How does your garden grow?

Sunday was another glorious day. The weather was fabulous – and in our sun trap of a patio garden at least, it must have been 20˚C or near that.

It was as though the Meteorological Office had been playing games with us.

Perhaps the forecast for far cooler, cloudier weather had been a jolly April Fool jape by the chaps and chapesses at the Met?

Whatever the reasons for the continued summer-like conditions, another trip to Columbia Road had been pencilled in for early in the morning and, in the event, took place in far warmer and brighter conditions than anticipated.

Two more pots of flowers made their way into one bag, together with a dramatic red grass to give the garden a bit of biological architecture.

But enough with the frivolous stuff!

The strawberry pot needed more plants, having been woefully underplanted a week before after rather poor advice – although frankly, I should have trusted my own instinct that three plants would not be enough for a traditional strawberry pot.

So the pot is now fully planted, with three Florence, three April and two Elsanta – the latter apparently taste rather good if allowed to ripen properly. And if they're not bought in a supermarket.

We had also decided to get little tomato plants. So we did, buying five baby plants – one orange cherry and two each of two larger, round, red varieties: Alicante and Gardener's Delight.

It’s at this stage that my copies of Tender, Nigel Slater’s rather magnificent (and heavy) two-volume work on growing your own fruit and veg, and then using them, started coming into its own.

A Christmas present from my parents, it provides far more information than the labels that came with the pots. Not that that would actually take much doing. In terms of the tomatoes, the only thing that the label revealed was the name of the variety.

We had a good spot for them, in a corner that gets a good bit of sun, but – like the rest of our little patch – little wind.

Slater says that tomatoes need to be well spaced in the pots (or bed). Oops. Five in one pot?

That problem was solved by putting three in one pot and two in another. In the first, we also popped in a rather fetching and unconventional iron obelisk that we found while hunting for bamboo.

Not only will it provide a vital climbing frame for the fruit, but it looks really quirky, and adds valuable height to the visual look of the corner too.

Slater also came into his own on the next planting job: a vine.

Our flat is one of a small block of 12. At the back, we have a gated carpark and, at the furthest end of that, the communal bins. Next to the bins, facing east and a quite shady corner, a vine has been growing for the 17 years since the block was built.

And amazingly, it’s been producing substantial bunches of fruit – although being near the bins, you never quite fancied eating them.

But with the garden now paved, we decided that one area of fence could be given over to a vine, which we’d plant in a large pot.

True to form, the label that came with the vine had rather bland instructions, with little more concrete information than the name of the variety – Vroege van der Laan. Slater was rather better, citing his own experience. It needs sun and, according to Slater, thrives best if you don't mollycoddle it.

So, only very occasional feeding and don't water too much either. Make it work. Given that, after hoping to be able to eat the occasional grape, his produces 50-80 small bunches a year, that advice would seem to be sensible.

I planted it at the back of a large, plain pot, next to the fence, with masses of gravel at the bottom and then plenty of sand, before adding the compost.

It looked a tad lonely, though, so I put eight nasturtiums around the opposite edge of the pot. They'll provide col,our and more fodder for us.

One of the things we'd decided was that we wouldn't make the mistake of crowding the garden just when we've finally got more space in it than since the day we moved in. Yet now we've got going, it seems that we have far more space than we realised. There's room for a few more ports yet.

That will have to include a chilli bush – and rosemary. For the latter, I've now ordered mesh and pegs and stuff that will protect it from Chrysolina Americana a rather attractive beetle that just adores the stuff.

They apparently also like thyme, but when they invaded the garden two years ago, they ignored the thyme and concentrated on my rosemary, stripping it bare.

That was part of an ordering blitz: new secateurs after the old ones collapsed. This in itself was an educative process – I'd never realised that there are different styles for different jobs. And a guide to basic pruning techniques from the Royal Horticultural Society seemed like a sensible investment too.

A shovel too, as the two small, plastic dustpans I have are utterly inadequate for sweeping up in the garden. And organic tomato food for obvious reasons.

Where we'd bought the obelisk – from Len from Halifax – we'd also found a nice, metal folding table and chairs for far less than we'd expected to pay, so managed to carry them home along with everything else. Cushions for the chairs are also now on order.

A rough weekend calculation, though, has left me particularly cheered. What has been spent on the garden in the last few weeks is less than what has been saved by both of us having given up the tobacco in the last 10 weeks. Which is both a bit of a shocking thought – and also something to make me feel doubly chuffed.

Indeed, looking around the garden now, I'm starting to see the sort of patio garden that I thought would be wonderful, but never managed to get anything like as close to.

It should be productive for the kitchen – but it is also beginning to look really pretty. And I admit to feeling a big flush of pride on Sunday afternoon as I cleared up after the latest potting exercise and then took time to look around at my developing little corner of paradise.

The only thing that I seem to have got seriously wrong, thus far, is in forgetting to get some grass in specifically for the cats to nibble – as Otto reminded me rather effectively on Sunday afternoon.

This will be rectified this weekend. And if they're very, very lucky, I might get them some catnip too.

'Ummm,' says Otto. 'Drugs ...'

Springing all the way into summer

It's March. Okay, it might be late in the month, but it's still only March. And on a day off today, I spent hours in the garden, in shorts, a vest and sandals, potting plants in the scorching sun.

It was the same yesterday - and the forecast suggests it will be the same for the coming days.

And it's not even April. This is not a complaint, you understand - although the consistently haywire seasons do make you think about climate change - but simply astonishment that it feels as though we actually skipped spring pretty much altogether and landed rather suddenly in the summer.

The planting has continued apace over the last few of days, after two Sunday morning visits to Columbia Road and then a trip on Monday to B&Q with a man and a van to load up with gravel, compost and as many pots as I could pile onto the huge trolley.

There used to be shops on Columbia Road itself that sold pots, plus ones on Hackney Road, but they either don't exist any more or have simply stopped selling pots. It's difficult to know why: there doesn't seem to have been any reduction in interest in gardening.

But it meant that even after the pots I've had for years had all been cleaned out, more were needed, so there was little option but to organise such a trip.

Having not been out to the Lea Bridge Road area for years - it's not a trip you do if you don't have a car - I'd totally forgotten that its slap bang next door to the Olympic site. As we crawled past roadworks in the dense early-morning traffic, it was pretty much impossible not to look up and go: 'Oh there's the velodrome oh god it's going to be total chaos'.

Vast amounts of everyday traffic and they're taking a lane out just so VIPs and corporate sponsors can get from the centre of town to the Games site.

Ian, who was helping me, pointed out all the high fencing and CCTV camera and noted, dryly, that after helping pay for it all with our council tax subsidy, it was debatable just what we'd get out of it.

B&Q was hardly the best shopping experience I've had. In many ways, it's convenient and easy. There was a really good selection of pots - although you need to be careful, as a lot were slightly chipped, and not in a design feature sort of way.

But you can forget basic advice - or even much clue about stock. Perfectly polite and as helpful as possible with no in-depth knowledge, but not able to do more than optimistically point me in a vague direction.

And when you go to pay, it's self-service tills - although a woman did come over to start me off with that process. It's no wonder such staff hardly seem happy when the customers are being expected to help put them out of work.

In March 2011, the Kingfisher Group, which owns B&Q, reported a 22.5% rise in profits to £670m. Perhaps if they invested in their staff a little more, it would be possible to get information when you need it - and get a human touch when you're paying.

Are such basic ideas of service really so out of fashion? And if you had a better shopping experience, perhaps you'd return more frequently. And you certainly wouldn't write blog pieces like this.

Perhaps this is the point at which to note that investing in staff clearly is unfashionable when you can get free, taxpayer-funded labour on the somewhat ironically titled 'Workfare' scheme instead.

And that's without mentioning that many big companies also rely on further taxpayer subsidies to their profits as such in-work benefits as tax credits help make up for low, low pay.

Nope, service is out of fashion because service demands investment in people and that costs.

Anyway, I survived. And back in the garden, it was time to get potting in the sun.

Over the course of two days, I've now planted up a pert little box, a hebe, some Cape daises and succulents, plus sorrel, two varieties of parsley, strawberries, chives, garlic and oregano.

There is something emerging that I'm really happy with. Colour and texture, decoration and culinary staples - although the latter two are frequently one and the same. There is more to come, but what is coming together is now also making it easier to think about what to do next.

And in the meantime, it has already become a more wonderful space in which to soak up the sun.

Weather to warm up the pleasure muscle

A whisper of cloud in the blue and the sun warming the body, all the way to the bone. Bright pink blossom waving gently in the merest of breezes. It was a glorious weekend.

Not that the enjoyment in our neck of the woods was limited to me and The Other Half alone: the cats were thrilled to bits too. The kittens went scatty both mornings, as we sat outside with coffee, relishing the peacefulness.

Otto made several dashes up one fence into next door’s garden, which seems to be her Schleswig-Holstein. Loki too was full of wild-eyed mischief. Next time, I’m naming cats something like ‘Fluffy’. Boudicca, by and large, remained aloof.

I took the chance to sit out with them, finishing Joanne Harris’s Chocolat, which I’ve now read at least three times.

It’s a wonderful book – and one that reveals new things every time I pick it up.

This time, I was particularly aware of the idea of having to stop running from the past before you can move forward. Both Vianne and Reynaud are in this situation, as well as Josephine. The question – and it remains at the end – is whether any or all of them can do this.

As always, it makes me cry in a number of places – and yet this is a deeply life-affirming novel, and one that celebrates pleasure (including food) and life itself.

In ways that I had not seen before, it seemed much more personal than on previous readings, bringing to my own somewhat nomadic childhood and the impact that that (along with other things) influenced.

But lifting the theme of food from it, this was a chance to build on Thursday’s development of taste and looks.

Because I was running low on stock, Saturday was a day for roast chicken. The bird was stuffed and cooked as per the River Café East Two recipe I use (three hours on a low heat, then half an hour on high, with Vermouth added for the final stretch and butter massaged into the skin).

The weather was so utterly fabulous and summery that it was also the perfect time for a salad of courgette, sliced into thin ribbons and dressed with honey, lemon juice, olive oil, seasoning and tarragon leaves. It’s a lovely light and fragrant dish.

I also did Provençal tomatoes. These were big, beefy fruits, halved, de-seeded and dried out carefully, then sprinkled with a mixture of salt, pepper, nutmeg and sugar before being filled with a layer of finely chopped shallots and topped with masses of fresh, fragrant herbs and garlic, also finely chopped.

They go into a hot pan, skin side down, for two minutes, and then you throw in a slug of wine or stock or water. Turn the heat down, lid the pan and leave for 10 minutes.

Take a spoon and a palate knife and carefully turn them, keeping the shape and the filling in place as much as possible. Add a drop more liquid if required. Lid the pan again and cook for a further 10 minutes.

Now mine had rather collapsed on Saturday (hence the absence from the photo), but they’re still seriously tasty.

And as a garnish, I’d more aïoli and also some tapanade, which brought plenty more big flavours to the plate.

That was followed by a rhubarb syllabub, which freshened things up again.

There is pleasure in eating food and there is pleasure is cooking it. And this was a day when the very weather gave an enormous dose of pleasure too.

Letting out the internal beach bum

For me at least, a holiday by the beach is not the time to fret about how my hair looks and what I’m wearing. It’s the time to let my internal beach bum out.

I potter around a swimming costume with shorts and football shirt on top – they dry brilliantly quickly, thus making excellent beach attire – a baseball cap to protect my head and a pair of flip-flops. My one concession to fashion is serious sunglasses.

For a substantial number of French women, though, that is most decidedly not the point.

It’s something of a shock to the system to see women turning up on the beach, not simply in designer swimwear and sunglasses, but with hair perfectly coiffed, immaculate make-up and plenty of jewellery.

Not that most of them make it any further into the sea than shin level, where they reveal something else: the gentle French art of posing.

Not, I hasten to add, that the men are immune. And not that it is remotely limited to any age group.

There are three main poses: arms folded, hands behind back or wrists on waist with hands behind. And they make it appear utterly effortless and utterly unselfconscious.

Mind, when they do go further into the water, they have to swim with heads up – which makes my clumsy breast stroke seem so much more proper.

I, on the other hand, spend my time in a constant battle to ensure that my skin gets tanned without getting burned – given a backgrounds that includes a Cornish Celt, I have to be grateful that my skin can even look at the sun without burning instantly (are Celts actually vampires?) and, of course, that I do not have red hair.

However, my skin has required training over the last 10 years since I discovered sunbathing. But this year, daring to apply actual cooking – sorry, sun – oil to my legs in an effort to finally persuade them to change colour, I achieved more of a tan for my work.

Then, instead of hovering around looking glam in the shallows, I like to bathe – actually bathe. I’m not a strong swimmer and even the usually calm Mediterranean waters at Collioure can make me panic quickly, wanting to get my feet down and on to something solid as quickly as possible.

Snorkelling had proved surprisingly easy in the previous two years, but I currently lack the equipment necessary to grip the snorkel properly. So in the event, after seeing another adult with one, I bought a cheap, plastic floatation device (a sort of small board) and then swum merrily back and forth, enough to benefit from the exercise.

But then I had moments of feeling a little like a beached whale: I wanted to move so much more freely and it was as though I were hampered by my fears.

So I did something that I’ve been promising myself I would for over a year: I hired a canoe from Cyril, donned a lifejacket, grabbed a paddle and headed for the sea.

I have never been in a canoe before. Many years ago, on a family holiday, I tried rowing and took to it with ease. I knew I could paddle a canoe – my only worry was actually getting in the thing without making a complete prat of myself or requiring help.

Amazingly, I managed that bit easily enough, and then it was off into the bay – far, far further out than I’d ever been when in the water, with no worries about being out of my depth; confident and comfortable.

You need to be aware that the paddles on the oar are at different angles, but it feels like a completely natural twist of the wrists.

I was able to paddle quite fast when I wanted to or simply putter about with ease.

When I got back to shore (okay, I fell arse first into the water when I got out), The Other Half remarked: “Tres impressive”. Which I took as a compliment. And the experience left me feeling suitably chuffed – and with a real sense of lightness; of being able to move comfortably and well.

Unfortunately, a day later, Cyril told me that they were backing up Bora Bora Beach Club for the year. I’ll have to wait to try it again. So it was back to working on my tan on San Vincent Plage, which has the fabulous Au Casot at the back of the sunlounger section of the beach, a restaurant that serves wonderful fish and seafood. That was the signal to halt picnic lunches and head for a table at lunchtime for the rest of the holiday.

Interestingly, where many of the most obviously touristy eateries in Collioure make a big thing of moules et frites (mussels and chips), Au Casot serves none.

What they do serve, though, is fabulously fresh dishes, cooked simply: I enjoyed the gambas one day (I just love getting my hands messy as I rip the shells off these beauties, and then them in the restaurant’s own aioli), monkfish and dorade. It might not be fashionable, but for ambiance and food combined, Au Casot is perhaps my favourite Collioure eating experience.

Sun and a sole sole

The sun has been out in style again today: after what seems to have been a really long, cold winter, we seem to have barely got ourselves into the spring before something more akin to summer has arrived.

I love, love, love the sun.

When it's like it has been since Saturday, all I want to do is soak it up. Crystal clear skies over Manchester, making me have to don sunglasses to watch Saturday's derby game against the unmentionables, even managed to make dying-seconds defeat less difficult to take.

For Otto and Loki, of course, this is their first experience of the sun. It might only be small, but they love the garden. Otto adores rolling around in what passes for soil in our little plot, while there are moments when his brother simply springs around the place with utterly infectious pleasure.

For me, it's as though the sun soothes and relaxes me.

I spent most of Tuesday in the sun, and then followed it with the simplest food: asparagus, boiled and then dressed in virgin oil and lemon juice, seasoned with Maldon Sea Salt, followed by a lemon sole, brushed with a little olive oil and then grilled, then served with lemon and seasoning. Nothing else – and utterly blissful. It left me feeling sublimely satisfied.

I don't know whether it was because I had particularly good ingredients that the meal was so good. But then again, as far as I know, the ingredients were no better than those that I usually buy.

We're so used to cramming a single plate full of food that perhaps we don't even really taste one or two simple things properly. It's that simplicity thing again – but I'm beginning (yes, I know I'm rather slow at this) to understand that the best way to do this is two or three courses, done this way.

It's also remarkable just how much cultural baggage I find I'm carry with regard food. When we were away, I was talking with The Other Half about fish and how he doesn't appear to like having a whole fish on his plate – even when, like plaice or sole, they're really easy to take off the bone.

It emerged that what he doesn't like is having such a fish whole – when his plate is crammed with loads of other things, that makes dealing with the fish more difficult. It also emerged that I give him far too bigger portions of potatoes – he thinks this is another cultural thing, whereby Woman of House gives Man of House more of everything (and particularly the stodge) because Him Man and Needs More Food for His Hard Work. Okay – he didn't actually make the last bit of analysis. But he's right.

And similarly, I have that cultural baggage of 'meat and two veg' (one of which is potatoes) to contend with. Actually, I don't think I'm doing badly on all food fronts – but it's an interesting indication of how difficult it is to really, at foundation level, alter food habits. And of course, once you recognise such things, it's easier again to move forward.

Food to welcome spring – and bid farewell to winter

A sudden cold, with the overnight addition of a stomach upset, has left me at home today. Nobody likes having colleagues who are running to the loo every five minutes and coughing and sneezing the rest of the time.

In fact, the first day of March has brought lovely weather with it: so welcome after what seems to have been weeks or grey cloud and streaming rain.

I don’t want to wish the year away – I was irritated to see Easter cakes in the chain baker on Broadway Market on Saturday. I wanted to tell them: ‘Stop it! It’s a month until Easter!’ But to be fair, the supermarkets start selling Cabury’s Crème Eggs almost as soon as they’ve cleared the last of the Christmas fare from their shelves.

But that aside, I am ready for spring. We’ve already had the first signs, as with unerring predictability, the year’s first roadworks popped up a week or so ago. And the snowdrops too have been showing their faces.

Right now, there’s blue sky visible and the sun has some real warmth in it.

It’ll be the kittens’ first spring; the first time they’ll have felt the sun on their bodies. They’ve been allowed out into our tiny garden a couple of times now – and get giddy with excitement. Loki has already realised he can climb the fences and the bay tree.

I’m sitting on the sofa with my laptop and Loki, who is busy washing himself. When the sub’s out, you can feel the warmth here.

It was a bit of a foody weekend: The Other Half was off up to Yorkshire for Rugby League again, so eschewing the Easter fondants (small cup cakes with grated ‘chocolate’ nests and a trio of mini eggs on top) I got myself some squid for Saturday evening.

The meal was a doddle. Take a courgette and grate on the coarsest grater you’ve got. Pop in a colander and salt. Leave for around half an hour. Rinse and pat dry with kitchen paper.

Heat some olive oil. Add chopped or dried red chili to taste, plus smashed garlic cloves. Then add the grated courgette and the sliced squid.

It takes no more then five minutes.

In the meantime, cook some pasta – linguine or spaghetti are ideal.

Grate some lemon zest into the squid mixture and serve with the pasta.

Easy.

Indeed, it came out of River Café Easy Two, the first of the River Café books I got and something of a personal food Bible.

Tonight, indeed, I’m adapting a risotto from the book’s predecessor – porcini, sage and orange – to make it a main course rather than a starter. But it’s still the basic flavours from the first River Café ‘Easy” book, which I added to my library last year.

And so it was with some sadness this morning that I read that Rose Gray, the co-founder of River Café, has died after a lengthy battle with cancer.

Given how recently I actually came to the River Café books, it seems perhaps a little odd to say Rose and her co-founder Ruth Rodgers have influenced my own culinary development so much. But they have – not just directly, but indirectly too – specifically via former employee Jamie Oliver, whose cooking was massively important for me in the earliest years of my food rebirth: simple dishes that produced amazingly sexy results.

So thank you, Rose. And Ruth.

Yesterday was a tiome for simple food too – but it could hardly have been more different. The growth of the ‘slow food movement’ is helping to see a number of revivals.

Now, mutton – for so long almost impossible to get – is becoming available. I can’t remember ever having had it before – never mind actually cooking it, so for a first opportunity, I went down as traditional an English route as possible: I boiled it.

I put around 2kgs of shoulder and popped that in a big pot, with water up about ¾ of the way. Then I added a couple of chopped sticks of celery, a chopped carrot, a roughly sliced onion, some rosemary, a few peppercorns and a bay leaf or three.

Bring to the boil, skim , cover and simmer for around two hours. You can probe the meat quite easily to check that it’s properly tender.

When it’s nearly done, make a white roux with plain flour and butter. Then start adding stock from the pan with the meat. When you’ve reached a consistency you like, add some capers that you’ve rinsed and drained. Check the seasoning and adjust according to taste.

Serve with plain boiled potatoes. I did some carrots on the side too, but it was traditionally served just with the meat, potatoes and sauce.

That came from Rick Stein’s Food Heroes, where he raves about having it while sitting opposite Kingsley Amis in The Garrick. Setting aside the question of anyone actually being excited by being near Amis, and you get half of the point. You can imagine Dickens eating this in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street – or Mr Pickwick. It’s utterly traditional food – and it’s good food.

The mutton was lovely - flaky and full of flavour; a little like a slightly gamey lamb. The sauce was a revelation.

And hopefully, that was a fitting culinary farewell to what has been a long winter. I’m ready for the sun.

Sun, sangria and a spot of cooking

If there was one thing that I hadn’t really imagined doing, it was sitting on a beach reading a cookery book. But then again, this was Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking, so you could argue that it was part travelogue anyway.

But there I was, happily looking for the bits that would educate me about the food of Languedoc-Roussillon between visits to the market.

Part of that education came in the section on fish. Always a believer in simplicity anyway, David here expresses the view that the best way to cook fish is under a grill. It struck me that I don’t really do that very often and that, indeed, fish is not my strongest culinary point, even though I love fish.

In the months preceding the holiday, we’d talked of popping down to nearby Port Vendre one morning to buy fish at the fish market, but spotting a fish stall at Collioure’s twice-weekly market rendered that an unnecessary journey.

So as I waited for the day when I would buy fish, I boned up on using it. I planned to get something like a couple of smallish sea bass, make a couple of slashes in the sides and “paint them” (as the divine Mrs D describes it) with some olive oil before whacking them under the grill. Okay, I was also thinking of stuffing a load of thyme into them too.

But then, as we stood waiting at the fish stall early one Wednesday morning, The Other Half suggested I ask for some bream – or dorade as it’s known in France. Sure enough, the stallholder had some in his iced boxes. And sure enough, it looked superb. So I bought one – with the realisation dawning that this was not the sort of stall where a fishmonger is going to scale, gut and prep your fish. Presumably, it’s assumed that anyone buying fish knows what to do with it and how. I was going to have to fillet by myself.

Some months ago, one of my best kitchen knives broke. Yup – a very expensive Zwilling Henckels broke. In a number of places – little knicks coming out of the blade when I sharpened it. I assume there had a been a fault in the manufacturing of it.

However, I’d been wondering what to do about replacing it. And at the same time, I started wondering whether the cottage we’d booked for our holiday would have decent knives for my culinary adventures. Putting two and two together, I descended into the basement at Galleries Lafayette in Perpignan on the Saturday morning after our train journey south.

There, to my absolute astonishment, I’d found knives for a fraction of the price I’d expect to see in England – Zwilling Henckels and Sabatiers for around €35. Thinking about what I needed, I bought a long, thin-bladed Japanese knife for a very good €32. The Other Half wondered whether the prices were a reflection of a much bigger market for good knives in France than in England.

Anyway, our holiday cottage had knives and they were fairly sharp. Or at least, sharp enough for the jobs I set them over our first week. But then came the dorade and “fairly sharp” wasn’t really going to cut any ice with me.

A day on the beach and two sundowners of sangria later, I took the knife out of its box and the fish out of the fridge, before introducing the two. They got on well and, for only the third time in my life, I managed to fillet a fish. Easy, really.

I boiled a couple of potatoes, heated the grill, sliced and lightly salted a selection of tomatoes, and then set a pan on a hob to very gently warm through some olive oil, with lemon juice and smashed garlic.

Mrs D asserts that, when grilling fish, start with the pan close to the heat source until the skin has crisped up and then move it lower. That entailed a little manual work of holding the pan close to the heat, since twiddling around with the one moveable shelf, while cooking, would have been a bit of a fiddle.

The book also says that you know when fish is cooked because it takes on a different colour – a different whiteness, really. And it did. So for once, I used that as a judge.

The potatoes were thickly sliced and then drizzled with the warm oil, which also worked as a dressing for the fish. The tomato salad was about as simple as you can get – but wonderful to taste. And a bottle of white Merlot, so sweet that you could almost taste the sunshine that had ripened the grapes, was the perfect accompaniment.

It wasn’t my only cooking success in Collioure, but it was the best.

Of Printemps and patent pumps

Perhaps it was the mere act of contemplating matters sunny yesterday, but the weather has changed.

No … not the weather: the season (fingers crossed).

Lunchtime yesterday was fine enough to sit out at the café in Russell Square and drink frothy latté.

Today has been better yet. There is warmth in the sun and the light has lost the brittle quality of wintery days.

So it seems perfectly in keeping to have turned to the Mediterranean for culinary inspiration today.

A chicken is already in the oven for a long, slow cook, à la one of the River Café cookery books. The bird is stuffed with garlic, sage and rosemary and is sitting in a tight dish with 200ml of water in the bottom at around 80˚C. After three hours, it’ll have butter rubbed on it and Vermouth added to the dish, before being returned to a hotter oven for a final half hour (or until it browns).

I’m going to serve it with good bread and with zucchini scapece – courgettes, thickly sliced and then salted for half an hour, before being dried and fried in vegetable oil with mint leaves.

The body has already been ready for the change of season for a couple of weeks: I’ve been binging on salads most evenings; ludicrously simple things such as plate of lamb’s lettuce, with a few baby beets and some smoked mackerel. Delicious.

At lunchtime today, I borrowed some more inspiration from River Café, cooked myself some broad (fava) beans from frozen and tossed them over a sliced pear, some goat’s cheese and toasted walnuts, dressed with nothing more than a drizzle of virgin oil.

As snowdrops display their beauty in the planters at the front of the flat, these are the tastes to go with it.

It’s been so pleasant sitting out that, when I finally got around to getting the camera out and taking a picture of the Marc Jacobs patent pink pumps for Irene, I was even able to take advantage of the natural light. They’ll go brilliantly with the dress from Monsoon, that I found on my Thursday shopping jaunt.

I feel soothed and relaxed. Chores are out of the way and I can sit out in the garden for a little longer. The days are drawing out and buds are just beginning to peak through on the bushes and trees that I passed alongside the Regent’s Canal as I wandered to the market this morning.

Looking up, you can see silhouettes of the first blossom against azure skies. The birds have been tweeting away all afternoon, driving the Queen B into a frenzy of chuntering and chirruping to herself.

We’ve had a good winter – a real winter. The cold has exhilarated and cleared the senses.

But now it’s time for spring, and everything seems to be reaching out for it.

Sun, sea and salt

The sun on your skin has to be one of the most sensual experiences ever. Warmth in the air and salt on the sea breeze. Gulls wheel above, flying and shrieking as though out of nothing but joy.

A friend sent me some extracts from Mark Kurkansky’s excellent Salt: a world history this morning, and managed to turn my mind straight away to the south of France; to Languedoc-Roussillon, to the Mediterranean coast, to the vast salt pans visible from plane or train and, most of all, to Collioure.

The little port, nestling below the Pyrénées, has two claims to fame: anchovies and art. The art in question is Fauvism – Matisse thought the light there the most beautiful in the world. The little fish were integral to the village’s economy; salted and dispatched to various parts of the world, valued as the finest anchovies anywhere.

Just reading about it made me long to be back there. The pebbled beaches leave the Mediterranean crystal clear. Venture in and fish will soon be swimming around your legs. Don a snorkel and goggles and float, face down, gazing into a different world; a world where sunlight, refracted through the water, glistens all around.

Keep your eyes open and watch: spot the tiniest of lifeforms shifting around in their shells; creatures scooting out of sight behind rocks as the seabed falls away and weeds sway languorously below. Daurade as big as dinner plate and busy shoals of multi-coloured smaller fish go about their business.

Stay still: let your body stop. And just watch.

Wander along the narrow, winding streets of brightly painted houses: admire the art – there’s plenty of it. Sit at any one of the seafront cafés and watch the world go by. Banish any timepieces.

Lunch on anchovies and olives, or sardines charred on an open grill right next to the beach and stuffed between bread with the fingers. Dine on squid dipped into unctuous aïoli or tuna with ripe tomatoes and fresh bread dipped into virgin oil, squeezed from the groves on the surrounding hills. Drink the sweet, local Banyuls to start, before moving on to a carafe of the house rosé. Perfection in simplicity.

Relax and let the place rub away all the stress and the tensions of modern living. And still the sun; blissfully hot, caressing the skin; the water, lapping the shore, and the blue, blue sky overhead.

The end of February nears. It’s still chilly in London, although milder than for some weeks. Time for winter to end. I need the sun on my back and the salt in my nostrils again.