I like cabbage.

I really like pan-fried cabbage.

Aha.

Butter, a splash of cider vinegar, a little sugar, lots of salt and pepper, and a low heat. Soon I had melt-in-your-mouth buttery cabbage. Chuck some thinly sliced apple or pear in there too, if you fancy.

Next, I was craving a roast, but weirdly, a croque monsieur did a good job of stepping in.

Cheese and meat, amirite?

Choose your poison: Gruyère, Emmental, Comté (you fancy), American cheese (I don’t like you), cheddar, etc. Ideally a mix. Buy lots. You’ll also need some good ham and whatever bread takes your fancy.

Make a béchamel with Dijon mustard and nutmeg, then stir in plenty of cheese. Spread a little Dijon on the inside of your bread, followed by a generous layer of cheesy béchamel on each slice. Pile on the cheese, ham and more cheese, then close up your monster of a sandwich and pan-fry in butter until golden on both sides.

Slather the top with more béchamel and grated cheese. Ideally, you’d finish it under the grill. If one does not avail itself to you, a makeshift foil lid and a low heat will do the trick. Just pretend you’re camping. It helps.

Serve with cornichons, a very sharp salad and a glass of white wine.

Autumn is also stewed fruit season, and the stove can manage that without any help (thank goodness). I stewed pears from the garden (foil lid, round two), then plums (not from the garden), and both were exactly what a cold evening called for. Custard or yoghurt go well with either, and the fruit is also delicious swirled into your morning porridge. I practically felt like Nigel Slater.

I suppose that’s the thing about housesitting. You learn to make yourself at home in places that aren’t yours, working around other people’s choices that seem utterly baffling, if not downright unhinged. Presumably, it all makes perfect sense to them. (Right??)

Sometimes you discover a lovely new neighbourhood, sometimes you discover you can make a very good dinner with a frying pan and a sheet of foil.

And sometimes you just really, really want to bake a crumble.

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I know we all say it, but autumn is the time for apples.

Baked apples with their insides hollowed out and filled with brown sugar and butter. Maybe raisins if you’re feeling frisky. Simple apple crumble, crunchy and buttery and smothered in cold custard. Delicate apple tarts with a touch of cinnamon, or the traditional French way, with nothing much added at all, allowing the apples to shine through.

Autumn always makes me want to cook from old recipes rather than new ones. Maybe it’s the return to the kitchen after summer, the first cool air making you long for childhood things, or simply the nostalgia of apples baking in butter and sugar. Either way, this is the time of year I find myself thinking about family recipes.

My favourite recipes are the ones that have been passed down. Handwritten and faded, crinkled and yellowed, steeped in deep nostalgia. They rarely contain the level of instruction you would expect from a modern cookbook. Measurements are approximate (I’m looking at you, “an egg-shaped amount of butter”). Temperatures are occasionally absent. Every generation makes them slightly differently.

When we were children, Mum had a big blue ring binder filled with her recipes passed down from my grandparents, written in her spidery handwriting. The chocolate chip biscuit recipe was especially stained, smeared with years of rogue biscuit dough. It was a working document, which is exactly what made it so precious. You could see the years of use in every splatter and wrinkle.

And Mum’s party piece, the thing she would pull out when she wanted to impress, was always Mamie Nicole’s apple tart.

Mamie Nicole was my French grandmother and, by all accounts, an amazing cook. Dad can wax lyrical about the things she used to make and reliably leave me drooling over meals I never got to eat.

I wish I’d known her better. Once a year, a box would arrive from France filled with beautiful new clothes, all with this particular smell that I still associate with childhood. I’ve never figured out what it was, but every now and then I’ll smell it on new clothes, or in someone’s laundry, and I’m instantly reminded of those boxes. I still look for it.

As I got older, she sent me stamps for my collection instead. I would sit at the kitchen table painstakingly writing thank-you letters in my terrible French, which Mum would edit before they were sent across the world.

When I was sixteen, we went to France and I finally got to know the world those boxes had come from. Grandpère’s paintings hung everywhere. I tasted crème anglaise and fell immediately in love. Mamie Nicole refused to own a dishwasher, so after meals my siblings, cousins (cousins! I had cousins!) and I stood together washing everything by hand.

Dad also told me that her need for cleanliness extended to ironing all the children’s socks, but I suppose we all have our quirks.

Her apple tart, meanwhile, became part of our childhood on the other side of the world.

Growing up, we often went to my mum’s friend Mickey’s house for social gatherings. She had a sprawling property out the back of Gulf Harbour in Auckland, New Zealand. Imagine a farm, but without the animals, peppered with overgrown paddocks, a stream full of reeds (and spiders), a trampoline and the occasional bull. Don’t ask.

She made the best Black Forest cake in the world and often held bonfire parties on the property, to our great excitement. Part of the house was only semi-renovated, and one room held nothing but spare mattresses and couches. Naturally, we piled the mattresses on top of each other and created an epic playroom.

That was a highlight of every visit until my friend Joy smacked herself in the face with a glowstick while jumping a bit too enthusiastically. The tubing broke against her teeth and, much to our delight, made her mouth glow. The poison centre was quickly called. She was fine, apart from the temporarily glow-in-the-dark teeth, which the rest of us considered extremely cool. We were subsequently forbidden from playing quite so raucously in the mattress room.

It could have been worse. The following year, her sister Grace fell through the trampoline and fractured her neck. (She was also fine.)

Ah, childhood.

Looking back, Mickey’s place feels like a pocket of the gloriously wild side of childhood: fort building, Spotlight in the dark, Bull Rush and tiggy. My first bee sting. Adults somewhere in the distance while we disappeared down fields and came back with grass stains.

Once, when my best friend Joy and I were about thirteen, we wandered down to the lower paddock, which was bisected by a stream, muddy and choked with reeds. We stood over it ribbing each other as teenagers do until Joy pushed me in for a laugh.

Being all of thirteen years old, I instantly burst into tears.

Joy, immediately horrified by what she’d done, jumped straight in after me.

“See? Now we’re both wet!” It was exactly the right thing to say.

Within seconds we were laughing uncontrollably, and eventually we plodded back up the hill to our parents, dripping wet and fully dressed.

“We slipped and fell in,” we said, exchanging secret smiles.

There are friendships built through important conversations and shared milestones, and there are also friendships built by voluntarily jumping into a muddy stream because you’ve made your friend cry. Both are important.

And somewhere in the background of all of this, there was food.

The adults gathered around tables. Mum brought Mamie Nicole’s tart. Mickey made her Black Forest cake. Her golden retrievers licked the plates clean. I’m sure there must have been savoury food too, but child me had priorities.

After a few years, Mum started swapping the apples for tinned Black Doris plums (a deep purple New Zealand plum), just to change things up. That version became so popular it was requested at practically every party. The lightly golden, slightly sticky pastry soaked up puddles of deep purple plum juice. It was ridiculously delicious. After ten years, my eldest brother refused to eat it, which just goes to show even the best thing can be overdone, though I never suffered from that particular problem.

This is what I love about passed-down recipes. It’s both wonderful and sad to have recipes from someone you knew, but whose cooking mostly exists for you in other people’s memories. You can never taste the tart exactly as they made it. You don’t know what they changed without writing it down, what they judged by sight, or what they simply knew. But you can make the recipe. And the recipes that survive aren’t really preserved at all. They’re used.

They get stained. Someone swaps the fruit. Someone decides a tablespoon means a very heaped tablespoon. They are carried to parties and eaten by people who never knew the person who first made them. Eventually, the altered version becomes somebody else’s childhood memory.

Mamie Nicole made an apple tart in France. Mum made it in New Zealand, then filled it with local plums and carried it to a friend’s house, where we ate it between bonfires and games and minor (and major) childhood injuries.

Now I make it too. I can’t tell you whether mine tastes like Mamie Nicole’s. Almost certainly not, and actually, that’s okay. It’s part of the story.

Mamie Nicole’s Apple Tart

As passed down from Mum

This is very much an old family recipe, so some of the measurements are pleasingly imprecise, including the size of the tart dish. From memory, Mum used quite a large one. Don’t panic about getting the fruit quantities exact: if the bottom of your dish is covered in a single layer, you have enough.

Ingredients

• 6–8 Braeburn apples (the amount depends on the size, so eyeball it), or see the plum variation below

• Butter, for greasing the dish

• Caster sugar, for coating the dish

• 8 heaped tbsp plain flour

• 4 heaped tbsp caster sugar

• 3–4 tbsp cold butter (originally an “egg-shaped” amount)

• 1 egg (if it’s particularly small, use 2)

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 160°C conventional (not fan).

2. Grease a tart dish generously with butter, then sprinkle with caster sugar to lightly coat the base.

3. Peel and quarter the apples. Arrange them curved-side up in a single layer over the bottom of the dish.

4. Bake for 20–30 minutes, or until the apples have softened. Remove from the oven and allow them to cool slightly.

5. Meanwhile, make the pastry. Mix the flour and caster sugar together, then add the cold butter. Rub it in with your fingertips until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.

6. Add the egg and gently work the mixture together until it forms a ball of dough. Dust it with a little flour if needed to stop it sticking.

7. Increase the oven temperature to 180°C.

8. Roll the pastry out on a lightly floured surface. The easiest way to transfer it without breaking it is either to loosely roll it around your rolling pin, or roll it on a sheet of floured baking paper and flip it carefully over the tart.

9. Lay the pastry over the fruit and trim the edges. Mend any cracks or gaps with scraps of excess dough. Perfection is very much not required here.

10. Bake for 20–25 minutes, until the pastry is cooked and lightly golden but not deeply browned.

Plum variation: Swap the apples for tinned (or fresh) Black Doris plums. If you’re using tinned, there’s no need to precook them as you would the apples. Drain them, arrange them in the dish and continue with the pastry.

To finish: You can add cinnamon or other warming spices to the apples if you like. Mamie Nicole’s original version was simpler, letting the fruit do the work. Serve it warm or at room temperature. Custard, cream or ice cream certainly wouldn’t hurt.

P.S. The raw dough is also delicious. Ask me how I know.

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Welcome to The Sunday Table, my monthly letter for paid subscribers. A place for recipes, books, seasonal finds, and whatever else has been occupying my mind lately. Thank you for being here.

What I’ve Been Cooking Lately

There are two rules to my summers (three, if you include picnics). I must BBQ. And I must swim.

By the first of September, I was beginning to think I would achieve neither. Then both of them fell into my lap!

We took a housesit in gorgeous Marlow, just outside London, and it happened to come with a barbecue. Pair that with my brother visiting for a couple of days, and peri peri marinated chicken burgers wrapped in bacon and topped with cheese were born. They were just as good as they sound.

One of the glorious things about September is how it sits between summer and autumn, never quite committing to either. Courgettes, tomatoes and corn are still plentiful, but figs start making an appearance and suddenly I’m turning towards heavier, warmer dishes. It’s the month where I’m absolutely eyeing up roasting a cabbage and braising some white beans, but I’m still munching on tomatoes like they’re going out of season (oh wait, they are).

Falafel flatbreads with quick-pickled red cabbage have made an appearance multiple times. I do have an excellent falafel recipe, but these are absolutely shop-bought because, as much as I love to cook, don’t you worry, I can be a lazy sod too.

It’s also the time for fig and cinnamon jam (a revelation, I promise you) with a side of fresh strawberries. Pair the last of one season’s produce with the first of the next and you won’t be disappointed.

I’m a big lover of white beans. Butter beans, cannellini beans, giant beans, whatever takes your fancy. And suddenly I’m seeing them everywhere. Has the world gotten healthier? Or have I just gotten older?

Either way, now it’s all about the beans.

And there are none better than Bold Bean Co.’s Queen Butter Beans (I wish I was being paid by them to say that. Even if the payment was in free jars of beans). I recently came up with a dish of melty slices of slow-cooked courgette and creamy beans cooked in their own bean stock with white wine, crème fraîche, lemon juice and a slightly silly amount of Parmesan.

I topped it with crispy, butter-fried chicken thigh and served it with a side of quick-pickled cucumber.

My god.

The cucumber was needed because this dish is rich and creamy and umami-savoury DELICIOUS. I’m not going to lie, I impressed myself.

Sop up with crusty bread. Be happy.

But back to those burgers.

Zingy, fatty, rich and acidic all at once, piled onto soft brioche buns with crisp lettuce and washed down with an icy-cold beer, because I’m hanging onto summer by my fingernails. I am still wearing shorts. I refuse to change, both metaphorically and physically. Jeans are staying in the cupboard for at least two more weeks.

I can’t recommend these burgers enough, which is why they’re my recipe of the month, even if the end of September is a slightly ridiculous time to be recommending a BBQ recipe. Incidentally, they work extremely well in a frying pan too, so no barbecue required. Never fear.

Recipe of the Month

Peri Peri Chicken Burgers

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It frustrates me sometimes, the way people react when I tell them we left New Zealand.

There’s an assumption that leaving somewhere beautiful means rejecting it. That if you grew up somewhere other people dream of visiting, you must be mad to want to live anywhere else.

But loving a place and choosing to leave it are not opposites.

I’m sure I do the same thing with Greece. I dream about living there, but I’ve only ever been a tourist. I see the tavernas and the blue water, the old stone houses and late dinners. I don’t see any of the problems underneath. I haven’t had to make a life there.

After a while, the conversations start to blur into one another. The Brits telling me about the three weeks they spent driving a campervan around New Zealand. Their awe over the beaches and mountains. Often, they’ve seen more of New Zealand than I have.

Or more of the bits that make it onto postcards, anyway.

They’ve seen Milford Sound and Aoraki (Mount Cook) and the Coromandel. They’ve seen the version of New Zealand we put on tea towels and tourism brochures.

They haven’t sat in a small town where half the shops are empty and shuttered. They haven’t watched people leave because there aren’t enough jobs.

They haven’t seen what boredom and isolation can do to young people when there is nowhere to go and very little to do. How drinking becomes something to fill the hours. How meth has hollowed its way into communities that tourists might drive straight through without ever knowing.

How a drunken drive home can become the last one.

How too many drinks and one stupid idea could mean going to school the next day to find someone wasn’t there. Would never be there again, because playing chicken with cars on a country road had passed for fun.

Until it didn’t.

They haven’t had friends lose battles they never spoke about out loud.

They drive through the farmland, but they don’t have to live there, among fences hanging drunk at angles, tin roofs sagging and old cars rusting slowly into the grass. Places where isolation is not picturesque but simply isolating.

New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the OECD.

We also have devastating rates of family violence. One in three women in Aotearoa will experience intimate partner violence in her lifetime.

Most visitors will never see any of that.

And that’s OK.

I’m sure I don’t understand half the problems Britain has yet, let alone Greece, the country I have spent years romanticising from afar. Being a visitor means seeing a place differently. You get the highlights without necessarily seeing the machinery underneath.

And I know it sounds like I’m shitting on New Zealand.

I’m not.

I love our beautiful land of the long white cloud.

I love our “she’ll be right” attitude. Our DIY Kiwi ingenuity. Our friendliness. Our instinct to help a bro out. Our wild landscapes and our bush, or what everyone else in the world calls forests.

I love our mountains and rivers and lush ferns. Sometimes it feels like you’ve been transported back to the Jurassic era. The landscape feels old. So old.

My heart belongs to the beaches. The wild west coast shores. Dangling my feet off the reef and watching stingrays float by. The call of a morepork at night. Lying back in the long, damp grass and tracing the stars in the sky, the Southern Cross and the Pot.

New Zealand will never not call me home.

But loving a country does not require pretending it is perfect.

So when someone looks at me in genuine disbelief and tells me I’ve left paradise, as though they cannot fathom why anybody would choose to leave New Zealand, it gets under my skin.

Because no place is perfect.

Not New Zealand. Not Britain. Not Greece. Not anywhere.

Every country looks better from a distance. That doesn’t mean the beauty isn’t real. It just means beauty is never the whole story.

I hope people keep falling in love with New Zealand the way I’ve fallen in love with Greece from afar. I hope they save up for the flights and hire the campervan and stand beneath mountains that make them feel so very small.

I hope they love it.

I just hope they never mistake the postcard for the whole picture.

No place is perfect.

Not even home.


Sources:
https://womensrefuge.org.nz/new-research-reveals-long-term-harm-and-systemic-failures-facing-victims-of-intimate-partner-violence/

https://mentalhealth.org.nz/resources/all-resources/statistics-on-suicide-in-new-zealand/

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September feels like the long last day of the week to relax and potter, to think, for the first time in ages, about making a roast for lunch whilst at the same time devouring the last of the season’s tomatoes.

It’s curling yourself into a blanket on the couch while still wearing shorts.

Eating a salad of nectarines, mozzarella, and a plethora of basil leaves from your own happy plant (really should turn that into pesto before it bolts), while Yorkshire puds rise in the oven.

Is it too early for cabbage? you think wildly, biting into the freshest of figs.

I am on a fig mania currently. It’s figs with cream cheese on toast, figs with goat’s cheese and thyme on tartines (so, more figs on toast), figs fried in butter and drizzled with honey over Greek yoghurt. Is it breakfast? Is it dessert? No one knows!

The last of the long summer evenings in the garden, the first cool breath of autumn in the morning. A hint of leaves changing colour and, of course, the long, bleak heatwave finally breaking. Rain at last.

The smell of the early mornings is changing too. That’s how I know autumn is on its way.

I’m clutching a cup of peppermint tea in the morning, but making a plum torte with the most gorgeous summer fruit by the afternoon, all too aware that soon the plums will be gone and something new and wonderful will take their place.

My social media feeds are already filling with talk of pumpkins and Harry Potter, lighting candles and watching rain from the windows (my algorithm might be oddly specific), but for me, it’s all too soon.

I already spend too much of my life looking ahead to the next thing.

Not even one big thing, just the hum of a modern brain that doesn’t know how to switch off. Always half-elsewhere. Thinking about what’s for dinner over breakfast. Letting my mind wander to my to-do list halfway through a film. Reaching for my phone to add something to the shopping list when I’m sitting in the garden reading my book.

Wishing for the weekend all week, then blinking as it rushes by.

Sometimes you miss summer whilst it’s still right there.

Autumn is coming, but it doesn’t need me to hurry it along.

So that’s where you’ll find me this month: popping figs into my mouth like sweets, reading in the garden, equipped with both shorts and a blanket, and doing my best to enjoy what’s already here.

There are, after all, still tomatoes to eat.

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Welcome to The Sunday Table, my monthly letter for paid subscribers. A place for recipes, books, seasonal finds, and whatever else has been occupying my mind lately. Thank you for being here.

What I’ve Been Cooking Lately

Looking back at August, I realise I spent most of the month cooking for others.

We all know the five love languages, but I’d like to propose a sixth: feeding people.

Between my partner Ben’s spectacularly complicated wisdom tooth extraction (which somehow resulted in dry socket, multiple infections and a diet consisting almost entirely of homemade tomato soup and ice cream), catering a full-day retreat for fifteen women, and hastily baking a plum torte because my brother and his partner were on their way over, I spent most of the month in the kitchen for someone else's sake.

Not that I mind. Looking after people with food has always made sense to me.

The month began with slow-roasted tomato soup, blitzed and sieved to within an inch of its life for fear of tomato seeds getting lodged in a healing wisdom tooth socket. Was the only sieve I could find about the size of a tablespoon, meaning I had to do it in agonising increments? Yes. The things we do for love.

Then came the invitation to cater a retreat right here in London. I said yes before I’d even fully heard the pitch.

It was organised by the lovely Maria, who runs a business called Girly Wine Night, which is a concept I could gush about for hours. It’s for women in London looking to make new friends, and as someone still finding my feet in this city, it’s been an absolute lifesaver. The range of events is fantastic: sound baths, yoga classes, arts and crafts nights, coffee dates, pastry runs and picnics. There’s something for everyone, and it keeps on growing.

Catering a full-day retreat for fifteen women, with a two-course lunch and a five-course dinner, was no small task. In hindsight, I definitely bit off a bit more than I could chew. I was chef and dishwasher in one, too many elements needed cooking on the spot, and I hadn’t built in enough time to clean between courses. The result was a 5am–1am day, 90% of it on my feet.

But it was a roaring success. One guest told me they were the best prawns she’d ever eaten and asked how I’d managed to keep them so juicy. Then the whole room gave me a round of applause as I emerged from the kitchen.

Did I end up taking a bus because the Tube was closed, then an Uber because the bus only got me halfway and nothing else was running? Yes. But you bet I floated home on that applause.

I’m already dreaming of a Christmas canapé supper club...

My favourite dish of the day was the whipped feta and watermelon salad. Greek yoghurt and feta blitzed until fluffy, watermelon dressed with a squeeze of lime, fresh mint, a little balsamic vinegar, and just a sprinkle of Maria’s mother in law’s gorgeous chilli powder (or Tajín would work beautifully). Ooh, my mouth is watering just thinking about it.

I was so busy I barely took any photos, but feel free to use the below for your own watermelon salad inspiration.

The slow-cooked lamb, roasted chicken, tabbouleh, tzatziki and roasted potatoes seemed to go down rather well too.

After the retreat I was suffering from slight cooking burnout, so I’d already texted my brother and his partner who were coming over the following day to say we’d keep dinner simple: tomato salad and pan-fried chicken. They’d had a long day travelling too, so nobody was expecting anything elaborate.

Did that stop me, twenty minutes before they arrived, suddenly deciding I absolutely had to make dessert?

Reader, it did not.

I’d picked up some little British plums on a whim and discovered, to my surprise, that they were green inside and wonderfully tart, which turned out to be perfect once baked.

Which brings me to this month's recipe, Marian Burros's legendary plum torte.

Everyone had seconds, which is always a good sign.

Recipe of the Month

Plum Torte

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I used to think that if I only had more time, I would finally become the person I was supposed to be.

I would work out every day. Stretch. Journal. Read more books. Cook beautiful meals. Take online courses. Become organised and interesting and deeply fulfilled. Lose weight.

Instead, I’ve discovered that free time mostly disappears into laundry, supermarket trips, thinking about dinner, and wondering where the afternoon went.

It’s funny how we always think life would finally fall into place if only we had a little more time.

I’m here to tell you it’s all a pretty lie.

You do have time. I just don’t know where it goes.

Somehow, all the chores you used to squeeze into evenings and weekends simply expand to fill the day. Laundry. Shopping. Cleaning. Dinner. Then suddenly it’s 4pm, which feels so unfair when I remember sitting in an office watching the clock thinking ‘in one hour it’s only two hours until lunch time’ until it was time to go home, blink, and do it all over again.

None of this is quite what I imagined.

I haven’t optimised my life, learned a new language, or run 5km.

But I have written poetry, started a Substack, read a pile of books that had been sitting on my list for years, almost finished writing a novel, and cooked all sorts of new things, from pide to paska.

I thought having more time would make me more productive.

Instead, it has made me pay more attention.

There is a shame that comes with unemployment, too.

When people ask what I’ve been up to, I instinctively reach for the productive answers. The job applications. The writing. The running. It feels harder to admit that I've also spent time learning the names of birds, perfected my homemade granola, or spent an afternoon sitting in the park because the weather was nice. Those things don’t feel like they count in the same way, even though they’ve made my life richer.

I would swap the uncertainty for a job in a heartbeat. I miss earning my own money. I miss having colleagues. I miss being able to answer, “So what do you do?” without feeling like I need to explain myself.

But there’s a difference between saying something has been hard and pretending nothing good has come from it.

One of those things has been discovering how much I actually need routine.

Not because every day needs to be ruthlessly optimised, but because otherwise I would become an Instagram-scrolling goblin who only leaves the couch to grab snacks. (I think my spirit animal would be a rat. Ideally one that lives in a deli.)

I read somewhere that when you’re unemployed, it’s really, really important to have a project. And some structure. After a year of unemployment, I can now confidently tell you it's really, really important to have a project. And some structure.

My mornings now always begin the same way.

My partner gets up between five and six for work, and I, eternally cursed as a light sleeper, can’t get back to sleep once I’m awake. Depending on how many times he hits snooze on the alarm, I’ll make his sandwich while he’s in the shower before walking him to the Tube.

On the good mornings, we wake up together, listen to a five-minute meditation, go for a run or a walk, then come home for Greek yoghurt, homemade granola, berry compote and peppermint tea while competing over Wordle and doing our daily Duolingo lesson. Those mornings have become my favourite part of the day.

Then I wave him off and begin my own. I love watching everyone else start their day.

The smart casual outfits, the takeaway coffees. I'm delighted by how many people still read physical books on the Tube.

Some days are for job applications. Some are for writing. Some disappear into life admin and staring at my never-ending to-do list (why does it keep growing??).

Wednesdays, though...Wednesdays are mine.

The one day I’ve officially allowed myself to blob. To be a hobbit.

I stay in bed longer (awake, but luxuriating in not getting up, damnit). I wander around the supermarket buying ingredients I’ve never cooked before. I make something wildly impractical. Sometimes I drink wine. I sloth.

And then Ben comes home.

Sometimes I feel like an eager dog at the window, starved for company, waiting for him to arrive all day. You’re here! You’re here! I have to remind myself not to immediately start talking at full volume about everything that happened, as if I’ve been storing it up all day. (I have been storing it up all day.)

On the days Ben's in the office, I talk to myself (and the cat) a lot. He usually answers back, though he’s not nearly as good at conversation as Ben.

I’ve slowed down enough to start learning the names of birds and plants on my walks. Now I can hear a bird call in my garden and think, "Aha, yes. That's a magpie!"

None of these things are achievements I can put on a CV.

I can’t walk into a room and proudly announce, “I learned three new bird calls this week,” the way someone else might say, “I had three job interviews.”

But they’re accomplishments too.

And I think I’d rather be the kind of person who notices birdsong than the kind who spends their whole life waiting for Friday.

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I grew a lime tree. I hit a 250-day Duolingo streak.

Neither comes with a party.

Why the hell not?

We know when we’re supposed to celebrate. Birthdays. Engagements. Weddings. Babies. Christmas. We have cards for them, decorations for them, designated aisles in supermarkets for them.

And I love all of it. I love throwing a birthday party for a friend (or myself), having people over for a casual barbecue, putting on a bottomless brunch. Whatever it is, I love an occasion. Christmas is my favourite time of year and, like many of us, I go a little mad for it.

But outside of those big, expected occasions, what exactly do we celebrate?

We spend so much of our lives looking ahead. The next job, qualification, house, project, promotion, trip, achievement. We finally get there, mark it with a nod and a smile, and almost immediately start looking towards whatever comes next.

But if your life doesn’t follow the usual script, the calendar can suddenly get very quiet.

So why aren’t we celebrating the other things? Getting the job you desperately wanted. Adopting a cat. Visiting your 30th country. Publishing something you wrote. Buying a car.

Big things, little things, deeply important things and slightly ridiculous things. I don’t care what it is. If it makes you happy, why aren’t you celebrating it?

I mean, I grew a lime tree. And I’m damn proud of it.

The kernel of this idea came many years ago, when I applied for a Master’s programme overseas. I desperately wanted to get in, but the programme usually required a science background, which I didn’t have.

I spent months emailing admissions, translating my grades from New Zealand, writing personal statements and chasing references, hoping there might still be a way in.

I waited. And waited. Heart in my mouth, sure I wouldn’t get it.

Then the news came: I got in.

At the time, the department was ranked among the top 30 in the world and the top five in the UK. I couldn’t believe it.

I happened to be with one of my best friends and her then-partner (now husband) when I found out. I screeched the news at them, completely giddy, expecting a quick congratulations! before the day carried on as normal.

Instead, he announced that we had to celebrate.

So we did. The three of us went around London from pub to pub, with my friends insisting on treating me, because as far as they were concerned, this was an occasion.

I was blown away. Someone wanted to celebrate my achievement. Not just congratulate me, but actually mark it. It felt…alien.

It has stuck with me ever since and remains one of my fondest memories, not just because I got into the programme, but because somebody else decided my happiness was worth making a fuss about.

So at the beginning of this year, I decided I wanted to celebrate more. Not only achievements, either. Seasons. Traditions. Good things happening to people I love. Days people have been marking for hundreds of years.

Over the years, friends and the places I’ve lived have introduced me to traditions I didn’t grow up with. Thanksgiving. Burns Night. Galette des Rois. The sweet, fluffy, brioche-like Mona de Pascua I ate during Easter in Spain.

I love the idea that the year can have a rhythm to it. That instead of racing from Christmas to birthday to Christmas again, we can punctuate ordinary life with moments of ceremony.

I’m beginning to think celebration is a habit. The more I practise it, the easier it is to find the next thing to celebrate. Sometimes that means cooking something traditional. Sometimes it means inviting friends over. Sometimes it’s opening a bottle of wine, baking something ridiculous on a Tuesday, lighting candles for the solstice, or going out because somebody you love has done something they’re proud of.

You don’t have to wait for the world to hand you an occasion.

There is always going to be another thing to work towards. Another goal. Another thing we haven’t done yet. But I don’t want to spend my whole life racing towards the next milestone and forgetting to notice when I’ve actually arrived somewhere.

So celebrate the qualification. Celebrate the new job. Celebrate your friend finally finishing the thing they’ve been working on for three years. Celebrate the first lime on the tree you planted. Celebrate the changing season.

Make the cake. Open the bottle. Invite people over.

Don’t wait for your life to become sufficiently important to celebrate it.

As Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

I think I’d like to spend more of mine celebrating.

A year of things worth celebrating

Here’s what made it onto my calendar this year. We missed a few, added others as we went, and had a lovely time doing it.

Steal whatever you fancy.

JANUARY
New Year’s Day — 1 January
Twelfth Night / Galette des Rois — 6 January
Burns Night — 25 January

FEBRUARY
Imbolc / Candlemas — 1–2 February
Valentine’s Day — 14 February
Shrove Tuesday / Pancake Day — date varies
Lunar New Year — date varies

MARCH
St Patrick’s Day — 17 March
Spring Equinox — around 20 March

APRIL
Easter — date varies

MAY
May Day / Beltane — 1 May
Cinco de Mayo — 5 May
Eurovision — date varies

JUNE
Summer Solstice / Midsummer — around 21 June

JULY
Bastille Day — 14 July

AUGUST
Lammas / Lughnasadh — 1 August

SEPTEMBER
Autumn Equinox — around 22–23 September

OCTOBER
Halloween / Samhain — 31 October

NOVEMBER
Día de los Muertos — 1–2 November
Bonfire Night — 5 November
Thanksgiving — fourth Thursday of November

DECEMBER
Advent
Winter Solstice / Yule — around 21 December
Christmas — 25 December
New Year’s Eve — 31 December

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In danger of sounding ridiculously privileged here, I'm very grumpy about not being in Europe this summer.

My Instagram and my Substack feed are all full of photos of gloriously clear water, piles of tzatziki in tavernas, or sun-soaked vistas from farmers’ markets in the south of France. I’d take either, honestly.

I can't complain. We recently moved from New Zealand to England, so our finances have been focused on that. But in my head, I imagined I’d find a job faster, we’d have a bit more breathing room, and be able to pop off for weekend trips to Europe. Maybe a cheeky week in Greece.

Not so.

Instead, it’s another heatwave in London.

Which, to be fair, isn’t actually the worst. The enormous parks, walks along the river, the beer gardens. London is wonderful in summer (I am excluding the tube from this statement).

But it isn’t Europe.

It isn’t mountain villages in the shade of ancient olive trees, drinking cold white table wine in the square while the cicadas drone away, and life carries on much as it has for hundreds of years.

It isn’t cycling down country lanes past fields of sunflowers or rapeseed, their bright yellow flowers waving in the breeze. Wandering through blazing hot markets filled with the smell of fresh bread, fish and sizzling merguez.

It isn't digging my toes into hot pebbles while goats wander past and I contemplate my fourth swim of the day.

Perhaps it isn’t Europe I miss. It’s being on holiday. And that’s all the difference.

So as another scorching weekend settles over London, I’m making my version of kolokithokeftedes, Greek courgette fritters, served with tzatziki, or simply the best Greek yogurt you can get your hands on.

I’m sensitive to the taste of egg, so I leave it out of mine, though traditionally they do contain it.

Crispy, creamy, moreish, and best eaten under the shade of grapevines or olive trees, with a cold glass of white wine alongside.

If I can’t be in Greece, I’ll damn well bring Greece to me. To my tiny courtyard garden, with fake grass underfoot.

At least it has a resident cat.

Greek Courgette Fritters (Kolokithokeftedes)

Serves 2 as a main, or 4 as part of a mezze spread.

Ingredients

• 1 courgette, grated

• 60g Greek feta, crumbled (not too finely as the chunks are delicious!)

• ¼ small red onion, very finely diced (or 1 spring onion, finely sliced)

• 3½ tbsp plain flour

• ½ tsp fresh mint, finely chopped (or fresh dill, or both)

• Salt and freshly cracked black pepper

• Olive oil and a neutral frying oil (such as rapeseed or vegetable oil)

Method

Grate the courgette into a large mixing bowl.

Add the feta, onion, flour, fresh herbs, a generous pinch of salt and plenty of black pepper. Stir until everything is well combined and forms a fairly thick mixture.

Leave the mixture to rest for 5 minutes so the flour absorbs some of the moisture from the courgette. (Don't drain the courgette. Without the egg, it needs that moisture to hold everything together.)

Pour enough olive oil and neutral oil into a non-stick frying pan to cover the base by about 1cm. Heat until shimmering.

Drop generous spoonfuls of the mixture into the hot oil. Don’t worry about making them perfectly round, the rough edges become wonderfully crisp.

Cook 5–6 fritters at a time for about 3 minutes per side, or until deep golden brown and crisp.

Transfer to a plate lined with kitchen paper while you cook the remaining batches.

Serve warm with tzatziki or thick Greek yogurt.

Notes

• I prefer mine without egg, but traditionally they do contain it.

• Fresh dill works beautifully in place of mint.

• Sweetcorn makes a lovely addition if you have some to use up (not at all traditional but it is delicious!)

• Best eaten straight away while the edges are still wonderfully crisp.

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Welcome to The Sunday Table, my monthly letter for paid subscribers. A place for recipes, books, seasonal finds, and whatever else has been occupying my mind lately. Thank you for being here.

What I’ve Been Cooking Lately

I hope you had at least one picnic in July. It would be a travesty not to.

Some people think picnics are an unnecessary faff. All that carrying. The inevitable bees. Sticky hands. Someone always forgets the bottle opener (hello, it's me). Then, perhaps, a jar of caramelised onion chutney leaks through the entire bag, which smells faintly of onions for the next three years. (I am absolutely not speaking from experience.)

To those people, I ask: where is your whimsy? Not every meal has to happen at the table. Indeed, I'd argue some of the best ones don't: the midnight cheese gnawed in front of the fridge door, the fresh peach hunched over the sink, dribbling juice like a demonic fruit bat, fish and chips on the beach, or a feast spread out in the garden.

Scrunching your toes into warm grass with a cold glass of Rosé in one hand and a strawberry in the other is one of summer's greatest pleasures.

The heat, however, is another matter entirely.

Eating cartons of cherries and lying around the place lethargically like a sickly Victorian child helps slightly. Escaping for the weekend to visit one of my best friends, who happened to have air conditioning in her guest room, that helped considerably more.

Everyone has their own idea of the perfect picnic spread. Mine has a few mandatory ingredients. Fruit first, obviously. Strawberries, grapes, wedges of rockmelon, or pineapple dusted with Tajín if I’m feeling particularly extravagant. Then something salty: olives, saucisson, cornichons, perhaps a little pâté, maybe a terrine de campagne if you’re lucky.

Cheese is non-negotiable, of course.

Ideally something soft, something hard, and something strong. My vote is usually brie, Comté and a proper kick-in-the-nose goat's cheese. I'm still working my way towards blue.

If you can’t get your hands on one of those little French goat cheeses, here’s my favourite trick.

Buy a soft log instead, slice it into thick rounds and pack it into a jar with olive oil, pink peppercorns and dried herbes de Provence. Leave it in the fridge for a few hours and you'll be spreading it onto crusty baguette and humming Edith Piaf before you know it.

But if there's one thing that's guaranteed to make it into my picnic basket, it's cake salé.

You’ll find it on apéro tables in homes all over France, though I doubt you’ll ever see it in a restaurant. It's humble cooking, made from whatever happens to be lingering in the fridge: cheese, deli meats, perhaps a handful of vegetables. It's invariably the first thing to disappear.

I have fond memories of eating it at big family gatherings in France. As the youngest, I was always the one sent around with the plate, dutifully offering slices to every family member before I was allowed another piece myself.

I remember feeling unbearably smug when my extended family arrived and the responsibility passed to cousin Tom instead. These days I have to crane my neck to talk to him, which is slightly discombobulating considering my clearest memory is of him toddling after cousin Victor, crying, “Victor, arrêteeeee!” over and over again.

So here's my version. It's perfect for picnics, brilliant for using up odds and ends in the fridge, and best shared with people you love.

Recipe of the Month

Cake Salé (French Ham & Cheese Loaf)

This is one of those wonderfully forgiving recipes. Swap the ham for leftover roast chicken, throw in a handful of olives or sun-dried tomatoes, use whatever cheese needs finishing, and it'll still be delicious. It's happiest eaten at room temperature, preferably outside.

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Every country does one thing better than anyone else. In my opinion, New Zealand's thing is salt and vinegar chips.

Doesn't matter if you're a thick cut or thin cut gal, a Penguin Chips (Bluebird) devotee or an Uppercut fan, they do them right.

I'm talking burn-the-roof-of-your-mouth-off, tongue-blistering, lips-peeling business. You lick the salt off because it burns so good. If it isn't an exercise in masochism, you're doing it wrong.

And then you put them in a sandwich. Sliced white bread only, chaps, with nothing but margarine (and marmite if you’re feeling frisky) to accompany. Best eaten at children’s parties or in the schoolyard at lunch.

None of this balsamic vinegar business. None of these soft-footed cider vinegar attempts. These chips (yes chips, not crisps) should be a welcome to the second level of hell, no sweetness here.

I can only surmise that the English are happy to simply flirt with vinegar. New Zealand doesn't believe in half measures. If you're having a vinegar chip then by God, it had better mug you in an alleyway.

Chardonnay vinegar isn’t going to cut it, chums.

I think what we need is a rating system. You know how you order a curry mild, medium or hot? I petition for a crisp meter: mild, medium and caustic.

Your mouth should flood with saliva. Your shoulders should reach your ears. Your tongue should wonder whether it can press charges for aggravated assault.

When you move overseas, you expect to miss certain things. Friends. Family. Christmas, birthdays and weddings. The beach.

Nobody warns you about chips.

I didn't expect to have to go on a chip quest, each offending potato weaker than the last. (And don't tell me to try Kettle Chips. They just aren't right.) So far M&S has had the best results, but I’m still not satisfied.

So if anyone knows where to find a salt and vinegar chip prepared to commit battery, I’m all ears.

Until then, the quest continues.

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Sometimes I think summer feels more like a place than a season.

The summers of my childhood were filled with the faint drone of lawn mowers, the steady chorus of cicadas and the scent of freshly cut grass. Picnics in Auckland Domain park, lying under the shade of old trees and eating fruit and nut chocolate that melted through our fingers. I remember once we forgot to pack spoons and had to drink our little yoghurt pots. Fish and chips at Stanmore Bay beach on Friday nights. Is there anything better than hot, crispy fish and chips eaten with the sound of waves in your ears and the salt licked off your fingers? Playing petanque on Big Manly beach, or morning swims at Little Manly Beach. I didn’t come up with these place names, I swear.

Then the bees. All the bees in summer. See, bees really like me. And what they adore most is stinging me with no provocation in inopportune places: my ear, my thigh, my bum (twice in two years, I wish I was kidding). One summer, as I lay on the beach sunbathing with my eyes peacefully closed, a bee landed on my behind and stung me out of nowhere. I leapt up and shouted “oh no not again!” much to my eldest brother’s complete confusion. The worst part isn’t the swelling. It’s how guilty I feel at their senseless death. Please, I’m just sitting here minding my own business, don’t bee like this. (I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist).

And always strawberries. Dark, sun-kissed, heavy with juice. Mum would take us picking at the strawberry farm, one for the bucket, one for our mouths, until our fingers were stained red and we were about to turn into strawberries ourselves.

But most of all, it meant my dad’s Tarte aux Fraises. A strawberry custard tart (crème pâtissière if we’re getting technical) made in his kitchen on long summer afternoons. I always wanted it for my birthday, and was always disappointed when he patiently explained that as my birthday falls in October, strawberries weren’t in season. Not this year, not next year. I think this only fuelled the obsession. I had it whenever the chance arose, and spent the rest of the year waiting.

I left New Zealand at twenty-one. By the time I returned, my dad had sold the apartment. I never got to go back, never got to stand in that kitchen one last time. He packed everything carefully into boxes, and I went through them later, the detritus of my childhood in cardboard, things I hadn’t thought about in years suddenly unbearably present. That version of us, the long summers and the kitchen and the tart, exists only in memory.

Now I’m an adult (whatever that means), I still make that tart every summer, wherever I am. In New Zealand, I buy expensive strawberries in small punnets from the supermarket, or spend an afternoon at one of the picking farms, fingers stained red all over again. Now I’m in England, I watched for that first flush of summer strawberries with a particular kind of eagerness.

Because that’s the thing about summer being a place. You can’t go back to it, not really. The apartment is gone, the kitchen is gone, and you are not the same person who stood in it. But one bite of this tart and I’m back to those long afternoons, the cicadas droning, the smell of cut grass drifting through an open window.

This isn’t my dad’s exact recipe. It’s more of a blend of his and this one I found online (with an easy homemade custard!), tweaked over the years until it tastes close enough.

Tarte Aux Fraises Recipe

Ingredients

Pâte sablée (pastry)

• 230g plain flour

• 65g white sugar

• 125g butter, chilled

• 1 egg

• Pinch of salt

Crème pâtissière (custard)

• 250ml full fat milk

• 1 egg + 1 egg yolk

• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract (the higher quality the better)

• 3 tbsp white sugar

• 2 tbsp plain flour

• 1/2 tbsp cornflour

Topping

• 500-800g fresh strawberries, washed, hulled and halved (depending on the size of your tart tin)

• 2 tbsp smooth apricot jam

Method

• To make the pastry, mix together the flour, sugar and salt. Cut the cold butter into small cubes and rub in with your fingers until it resembles large breadcrumbs.

• Add the egg and gently mix until the pastry comes together in a rough ball. Do not overmix or the pastry will become tough.

• Wrap in cling film and refrigerate for a minimum of 30 minutes.

• Once rested, preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

• Line a tart tin (I use a 23cm one) with baking paper, roll out your pastry on a floured surface and transfer to the tin. Cut away the excess and poke holes in the base with a fork.

• To blind bake, cover the pastry with baking paper and fill with pie weights or dry rice. Bake for 15-20 minutes, then remove the weights and paper and bake for a further 5-10 minutes until golden. Leave to cool completely.

• For the custard, heat the milk and vanilla in a small pot over a medium heat. In a mixing bowl, whisk the egg, egg yolk and sugar until pale, thick and fluffy, then whisk in the flour and cornflour.

• Once the milk reaches a gentle simmer, pour it into the mixing bowl and whisk until just combined. Pour the mixture back into the pot and cook over a medium-low heat, whisking regularly, until thickened. Watch it carefully, it catches quickly.

• Pour into a clean bowl and press cling film directly onto the surface to prevent a skin forming. Leave to cool completely (the fridge speeds this up).

• Spoon the cold custard onto the cooled pastry and spread evenly. Arrange the strawberries on top in a pattern.

• Warm the apricot jam until liquid, then brush gently over the strawberries to glaze.

• Refrigerate for at least an hour before serving.

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It wasn’t until I left New Zealand that I realised no-one else called their cheese ‘tasty cheese’. They had cheddar and gouda and comté. We had tasty cheese.

It’s a cheddar, supposedly, though more a halfway house between English cheddar and American cheese. Not crumbly, semi-plasticky, but with a more mature taste than the American stuff. It wasn’t exactly artisan. (It’s also about $20 a kg nowadays, but the cost of NZ groceries is a sad tale for another time.)

In England I discovered real cheddar, the crumbly kind with crystals. The good stuff.

People love saying English food isn't good. I look at them and say: have you tried Kiwi food? Although we do have our moments. The best savoury pies in the world, the pavlova (you can suck it, Australia), the flat white. But we’re not exactly a food destination. I say this lovingly.

England, though, has so many lovely, long, and sometimes wonderfully strange traditions. Yorkshire puds, buttery crumpets, golden syrup soaked pikelets, rhubarb crumbles. Then it gets stranger: mince pies (once made with actual mince). Toad in the hole. Spotted Dick. The old-school meals everyone loves to laugh at. Post-war English food was, from what I've read, fairly dire. (You can keep your jellied eel and your liver and onions, thank you.) But to hold it to that reputation now is not only outdated, it’s also insulting.

If anywhere captures the spirit of modern English food, it's probably Marks and Spencer. M&S, Marks and Sparks, whatever diminutive you prefer.

Because I’m not talking Michelin stars, although England certainly has them. I’m talking little luxuries and daily deliciousness.

I’m talking picky bits.

The first time I heard the term, I was confused. Then quickly, delighted. In New Zealand it’d be a snack, a picnic, a pot-luck dinner. None of them are quite right. The closest I can think of is the French apéro-dinatoire, which I had the joy of discovering early, courtesy of my French dad. But picky bits is better. Picky bits is perfect.

And M&S is its natural habitat. Is there anything so quite so thrilling, so wallet-thinning, as wandering through M&S on a hot summer’s day, taking in the air conditioning and popping one thing after another into your basket?

The expansive charcuterie selection (bresaola, Parma ham, every salami you could want). The little rounds of goat’s cheese, the Cornish Cruncher mature cheddar (those crystals, I told you). The extra virgin olive oil crisps, the extra creamy hummus. (Extra everything, really. It's all extra, in the best possible way.) The marinated olives, the chargrilled peppers, the dips. Oh, the dips, with new flavours every week. The crusty baguettes. The biscuits you can smell the moment you walk through the door. (Did you try the speckled egg Easter cookies? Insane.) The weirdly addictive marmite and cheese balls.

The way you get pulled into the 3 for £8 picky bits deal. Multiple times.

All this to say: there’s nothing quite like taking your haul and a cold bottle of prosecco to the nearest common, and picnicking in the latest heatwave.

Because if there’s one thing England does well, it’s summer. No, don’t laugh. I mean it. London in summer is a glorious thing. The long canal walks, dipping your toes in if you dare (I do dare, though I have drawn the line at a swim, unlike many. I have no wish for parasitic diseases).

The cold lagers in beer gardens, the Aperol spritzes in the sunshine, the open-air cinemas, the way the first hint of warmth sends hordes of people flooding to the parks, shirts off, turning steadily into lobsters in the sun. The smoky smell of barbecues drifting down residential streets. The paddling pools appearing in gardens, the sound of splashing and children's laughter and music drifting over fences.

There’s a magic to London in the winter: the Christmas lights strung across the city, the markets, the mulled wine, the cosy pubs, the smell of wood-burning stoves, the winter coats. But in summer, London comes alive.

Perhaps it's because they've endured the long dark nights of winter and the endless rain in a way New Zealand rarely has to. But people flourish in the sunshine. They do more, even on weeknights.

On a random Tuesday evening, it feels as though the whole city is outside celebrating.

And it all starts with picky bits.

Although I must say, your marmite still isn’t right.

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If I had a pound for every time someone asked me why I moved to the UK, I could probably afford that Richmond house I’ve been dreaming of. I have explained myself to hairdressers, Uber drivers and many people at parties. Basically everyone I come across.

When I mention I’ve come from New Zealand, every single one of them looks at me like I've said something slightly unhinged. The same aghast 'but why?' every time.

A Brit moving to New Zealand makes sense.

A Kiwi moving to the UK is apparently madness. Especially when it involved leaving family, secure jobs, and a rental that we were paying under-market price for. We left our friends, our certainty, our ‘normal’ path.

The British seem to love hating their own country. It reminds me of an older sibling with a younger one. They can bully and belittle all they like, but if anyone else tries, there'll be hell to pay.

I usually fall back on the practical answers, because saying a move is driven partly by a feeling tends to earn some odd looks and perhaps the suggestion I may have hit my head.

"For family."

“We wanted somewhere bigger, with more opportunities.”

A hundred practical considerations went into the decision. It's all true, but it's not the whole truth.

There is a feeling here that I find hard to capture. It’s in the hedgerows and the stone walls, in the rivers and the streams, in the foxgloves and the cow parsley and the meadowsweet. In the crows and the robins and the foxes. In the ancient churches and their peaceful graveyards.

Perhaps that feeling isn't entirely surprising. My great-grandparents came from Yorkshire. Even though those roots have long since faded into family history, my mum always says that when she first set foot in England, it somehow felt like coming home.

Growing up in New Zealand, England felt like a mythical place. Our literature was full of it. Enid Blyton’s Famous Five eating sandwiches on trains. C.S. Lewis’ London and the rambling English countryside. Harry Potter leaving King’s Cross for Scotland. Beatrix Potter’s squirrels and rabbits. It was the place King Arthur drew his sword from the stone, where Winnie the Pooh wandered in woods and Robin Hood hid in them.

The thing is, when you’re a child, you don’t realise these stories are set in real places.

I spent my childhood reading about things I had never seen. Trains. Foxes. Squirrels. Buildings older than my entire country. Places layered with centuries of stories and history. Somewhere distant and unreachable.

Because you see, England was as mythical to me as Hogwarts or Narnia. An impossible place from my childhood.

Then I moved there.

So when I walk down a country lane, or spot a robin in the garden, or pass an ancient church tucked into the landscape, how can I explain the delight that gives me? These were the things I spent my childhood reading about.

Perhaps I am still in my honeymoon phase with this country. I am not unaware of the struggles, the poverty, the homelessness, the economy squeezing us tight, the successive shitty governments and the rising anti-immigrant rhetoric (as a new immigrant struggling to find a job, I am keenly aware of these things). And those all matter. Very much.

It’s been so hard in many ways. The safety net of close community is gone, job hunting without contacts or references in the right country. Doing it with a visa that marks me as second class. I still haven’t found work and it hangs over me like an invisible storm cloud. Money is tight. We housesit to make money less tight, which brings with it constant uncertainty and change. Everything is different. Trying to sort anything to do with immigration usually leaves me on hold for hours, my anxiety through the roof and my pocket a few (many) pounds lighter. Perhaps New Zealand's system is no different. I just never had to find out.

But alongside all of that, I am seeing so much beauty. It’s like being a child again. Suddenly I am noticing the smallest things: dragonflies on the water, primroses and snowdrops and blackthorn, wood pigeons in the trees, heather and yarrow and hogweed. I find my joy again.

I am a stranger in a strange land. But I am learning its name.

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Welcome to The Sunday Table, my monthly round-up for paid subscribers. A collection of recipes, books, seasonal finds, and whatever else is on my mind. Thank you for being here.

What I’ve Been Cooking Lately

I can’t talk about June without mentioning the heatwave, obviously. For days my Substack feed was full of salads, people swimming, and many, many heat complaints (which I happily added to). Combine that with housesitting in the hottest apartment we’ve ever been in (a top-floor flat where we couldn’t open the windows or the cat would escape), and I’ve never been so sweltering in my life.

Cue operation low-cook. I think I ate my bodyweight in Greek yogurt (I recommend Fage 5%) and fruit. Then the salads: Caesar salad, lamb salad, halloumi salad, and picky plates (so many picky plates). Do not judge my unhinged picky plates.

Mainly, though, I've been living off shop-bought flatbreads (I usually make my own, but I think if I'd tried that week, they would have been more sweat than dough) with oven-roasted chicken wings, smeared with chili feta dip and piled high with pickled onion and cucumber. Or rolled up with tzatziki and shop-bought falafel and quick-pickled red cabbage. All the pickled things. Or stuffed with sumac-spiced lamb mince, or hot honey halloumi. The world is your flatbread.

Lastly, I’ve been eating a lentil salad on repeat. I start with supermarket packets of lentils, then fry up courgette, capsicum, chorizo and shallots until everything is brown and crispy. Then it all gets tossed with toasted pumpkin seeds, feta, plenty of fresh mint and parsley, dollops of lemony yogurt (or tzatziki if you can be bothered), and topped with quick-pickled onions (which I almost always have lying about in the fridge) and loads of lemon juice. Fresh, pickly, creamy, earthy and sharp.

And if you’re really desperate not to cook, I recommend burrata, the best tomatoes you can buy, fresh basil, salt, good olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Eaten straight. Yoom.

Of all the things I’ve made this month, though, it’s the wings I keep coming back to. You can buy a huge packet for a couple of pounds, and it’s so delicious Ben wanted to eat them all in one go. So there you go.

Recipe of the Month

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Heat waves like this one always make me think of Spain. And Spain makes me think of oranges, both the colour and the fruit.

My mind goes straight to Valencia, awash in yellow sunshine, its streets lined with orange trees.

When I moved there, it was on a whim. I was 22, on my second day of a barista job in Cambridge, staring down a cold, wet English winter and feeling distinctly unexcited about the future.

I applied for a role teaching English in Spain, dreaming of sunshine, but never dreaming I would actually get it.

The next day I had an interview over Skype. By the end of the week I'd accepted a position in a city called Valencia that I'd never even heard of. I didn’t speak a word of Spanish.

Two weeks later I landed with little more than a backpack and ‘hola.’

We were lost twenty-somethings who'd somehow all washed up in Valencia. It felt like each of us had come there hoping to leave something behind. Alix, soon to be my English friend, had dropped out of medical school and run off to Valencia to get away. She found her own place first and only landed the teaching job once she was already settled. Amelia, a wealthy Londoner, had been offered a position at a prestigious art gallery courtesy of her parents but dropped it in favour of the Spanish party life. Claudia, the trendy Italian from Milan, chain-smoked and seemed to both love and hate her country. We were a mixed bunch. English, French, Spanish and Italian flew around the room, often in the same conversation, the Europeans casually trilingual if not more.

We were paid 200 euros a month in cash for working forty-hour weeks, though this did include accommodation in a shared apartment. Ridiculously little, of course, but it gave me about 30 euros a week for groceries and 20 for beers at the bar, and somehow, it was enough. Did I live off homemade chicken wraps and three-euro bottles of cava? Perhaps. But did I have a damn good time doing it? Absolutely. “Una cerveza por favor, grande!” became my favourite line, and why not, when beers were two euros at the bar, and the gloriously generous tradition of a free tapa or ración coming with every single drink. Many beers were drunk.

There was a grungy, wonderfully atmospheric bar near us where ordering a pint took a full ten minutes, because each time the lady behind the counter poured our glasses, she decided there was too much foam, tipped some out, refilled, and started the whole process again. She did this with a face so deadpan I could never tell if she was screwing with us.

I worked from 10am, with a two-hour siesta in the middle, then resumed work until 8pm. I often wasn’t home until just after 9pm, since I walked everywhere. I didn't mind starting later, but I never got used to finishing so late. Some mornings I went jogging along the town's old riverbed, long since drained and turned into a beautiful park. The trees were heavy with oranges, and I'd spend hours basking in patches of sun and shade. Other mornings were slower: a café bombón, that thick, sweet condensed-milk iced coffee, sat at a table watching the street go by, in no rush to be anywhere.

Long lunches at nearby bars, cheap beer passing the time before work began again. Sunday afternoons listening to live jazz drift through the open doors of the local bar. House parties that never started before 10pm, in typical Spanish fashion. I lost count of the number of times I walked the hour across the city home at 2am, the heavy scent of jasmine perfuming the air, old ladies still out walking their dogs at that hour. It felt like the safest place in the world.

Of course, it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine. Half the teachers had crushes and relationships going with each other; gossip and drama were rife. It was like being back in high school. Amelia used to drink from a water bottle at her desk during lessons, only it was full of straight vodka. (She also once put bleach on her face trying to remove a pimple, but that’s a story for another time.)

And then I got fired. Not her, the one drinking spirits in front of her pupils. Me.

I’d been asked to go to Barcelona for a month, to cover staff shortages at a sister school. At first I was excited. Then I learned I’d be staying alone with an unknown middle-aged Spanish man, rather than with a group of teachers like I had here. I said no. In response, they fired me.

I called my best friend in England, sobbing. She told me I could come stay with her anytime, no questions asked, which took the edge off the panic. At the time it felt catastrophic. And like it was all my fault. It’s only years later that I can see the situation more clearly. They wanted a young woman to travel somewhere she didn't feel comfortable going, to stay with a man she didn’t know, and when she refused, they got rid of the problem instead.

Looking back, I’m glad I listened to the voice that said no.

It was one of the first times I had to stand up for myself and draw a line, in the face of everyone pressuring me to say yes. I’m proud of her.

It turned out to be a blessing in disguise anyway. I'd already finished my TEFL certification, and I was starting to tire of teaching. I crashed on Alix’s couch for a while, in her own little apartment until I found my feet. She took me out to the bars some nights too, the two of us picking up exactly where the school day used to end. One evening we hauled a portable barbecue up to the roof of her building and cooked skewers up there as the sun went down, eating ice cream, drinking beers, lying back and watching the whole of Valencia turn gold beneath us.

My savings were thin, but they stretched far enough to soon get me a room in a shared apartment for a couple of months while I figured out what came next. Thank goodness for cheap cities.

It was next to nothing to rent in Russafa, one of my favourite neighbourhoods, right in the heart of the bar scene. My room was painted sunshine yellow and reminded me of a Van Gogh painting. I shared the flat with two quiet Italian flatmates who mostly kept to themselves; Lucca, who once walked me to the local veg market (I think I briefly fell in love) and another whose name I can no longer remember at all. I had a tiny balcony looking down into the neighbourhood, and I loved sitting out there with a cold beer, knees pressed against the railing, eyes closed, listening to music drift up from the bars below.

I was so hot and dusty. So replete.

It was here, in this lovely little yellow room, that I invited friends over for a goodbye dinner. I'd wracked my brains over what to cook for a small crowd in a small kitchen, and eventually did what I always do when stuck on a cooking question: called up my dad. He immediately suggested an orange chicken dish, which felt perfect. After all, it seemed only right to use oranges to celebrate my time in Valencia: surely the capital of oranges. It would have been easy to let the bitterness of why I was leaving poison everything, especially given the irony that the bitter Valencian oranges are grown for beauty, not taste. But I bought sweet oranges from Andalucía for that dish instead, and I felt at peace with my choices. It was ending at the right time. I just hadn't realised it in the moment.

I’d already decided to leave for England, fleeing the hot winds blowing in from Africa. I made the call to go the day it hit 43 degrees. My friend’s offer in cooler England still stood, and I was ready to take her up on it. As I stood cooking that final dinner, I realised what the whole stretch of it had actually been: getting fired, the month of sleeping on someone else’s couch, the rooftop sunsets, the grumpy beer lady, all of it had made me feel, for the first time, like I was actually flourishing. Like I was a character in a story. My story. The best way I knew to mark its ending was with good food and the people who’d been in it with me.

Every time I make this dish now, it brings me straight back: sunny Valencia, the scent of orange blossom on the air, that glorious yellow light.

Chicken in Orange Sauce (Dad’s Recipe)

Serves 3–4

Ingredients

• 1 whole chicken, cut into pieces (or use chicken legs)

• 1 onion, finely chopped

• 2–3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

• A few sprigs of fresh thyme

• 1 bay leaf

• Salt and pepper

• 2–3 juicy oranges

• White wine (1–2 glasses)

Method

1. Heat some olive oil in a pan and add the onion, making sure it’s well coated. Cook on low heat until soft and translucent. Set aside.

2. In another pan, heat olive oil on medium-high. Brown the chicken on both sides, then add the white wine to deglaze the pan.

3. Reduce the heat and add the onions, garlic, herbs, salt and pepper, then the juice of the oranges and a few slices of the rind. Cover and simmer for at least half an hour, ensuring the legs are properly cooked (around 20 minutes if using breasts).

4. Taste halfway through, if it’s not orangey enough, add more zest and rind; if too bitter, add a splash more wine.

5. Remove from the heat and let it rest, covered, for 5–10 minutes before serving.

Notes: You can replace the wine with Cointreau, Grand Marnier, or rum, use half as much as you would if using wine, but add the juice of an extra orange. Serve with potatoes, rice, pasta, or green beans, though rice is my favourite.

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Cookham feels like the village time forgot. Half-timbered Tudor houses and skinny footpaths made for a time when roads only needed to be wide enough for horse and cart. The houses all gently buckling with age. There are more pubs than seem reasonable for a village this size. How properly English. You get the sense that life has by and large been the same here for centuries, and by God little things like the Industrial Revolution or electricity won't change that. I make up stories in my head about the locals, each having their favourite pub and the rivalries around it. (Reginald’s been drinking at the Old Swan Uppers for 30 years, but someone swears they saw him at the White Oak. Reginald swears he’d die before he set foot in there.)

And the river, oh the river. First I find it on the bridge, then I look for a way down. I find the church and rest a while in the shade of old trees. Looking out at the gravestones, it's peaceful. There’s an ancient yew in the churchyard, and I’m always fascinated by the pagan-Christian origins of places like this. As soon as I spotted the ancient tree, its branches twisted and gnarled, I knew it was a yew. They’re in most churchyards here, and the reasons are older than the churches themselves. The yew has been associated with death and the journey of the soul for thousands of years, and became a symbol of eternity long before Christianity came along.

Christianity did eventually arrive, and folded many of these older symbols into its own stories. Churches were built where people already gathered, and old meanings lingered beneath new ones. Something this old has outlived the religion that first claimed it.

Eventually I leave the peace of the churchyard. I walk and I walk and I walk until my feet are sore, and I find a perfect spot to sit.

On the banks of the river, beneath the willow tree, I close my eyes and listen.

The rustling of wind in the tall grasses. A moorhen squawking indignantly in the water. Further off, the occasional cry of a rooster. The sound of music drifts towards me, jazzy, upbeat, but with some serious bass. The sun is on my face, my fingers still sticky with nectarine juice. I lie by the river.

This is June. I am content.

Slowly I notice the music has changed. A trumpet plays Happy Birthday, followed by cheering, and I realise it's a live jazz band. I can see a giant tent in the garden of the house on the other side of the river, and I imagine chilled wine and ice buckets, delicate canapés. I wish I was there. Surely it's wonderful?

I think about the yew tree again, what it might have meant to so many people over so many years. Then I think about the party. Someone has been planning this for weeks, maybe months. It’s someone’s special day, perhaps the highlight of their year. But in the blink of an eye, it will be over. Everyone will go home and tomorrow will be ordinary again. And the yew will still remain.

Then I wonder if sometimes the idea of an event is more perfect, more alluring, than the event itself. It occurs to me that someone in that tent might be wishing they were somewhere else entirely. I wonder if any of them can see me, the girl in the grass beneath a weeping willow, and wish we could trade places. Maybe they're looking out at the river, at the quiet, longing to get away from all those people, to lie under a willow tree with fingers sticky from nectarine juice.

I don't move. The grass is warm, the willow leaves shift overhead, and somewhere behind my closed eyes, the trumpet keeps playing for someone else's day.

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Growing up, Friday night meant fish and chips. You can take the Kiwi out of New Zealand, but apparently you can’t take the English food culture out of the Kiwis. So many of our staple recipes hail from the old country: Shepherd’s pie, meat, potatoes and boiled veg, and of course, the ubiquitous Friday night fish and chips. All imported wholesale from a country most of us had never been to, but somehow, completely ours. (And our chips are better. Sorry England, but I’m not here for flabby fries.)

By Friday afternoon the excitement would start to build. We’d call ahead so we didn't have to spend half an hour waiting on the grass beside the shop while everyone else had the same idea. Shouting to be heard over the fryers. Feverishly trying to remember the number we’d been given so when they yelled "Number 33!" across the field, we could leap up in response. The weird little tins of Wattie’s tomato sauce, the pineapple fritters no-one ever ordered. The paper-wrapped bundle would be deposited on your lap, hot enough to burn your thighs, the smell of chips lingering in the car for hours afterwards. Then down to the beach, popping cans of L&P and biting into hot, crispy chips, the salt stinging your mouth. I always got chicken nuggets, turning my nose up at the fish. I still have a weakness for those nuggets.

Seafood and I have a complicated relationship. My parents, like most parents in the 90s, had the rule of finishing your plate before you could leave the table. If you weren’t keen on finishing, the threats came out: you'll have to eat it cold for breakfast tomorrow, or worse, you won’t be getting any dessert tonight. The horror. Mentions of starving children in Africa were also trotted out. 'Well then, post this disgusting fish to them and see how they like it,' I thought mulishly, though I knew better than to say it out loud.

The problem was, fish was revolting to me. To this day, I still struggle to eat anything even slightly fishy. I remember gagging around each bite, trying not to spit or throw up. One time, I started sneaking every second mouthful onto the floor. My clever disposal system had one major flaw: we didn’t own a dog. As it was, I ‘finished’ my plate, and promptly got in a lot of trouble when my parents discovered half a fish worth of uneaten bites on the floor beneath my feet. I still consider this a victory as I couldn’t be forced to eat it.

Every generation of parenting finds fault with the one before it, of course. But that battle over fish taught me something: nobody has ever been argued into liking a food. If I ever have children of my own, I don’t think I’ll make them finish a meal they genuinely hate. Some battles simply aren’t worth winning.

As far as I was concerned, fish would always be my nemesis.

Then I travelled.

In Croatia, I tentatively tried fish carpaccio off my brother’s plate. On a small Croatian island, I ate shrimps cooked ‘grandfather’s style’, fresh and sweet and nothing like the fish of my childhood. I ate octopus in Greece, and I liked it. I even tried oysters on the French coast. It was fresh, very fresh, but we shan’t talk about it. Snot of the sea. Shudder.

But it was on a pebbled Suffolk beach at sunset that things really changed. I was housesitting on my own in England, no one to judge or push me, and I tried fish and chips again. Dribbled in malt vinegar, wrapped in paper, soft and crunchy and fatty and sharp all at once. It seems odd, me buying fish and chips when I'd never liked fish. But I kept thinking about my mum's stories of fish and chips on English beaches. Maybe I wanted those memories too. Or maybe I wanted to feel closer to her.

I shared the beach with no one but the birds and the salt marsh behind me. I dipped my toes into the pebbly shallows, but it was freezing. The English sun doesn’t warm much in September. I wasn’t sure what I was doing. Job hunting, housesitting, alone.

But sitting on that beach with the endless roar of the waves pulling in and out, fish and chips warming my lap, I felt brave. I was alone but not lonely. Not in those moments, by the boundless shore.

It wasn't an overnight conversion. Most things aren't. But it was the beginning. I still won't touch anything overly fishy, but somewhere between Croatia and Suffolk I stopped being the child smuggling fish under the dinner table. Even if my brothers still won’t let me live it down.

I started making my own fish, courtesy of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, and haven't looked back since. The trick is keeping everything as cold as possible. That's what gives you the lightest, crunchiest batter.

Beer Battered Fish Recipe

Serves 2

Ingredients

• 2 fresh fish fillets, hoki, cod or snapper work well

• 1 x 330ml cold bottle of beer (any kind, I usually go for a lager)

• 160g flour

• ½ tsp baking powder

• Chilli flakes

• Salt

• 250-500ml cooking oil depending on your pot size (use rice bran or anything with a high smoke point)

Method

• Mix the flour, baking powder, chilli flakes and a good pinch of salt in a bowl, then place it uncovered in the fridge or freezer.

• Cut each fillet into 2-3 pieces depending on size, check for any missed bones or scales, season with salt, and put back in the fridge.

• Fill a deep pot with two inches of oil (I use rice bran) and set over a medium heat. To test whether it’s hot enough, dip the handle end of a wooden spoon into the oil. Once it bubbles immediately on contact, it’s ready.

• Take your flour bowl from the freezer and add the cold beer slowly, mixing roughly with your fingertips. You want it still somewhat lumpy as this is what makes it crispy. You may only need three quarters of the bottle of beer. Aim for a thick batter that drips slowly off your fingers.

• One at a time, coat each piece of fish in the batter and lower carefully into the oil. Don’t overcrowd the pot: the pieces shouldn’t touch, so work in batches of two or three.

• Fry for 2-3 minutes each side until golden brown, then transfer to a rack lined with paper towel and hit each piece with a pinch of salt immediately.

• Serve with loads of lemon juice, homemade fries, and whatever greens take your fancy. I love a fresh salad or homemade pickled cabbage. My partner is partial to peas.

Note: I've heard vodka makes an even crispier, lighter batter, but I don’t usually have vodka in the house so I can't speak to it. Worth a go though!

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Welcome to the first Sunday Table, a monthly round-up of recipes, books, seasonal finds, and whatever else is on my mind. Thank you for being here.

What I’ve Been Cooking Lately

I’ve been on a bit of a legume kick recently, consuming many a tin or packet (or jar, when I’m feeling bougie) of white beans, chickpeas, and lentils (ideally Puy, my favourite). …

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