I love everything about Christmas Day. I love opening the presents, I love reading any new books that have been unwrapped, I love trying to do the Christmas quizzes and crosswords, I love the drinking, I love the afternoon walk, I love the evening television. With a licence to enjoy myself, I find that the most banal activities become treats - even the tense business of cooking the lunch.

My [...]

I am going to be self-indulgent in this, my farewell column, and serve myself the writer's equivalent of the prisoner's last meal. It is (with apologies to vegetarians) a recently discovered recipe that represents the kind of cooking I enjoy best. It is not classical, but a simplification. As a dish for the home cook, it has far more integrity than many, apparently more authentic concoctions.

It is an Anglo-Indian [...]

Aubergines are the ideal vegetable - fruit, if you wish to be pedantic - for early autumn. They remind you of the summer, while offering a creamy texture that brings comfort as the sunlight mellows and the nights draw in. A pile of plump aubergines, glowing purple where the light catches them, is an irresistible sight.

An aubergine I cooked in France last month was a sumptuous reminder that so [...]

The biggest market in Lower Normandy takes place each Tuesday in 'Aigle. Here is the most lavish of hypermarchés, but in the open air, and colonising most of the main shopping streets and squares of a busy provincial town. You can buy clothes, shoes, watches and sunglasses. There is a stall devoted to casseroles. One trader specialises in food mills. But the heart of the market, and what never fails [...]

On a fine August day, picking raspberries is a pleasantly tiring way to spend a summer. The fruit can be reached, albeit from thorny bushes, with less back-bending than strawberries require. You make your way along your row, under the polytunnel, towards a colleague coming in the other direction. The atmosphere is relaxed, although you are aware that this is piecework, and that you need to make efficient progress.

Most [...]

As I wrote here last year, I am not a confident barbecue cook, though I do crave one or two grilled foods strongly enough to set aside my nervousness. I mentioned sardines; and I might have added sausages.

Why it is that sausages should work well on the barbecue is far from clear. You are supposed to cook them slowly. On the fierce heat from the coals, you risk splitting [...]

I am useless at DIY. The reason is that, fundamentally, I am bored by it. Confronted by some fiddly task, I decide, like a petulant child, that I cannot be bothered. Many people feel that way about cooking. They may enjoy food, but they are not very interested in it as a subject.

Cookery books and television programmes are rarely of help to non-cooks. The conceptual leap from words on [...]

In the marvellous film La graine et le mulet (English title: Couscous), a gala dinner to promote a new restaurant is held up when the couscous itself goes missing. No one even considers serving just the fish and the stew. Obviously, the absence of couscous at what is supposed to be a couscous restaurant would be a noticeable flaw. The more important point, however, is the symbolism of the grains. [...]

Cultural doomsayers like to argue that the domination of publishing by large corporations, and of bookselling by mass-market retailers, has dumbed down literary production. The case is dubious in general, but it does have some application to cookbooks.

What the big publishers largely produce is souvenirs: souvenirs of television programmes; souvenirs of the restaurants of celebrity chefs; souvenirs of idyllic retreats in the Périgord or Umbria. Or, from the illustrated [...]

The Observer Food Monthly has asked top chefs what foods they could not live without. The magazine meant, I think, store cupboard items - a point missed by Raymond Blanc, who nominated Laverstoke Park Hebridean lamb and Rhug organic chicken. We get enough of that sort of intimidating advice; what was cheering in this feature was the endorsements of humble and mass-produced items. I was chuffed that Angela Hartnett picked [...]