A well-stocked freezer is a wonderful thing, whether you need chips to make kale and an egg into a satisfying meal, or kale to make egg and chips into one that has a vegetable element.

Ice-cream concentrates flavours, lets them sing every note of their unique song, so that it becomes possible to appreciate every aspect of an ingredient we might otherwise think of as incidental

Beetroot pancakes are pretty and tasty

Let’s pay some attention to our fruit bags this week, and think about how we can turn the plums in the bags into delicious meals.

today, the newsletter is an optimistic daydream with some menu suggestions. But perhaps next weekend it will transform, as if by magic, into a giant gingham blanket lain on plush soft grass. And we will all be able to take a seat and help ourselves to a grand array of treats, served from the clingfilm-(or beeswax cloth)-covered bowls, the old takeaway containers and ice-cream tubs, thermoses, and the paper packages that are arranged upon it. 

Herbs are sort of hard to define, even limiting ourselves to the culinary world: they’re any plant we cook with more for flavour than as a central ingredient; and then generally we’re talking leafy above-ground plants, with roots like ginger being, uh, something else- aromatics, maybe?