Readers’ favourite photographs, songs and recipes

Snapshot: Honeymoon in Skegness

My mother’s honeymoon in Skegness was her first holiday, after the wedding her parents hoped would never take place and to which they refused to go. As they considered her the “best worker” of their eight children, they needed Kate at home to work the fields of their smallholding, bring in the cows and deliver milk (by bucket to 60 homes each morning). She went to school for only a year.

My grandfather provided hearses for funerals and carriages for weddings. Kate would prepare the horses: white ribbons for weddings and black ribbons with blackened hooves for funerals. The only payment she ever received was a flower from a wreath or a sugared sponge finger biscuit given to her father, the driver, to go with his glass of sherry.

In the early 30s, my 24-year-old dad was a rising star and manager of several shops opened by Dewhurst, the first butcher to sell the frozen New Zealand lamb that was causing quite a stir. My grandmother sent Kate secretly to buy some chops, directing her to go by a circuitous route so that the other East Kirkby shopkeepers would not catch sight of her. Harry knew the moment he saw 16-year-old Kate with her black labrador that she was the one for him; he gave a morsel of steak to Rover – and the best cuts of lamb to her. My grandmother sent her back again … and again.

He courted Kate for five years. When late for their first date at the saddle club dance, he gave the bus driver a fiver to shoot past all the intervening stops. She was never allowed to go out socially by herself, so Harry had to include her sisters as well. He used to make fry-ups in the back of his butcher’s shop for Mary, Kate, Nelly, Winnie and Nancy. Until Kate was 21 and legally old enough to marry, each of the other sisters thought she might have been the girl he wanted.

My father had to pay for everything at the wedding. My mother was swept away to Sheffield within the year, for my dad to open another new shop. Having toted all those brimming buckets as a child, she needed a shoulder replacement – but not till she was 92. Diana Aubrey

Playlist: The safe haven of our grandparents

Magic Moments by Perry Como

“Time can’t erase the memory of / These magic moments, filled with love”

My grandma Elsie and grandad Charlie were the linchpin in our lives. My brothers, my cousin and I seemed to spend all our spare time in their little house as kids. We spent autumn afternoons playing Pooh sticks, and endless summers running around in their back garden. Christmas was always a telly and turkey bonanza. He taught us that you don’t need money to beat boredom. She taught me to knit and bake jam tarts. They didn’t have much in the way of material goods, but as my mum always said, they were as happy as pigs in muck.

When my parents divorced, it was to their safe haven of a house that I was taken. They were the port in the storm, the incontrovertible proof that unconditional love exists and marriages can last – and work. Elsie loved the old crooners. Val Doonican was a favourite, but we chose Perry Como’s Magic Moments for her funeral earlier this year. The lyrics perfectly captured what she meant to us.

That song was the soundtrack to their lives. The line “The Saturday dance I got up the nerve to send you some flowers” perfectly embodies their courtship. The pair’s budding romance was blighted by Charlie’s two left feet. Elsie loved to trip the light fantastic with big sis Phyllis and wasn’t impressed with her beau’s bad moves. Charlie was unceremoniously dumped. Determined to win her hand, he enlisted the help of Phyllis, and the courtship turned into a 58-year marriage. They were still sending each other slushy “the only one for me” cards until Charlie died in 1996.

I remember holidays in the Lake District – long, lazy days spent messing about by the water. Friday nights were always grandparent time. They’d bring us each a bag of sweets as a treat. It was the only time of the week my mum would weaken and allow us a sugar rush. In the early days, Charlie and Elsie would come over on their trusty motorbike, complete with sidecar. Later on, it was in their car of choice – a Robin Reliant in trademark 70s tan. And that brings another Magic Moments lyric to mind: “The time that the floor fell out of my car when I put the clutch down.” With a suspect puff of smoke and a roar it took us kids on countless afternoon drives in the country, complete with pac-a-macs, Thermos flasks and a Tupperware box crammed with custard creams.

I tried to read a poem out at Elsie’s funeral but got so choked up I couldn’t even utter the first word. Even writing about it is giving me shaky hands. One of the first things I did afterwards was track down Magic Moments and put it on my iPod. I’m an avid runner and it’s now my cool-down track of choice after pounding the Devon dunes. Perry Como, I salute you. Cathy Latham

We love to eat Apple and berry crumble

Ingredients

3 large cooking apples

400g blackberries

Sprinkling of caster sugar

Crumble:

75g light brown sugar

75g plain flour

75g butter

A crumble is notoriously simple and offered the chance to hone a few simple techniques: keep the butter cool, and your hands cooler – too much crumbling and you lose that crunchy topping. Once the butter is rubbed into the flour, add sugar to the crumble topping until it resembles breadcrumbs and set aside.

Next, peel, core and slice the apples into small chunks, layering them into a large, well-greased pie dish with the blackberries, before sprinkling with sugar. Cover with the topping and bake for around 40 minutes at 180C or until the topping is golden brown and bubbling. Delicious with ice-cream or custard.

Memories of staying with Grandma as a little girl all revolve around the eating and making of food. Bedtime supper consisted of Horlicks and a toasted teacake, spread thick with cold butter. On waking, we’d drink tea from the luxury of warm, heavy blankets, scan her weekly glossies and dunk a few digestive biscuits for good luck.

Puddings have always been one of my grandma’s specialities and they put her allotment treasures to good use. Bumper crops of strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries and blackberries filled punnets and pies for all the family during summer, making way for the classic crumbles suited to colder months. It didn’t get tastier than a combination of apple and blackberry.

I was Grandma’s kitchen helper and we’d start baking from noon. I remember the thrill of a fresh pinny being tied round my waist as I stood on a stool to reach the sideboard and squirrelled away bits of leftover pastry to form customised jam tarts. A self-inflicted tummy ache would occur, depending on how much batter/pastry/sugar I’d nibbled.

I’m now free of the kitchen stool but still remember the smell of a baking, buttery crumble as it wafted through the house – the hard part was waiting until teatime to eat it. The crumble must be one of the quickest, tastiest and most nostalgic puds by far, easily spiced up with fresh figs and cinnamon.

Grandma’s home baking was, and still is, an important part of family life. For me, it’s what comfort food is really about. I bake when I’m feeling happy. Jessica Simmons

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Life and style: Food & drink | guardian.co.uk

There’s never a bad time to visit a vineyard, but one of the best is harvest time, when there are festivals, tasting events and even the chance to help pick the grapes

Vendimia festival, Jerez, Spain

Three weeks from Saturday, 4 September

Jerez de la Frontera in Andalucía, sherry capital of the world, becomes a hive of wine-related activity and parties from the first weekend in September to celebrate the Vendimia festival. There’s bullfighting (including a comedy bullfight), motorcycle racing and flamenco dancing, as well as grape picking. The family friendly festivities kick off with the Queen of Sherry parade, when she tosses a bunch of grapes into a press for four workmen to tread for the first official pressing of the vintage, and children run after her chariot to catch the sweets she throws. Then the party begins, with events in town and at the bodegas.
• See andalucia.com and turismojerez.com for details and accommodation. Casa Vina de Alcantara (vinadealcantara .com; doubles €160) is an elegant house in an arboretum, with 10 rooms and a pool, a short drive from the town centre

Marathon du Médoc, France

10-11 September

Thought marathons were all about sports drinks and energy bars? Not so in this event, where there are wine stops for runners pounding the pathways and roads of the Médoc region, passing 50 pretty chateaux and vineyards that are preparing for their autumn harvest. As well as the 8,500 or so runners, it attracts 50,000 spectators, many in fancy dress (comicbook heroes is this year’s theme), and food stalls along the route offer oysters, steak, ice-cream and cheese (obviously no one is there to beat their personal bests).

On the eve of the race the area’s estates open up their cellars and grounds and one property holds a Repas des Mille Pâtes (A Thousand Pastas’ dinner), which is reputedly great fun, and includes a cocktail hour. In the town of Pauillac, particularly along the quays of river Gironde, the party continues into the night. On the morning after the race, there is a 10km walk (the Ballade de Récupération), which provides an opportunity to taste more of the region’s wines.

OK, it’s the weekend after next, so if you haven’t registered yet, you’re off the hook, though you can still go and watch. And if you’re planning to run a marathon next year, this one has more of an incentive than most.
• marathondumedoc.com sells packages to the event and lists accommodation

Festa dell’Uva, Impruneta, Tuscany, Italy

26 September

The oldest grape festival in the region and one of a slew of harvesting events in Tuscany, the Festa dell’Uva in Impruneta pays homage to the region’s prized chianti and other varieties, with parades, dances, shows and food stalls. You can catch a bus from Florence to Impruneta.

• lafestadelluva.it. Tourist information: +39 055 231 3729, presidentefestauva@yahoo.it. Castello di Cafaggio (020-7193 1363, icastelli.net; from €90 per night) is a gorgeous 14th-century estate set in vineyards a few minutes from the village

Paso Robles Harvest Wine Weekend, California, USA

15-17 October

The small Central Coast town of Paso Robles celebrates the new vintage with more than 130 wineries holding their own events during the third weekend in October. A notably cool summer coupled with a slighter later bud break from a sluggish spring has the local wine industry predicting a much later harvest, possibly into November, but the festival dates remain the same and it won’t be any less fun. Wineries hold their own individual events, everything from novelty grape stomping to intimate winemaker dinners and wine seminars. The area also has hot springs (such as franklinhotsprings.com) if you need a different sort of liquid therapy afterwards. The drive to Paso Robles from either San Francisco or LA, along the Pacific highway, is truly spectacular.

• pasowine.com. Most of the vineyard accommodation is fully booked for this year, so you would be better off hiring an RV or camping. The Springs at Borrego (springsatborrego.com) has its own natural mineral baths and star parties with an astronomer, and weekly wine tasting. See tinyurl.com/3az3lhu for more campsites

Jurade de St Emilion, Bordeaux, France

13 September

The most picturesque of Bordeaux’s medieval villages, St Emilion is synonymous with fabulous wines, and its autumn festival is one of the most prestigious. The Jurade dates back to 1199 and is a celebration of some complicated political history, giving the rights of the area from King John to the locals, along with the control and quality of the wine. During the Jurade local winemakers open their cellar doors and estates for two daysto mark the start of the harvest.

• saint-emilion-tourisme.com for links to accommodation from €60 a night, and details of the festival

Life and style: Food & drink | guardian.co.uk

 Organic Spirit cocktail tuition can set up in any venue and our training courses are a great start to any office Christmas party!
As well as passing on our passion for creating imaginative cocktails using the finest of ingredients, Organic Spirit has an extensive canapés offering and is passionate about using organic, seasonal and local produce in all of our cocktails and food.  Not only does it taste better it is also better for the planet!
Here’s a taste of our festive treats for Christmas 2010.
 
To Drink

 
Spiced Clementine Martini

Clementine juice shaken with Organic Spirit Christmas syrup and brandy, a blend of warm winter flavors that warm the cockles of the heart. Served short over ice..
A date under the mistletoe

 
Date and raisin infused rum, shaken with brambly apple purée, and Organic Spirit Christmas syrup. Served tall with a date and citrus foam.
Hot rum butter cups

 
Creel-caught Langoustine Bisque Shots with Tarragon Foam and Swiss Gruyère Wafers
AOC Champagne Fleur de L’Europe Champagne and Truffle Chicken Liver Parfait on Brioche
Wild Mushroom Tartlets with Chervil Hollandaise garnished with Enoki Mushrooms
British Chestnut and Peruvian Fair Trade Dark Chocolate Mini Tartlets

Spiced organic with Tahitian Vanilla, Active Manuka Honey, Lime Peel, Chilli, and Organic Spirit Christmas spice mix, gently warmed and served in earthenware mugs.
 
To Eat:
Dalesford Farm Quails Eggs and Scottish Smoked Salmon served in a crisp pastry shell

Life and style: Food & drink | guardian.co.uk

Part two, the top ten of Observer Food Monthly’s countdown

• Part 1: See who else made it into the top 50

Our panel of judges: Raymond Blanc, Bill Buford, Rachel Cooke, Monty Don, Fuchsia Dunlop, Fergus Henderson, Mark Hix, Simon Hopkinson, Atul Kochar, Prue Leith, Thomasina Miers, Tom Parker-Bowles, Jay Rayner, David Thompson and the OFM team

10 GREAT DISHES OF THE WORLD Robert Carrier
(Marshall Cavendish, 1963)

Good cookery books capture the culinary zeitgeist; truly great cookery books shape it. Few are as important or, frankly, as indispensable as Carrier’s Great Dishes of the World, which gently explained to a Britain for whom the memories of rationing were still fresh, that there really was a world of food beyond their shores. Carrier delivered fabulously detailed and uncompromising recipes for the likes of beef stroganoff and bouillabaisse. The writer’s attention to detail , and commitment to getting it right, is obvious on every page and explains why the books has endured. Carrier, who died in 2006, continued to update Great Dishes, and it remained in print for years. Though the colour plates now have a certain kitsch quality there is no doubting its reach or ambition. As well as roaming far and wide across Europe there were also recipes from China, India, the Middle East and Caribbean. Even so there’s no doubting that its heart really belongs to France. Jay Rayner

9 SICHUAN COOKERY Fuchsia Dunlop
(Penguin, 2003)

Before I had finished even half of Fuchsia Dunlop’s introduction to her first cookbook, I was kicking myself for knowing so little about such a diverse and clearly delicious food region that’s as big as France and more populous than Britain. Her entertaining descriptions of her time spent cooking in Chendung’s famous cooking school combined with her simple, concise translations of what she learned made me yearn to start cooking immediately. I was in Chinatown a few days later, loading up on ingredients, though many are readily available in good supermarkets.

The recipes veer from the incredibly simple, such as stir-fried potato slithers with chillies to the more elaborate, such as dry-braised fish with pork in spicy sauce. Clear chapters cover cold food, poultry, fish dishes and street food. The vegetable chapter includes a recipe for fish-fragrant aubergine that is so simple and yet so good that it would convert anyone to Sichuan food. Concise sections detail most common ingredients and different cooking methods. You’re left aching to visit the region, just to learn more. Thomasina Miers

8 THE CLASSIC ITALIAN COOKBOOK Marcella Hazan
(Papermac, 1973)

Marcella Hazan often gets the blame for the craze for balsamic vinegar, and she has been known to complain people use it far too much. But in other matters, her influence has only ever been benign. Hazan, knowing that some pastas are most definitely not best made at home, has made cooks everywhere feel truly proud of their jars of dried spaghetti. She has also, down the years, encouraged them to chuck out their garlic presses, and use instead the blade of a knife to crush our cloves. Best of all, she has taught us to elevate what we used to call spaghetti sauce to the status of ragu, an altogether more sophisticated beast. We know now to add milk to it, and nutmeg and, if we are feeling really chi-chi, we can throw in some chicken livers, too, and call it ‘ragu di fegatini’.

The Classic Italian Cookbook was published in 1973 in America, where Hazan taught cookery in her New York apartment. Then, in 1980, it was adapted for a British audience by Anna del Conte, at which point she won herself a whole lot of new fans, plus an Andre Simon Award. It is a very good book indeed: comprehensive, straightforward, with recipes that really work. If you want to know how to make proper risotto, minestrone, or lasagne, this is where to look. But it includes other delicious things, too: pot-roasted squab, stewed rabbit, braised oxtail. As Hazan notes, the Italians like to describe such dishes as “un bocone da cardinale”, or a “morsel for a cardinal”. We don’t know too many cardinals, but we know what she means: this is gloriously tasty food, to be cooked for those you really love. Rachel Cooke

7 THAI FOOD David Thompson
(Pavillion Books, 2002)

Australian chef David Thompson first went to Thailand almost accidentally when some holiday plans fell through, and was smitten by the country and its food. He moved to Bangkok, where he studied in the kitchens of people skilled in the noble arts of traditional cookery, pored over the memorial books that documented palace recipes, and explored the food sold on the streets. He originally promised his publisher a small book on Thai snacks, disappeared for years of intensive and obsessive research, and finally came up with this remarkable and comprehensive study of Thailand’s culinary traditions. (With characteristic irony, he mentions in his acknowledgments that writing it was ‘an interesting, prolonged experience’.) Within its gorgeous pink covers, you will find information cultural, geographical, historical, spiritual and culinary, not to mention a vast collection of recipes that range from street food through palace cooking, to exquisite desserts. It’s a book of rare depth and complexity, demanding and exotic, and one that opened the door to a new appreciation of Thai cookery among readers of the English language. Fuchsia Dunlop

6 ENGLISH FOOD Jane Grigson
(Ebury Press, 1974)

The great Jane Grigson, the Observer’s food writer from 1968 until her death in 1990, was also the author of many wonderful cookbooks. It’s perhaps debatable which is the best of these, but the one for which she will always be most celebrated is English Food. As the critic Fay Maschler put it: “She restored pride to the subject of English food and gave evidence that there is a valid regional quality still extant in this somewhat beleaguered cuisine.”

English Food (it contains recipes from Wales, too) is undoubtedly a work of scholarship: carefully researched, wide-ranging and extremely particular. But it is also contains hundreds of excellent recipes, the vast majority of them short, precise and foolproof. Who could resist poached turbot with shrimp sauce, or a properly made Cornish pasty? As for the puddings, Grigson delivers recipes for some of our favourite ever: Yorkshire curd tart, brown bread ice cream, queen of puddings, and Sussex pond pudding. There is also an excellent – and blissfully long – section on teatime: every possible cake and bun is here in all their sugary, buttery glory. Rachel Cooke

5 ROAST CHICKEN AND OTHER STORIES Simon Hopkinson with Lindsey Bareham
(Ebury Press, 1994)

Simon Hopkinson is not a great cook because of his mastery of technique, though he has that by the bucketful. Nor is it his flair for innovation that makes him; even he would say his food cleaves tightly to the great European traditions. What defines him is his exquisite good taste. Nowhere is that better demonstrated than in this cleanly written, utterly reliable, delicious book. It is organised by ingredient – A is for anchovy, B is for Brains, P is for pork pieces and bacon bits – with a short essay on each. Then come the recipes, be it the roast chicken of the title – the trick is to rub it with butter and then squeeze over the juice of a lemon – one of his beloved tripe stews, or his saffron mash, pretty much the only dish he claims as his own invention. Pleasingly there is a direct link in this book back to the great Elizabeth David with recipes that she first introduced to these shores, such as the saffron soup with mussels or the heart stopping St Émilion au chocolat, refined for a modern palate. Jay Rayner

4 KITCHEN DIARIES Nigel Slater
(4th Estate, 2005)

Nigel Slater is the Philip Roth of food. The towering writer of his generation by whom all others are judged. Or simply “a bloody genius”, according to Jamie Oliver. Real Fast Food is Slater’s Portnoy’s Complaint, the bold and brilliant arrival, packed with precocious appetites and ideas, that changed for ever the thought of what to do with food in the cupboard or fridge. But Kitchen Diaries is the full flowering of a mature talent, with a clear knowledge of who he is, where he comes from and what he wants to say.

Moving on from Richard Olney’s defining understanding of seasonality, Diaries places food back in the heart of the British home, the garden, the market, the farm. “Roast rhubarb on a January morning; pick-your-own strawberries in June; a piece of chicken on a grill on an August evening; a pot-roast pigeon on a damp October afternoon.” The concept was simple but game-changing. British food from now on would celebrate the right food at the right time. Open it on any page (but start, say, with 1 January on page 4) and savour the simple beauty of the recipes and the writing. Allan Jenkins

3 THE BOOK OF JEWISH FOOD Claudia Roden
(Penguin, 1996)

Cairo-born Roden has published many great recipe books, and there are few who can touch her knowledge of the Mediterranean and Middle East. But it is The Book Of Jewish Food which will stand as her masterpiece. In truth it is less a cookbook than a cultural over view of the entire Jewish diaspora, with appropriate recipes attached. It is a mark of just how reliable a piece of scholarship it is that, on publication, it was greeted with almost universal acclaim; a rare achievement for any work wading into the notoriously rancorous Jewish community. Every page and, more important, every recipe bursts with the vigour of a people that spent 2,000 years on the move. The dishes of the Sephardic Jews of North Africa and Spain are as rich and varied as you would expect of a writer who made her name with the food of the Middle East. Here are instructions for Iraqi date-filled pies, Tunisian couscous cakes and quinces in wine. More compelling still is her codifying of the eastern European Ashkenazi tradition: her irrefutable instructions for perfect chopped liver, latkes, gefilte fish and the rest. Any edition of this book is a joy, but the beautifully illustrated American version, published by Knopf, is particularly special. Jay Rayner

2 FRENCH PROVINCIAL COOKING Elizabeth David
(Penguin, 1960)

Elizabeth David came to me somewhat late, in cookery calendar terms. My mother, a very good cook indeed, had not, to my knowledge, a book of hers anywhere in the house when I was fettling away at the Aga in my early to late teens. Cordon Bleu, yes. Dad’s dog-eared EP Veerasawmy paperback for his curries, indeed. But no Elizabeth David. It was not until I was 21 years old when friends in West Wales gave me a set of her Penguin paperbacks for my birthday, hoping that they may further inspire me in the kitchen of my little restaurant by the sea. Although I had already worked in a French restaurant and eaten in France with my parents, nothing compared to that which I was to learn and devour from French Provincial Cooking. Nothing had previously evoked such a sense of place and time with the richest prose. It was and remains, intoxicating. The recipe for poitrine d’agneau Sainte Ménéhould is a case in point, where this meagre, though supremely flavoursome joint, is quietly poached with aromatics, cooled, carefully divested of its flacid, corset-like bones and excess fat, it is then pressed between weighted plates, or some such. Once firm, this now flat cut is sliced into thick strips, smeared with mustard, beaten egg and coated with breadcrumbs. Gently grilled, or fried till crisp – not ‘crispy’, a description Elizabeth David abhorred. This is a remarkably good plate of food. Simon Hopkinson

1 THE FRENCH MENU COOKBOOK Richard Olney
(Ten Speed Press, 1970)

On a summer afternoon at his home in Provence in 1999, the American food writer Richard Olney went to lie down after a light lunch, and never woke up. He was 72, and had led an interesting and fulfilling life (his friends included the writer James Baldwin, the poet John Ashbery, and the painter John Craxton). He had also, unlike many people, been able to cook his own last meal. The story goes that when his brothers arrived to arrange the funeral, they found a plate and a glass by the sink. The plate contained traces of a tomato pilaff; the glass, red wine. The remaining pilaff was in the fridge. The brothers took it out, heated it up, and toasted him before tucking in.

This pilaff tells you everything you need to know about Olney. People favour risottos now, but before there was risotto, there was pilaff: buttery rice mixed with onions, garlic and tomatoes that have first been fried in olive oil. If the tomatoes are good and fresh, the oil sufficiently grassy, and the onions just so, this is the food of the gods. Olney was a hugely accomplished and knowledgeable cook, but his mantra was simplicity and, in this sense, he was ahead of the times. When The French Menu was first published in 1970, its determinedly seasonal approach was considered revolutionary. Four years later, he published Simple French Food, and his reputation was sealed.

Some read Olney for his uncompromising style alone. His sentences are longer than a prize pike; his salads are “composed”, not tossed. Others like the way he pairs every dish with a wine. But it’s his menus that really slay you. Olney lived alone, but he was a generous host, and his friends must have considered themselves truly lucky. Imagine a friend who cooked you sorrel soup, followed by frito misto, pheasant salmis with ceps, and an orange jelly. Or crayfish mousse, ravioli of chicken breast, roast leg of venison and moulded coffee custard. Or, perhaps best of all, cucumber salad, baked lobster, braised and roasted partridge, and fresh figs with raspberry cream. With this raspberry cream, we quietly rest our case. Rachel Cooke

Life and style: Food & drink | guardian.co.uk

Today’s poached chicken is tomorrow’s salad supper or late-night sandwich with all the trimmings. So whip up a feast, and bring on the leftovers…

No holiday for me this summer. There is too much going on. (Which probably explains the forgotten sugar in the ginger beer recipe the other week – my apologies.) The recipes that are most useful to me right now are not those that I can knock up in a few minutes, but those that involve cooking one day for the next. Coming home after a hectic day in sweltering heat to “something I made earlier” has been a life saver.

The early part of this week saw me poaching a chicken in a lovely herbal stock, letting it cool, then feasting on it for the rest of the week. (The stock became a sustaining soup last night.) The best of these fridge raids involved hunks of leg meat – and the even juicier undercarriage – tucked into a mayonnaise made with handfuls of fresh herbs and enough lemon juice to lift the spirits of both me and the cold chicken.

Chicken mayonnaise is often made from left-over roast chicken and that is fine. But better, I think, is to use a bird that has been poached in a mildly seasoned liquid. Allowed to cool in the stock, the flesh will be infinitely more moist that it would have been otherwise.

We have, I suspect, got out of the idea of cooking any sort of meat in stock on a regular basis. Slow cooking of this sort rarely fits in with our lives any more. It is only when you come to do it, on a Saturday afternoon or on a soggy Sunday morning, that you wonder why you didn’t do it before. With your bonny chicken cooked and cooled, the notion of a midweek chicken salad, late-night sandwich (with bacon, tomato and mayo) and a shallow bowl of pappardelle with chicken, olive oil and torn basil on the table in nine minutes finally becomes a reality.

Basil mayo is perhaps the most appropriate for a chicken salad at this point in a long hot summer. Especially as my plant on the kitchen steps has reached the size of a small garden shrub. So large, in fact, that last night I scooped up some of my chicken mayo and rolled it in a basil leaf that had grown to the size of a piece of lettuce and stuffed it in my mouth, dolmades style.

The idea of “today-for-tomorrow” works with puddings, too. Give me a load of soft fruit and a loaf of bread, and I will show you a good time. Summer pudding (made in the evening so it is ready for the next day) needs little introduction, but at this stage of the year I am swapping the redcurrants for other fruit. The plum season is just about upon us, and they work splendidly in place of currants, adding much juice and an end-of-summer feel.

Chicken with dill and basil mayonnaise

Moistness is all. Cooling the chicken in its broth will help to keep it juicy and easy to carve. Serves 4-6.

a medium-sized chicken
2 tomatoes
2 medium onions
9 black peppercorns
12 parsley stalks
a few sprigs of thyme
1 bay leaf
1 large lemon

Put the chicken in a large, deep pan. Add the tomatoes, the onions still in their skins, and the peppercorns. Tuck in the parsley stalks, the thyme and the bay leaf. Cut the lemon in half and add it to the pan. Pour over enough water to cover the chicken.

Bring to the boil, skim off the froth, then turn the heat down to a simmer. Let the chicken simmer for an hour. By that time the stock should be rich with flavour and the meat on the bird should be tender yet not falling off the bone. Check the flesh at the deepest point – if it is still pink, it needs a little longer. Remove from the heat and let the bird cool in the stock. Don’t refrigerate, but keep as cool as possible.

Lift the chicken from the stock and pull the meat off in large pieces. Cut or tear into large strips and chunks.

Basil and dill mayonnaise

3 egg yolks
½ tsp Dijon mustard
a pinch of salt
150ml groundnut oil
150ml olive oil
10-15g basil leaves
10g dill fronds
the juice of ½ a lemon
1 small cucumber
a few appropriate flowers or herbs to finish

Put the yolks in a bowl with the mustard and a pinch of salt. Whisk in a few drops of groundnut oil followed by a steady trickle of the rest, whisking constantly. Once you have used all of the groundnut, move on to the olive. You should have a thick, custard-coloured mayonnaise.

Stir in the chopped basil and dill leaves, check the seasoning, then set aside for the basil to do its stuff.

Half an hour or so later stir in 2 tsp of lemon juice. This should thin the sauce down a little, so that it is a coating consistency. If it doesn’t, then add a little more.

Check the seasoning.

Peel the small cucumber and then cut it into thick, match-like strips. When finished, fold gently into the mayonnaise with the chicken.

A plum pudding for late summer

Serves 4-6

500g plums
150g sugar
500g mixed berries (raspberries, blackberries etc)
a 500g sourdough loaf

You will also need a 1 litre pudding basin

Halve and stone the plums. Put them into a stainless-steel saucepan with the sugar and 250ml of water and bring to the boil. As soon as the fruit is soft, tip in the berries. Continue cooking, but now at a low simmer, until the fruit has started to burst and the juice in the pan is a good, rich colour.

Remove the crusts from the bread, cut into thickish slices then into rectangular strips (like soldiers for your boiled egg), cutting one piece into a disc to fit the bottom of the basin.

Tuck the round of bread into the bottom of the pudding basin. Press the fingers of bread all round the sides of the dish, carefully butting them up together so there are no gaps.

Lift the fruit from its juices with a draining spoon and pack tightly into the bread-lined basin. Cut the last pieces of bread to fit the top then put the basin on a shallow dish. Spoon over enough of the juice that it thoroughly soaks the bread, then place a plate on top of the basin. Add a heavy weight – a can of beans will do – then leave in the refrigerator overnight. You can turn the pudding out if you wish, though I’m not sure it’s necessary.

Email Nigel at nigel.slater@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/nigelslater for all his recipes in one place

Life and style: Food & drink | guardian.co.uk

Food for thought about shaping our world through food…

Have you ever thought about what food really means? Ours is the first society in history to take food for granted – to treat it as something to be made cheap and convenient while we get on with “more important” things. Industrial food systems have made feeding ourselves seem easy, but when you factor in all the externalities – fossil fuel consumption, rainforest destruction, desertification, pollution and obesity, etc – it becomes clear that “cheap food” is an expensive illusion.

Feeding ourselves healthily, equably and sustainably remains our greatest challenge – one that will, above all others, shape our future selves, society and planet. Food’s influence is already to be found in our cities, landscapes, work patterns, social lives, domestic routines, politics, economics and ecological footprint. Food already shapes our world – so why not use it as a tool to shape a better one?

If we choose we can create sitopia, or food-place (from the Greek sitos, food + topos, place). Unlike its counterpart utopia, sitopia is achievable. Indeed, we already live in a version of it, albeit a bad one, made by the likes of Tesco, Monsanto and Walmart. But if we were to harness food as a tool, we could create a better sitopia, closer to the sorts of places and societies in which we actually want to live. What they might be like is up to us – and that is the point. Food’s influence is so profound that it is practically synonymous with life itself. That makes it far too powerful to be left in the wrong hands.

Carolyn Steel is the author of Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (Random House, £8.99). Visit theschooloflife.com

Life and style: Food & drink | guardian.co.uk