The vegetarian option used to be a risotto you could spot from the doorway; now it is often the best thing on the menu.

I used to run dinners like a launch schedule and hit every mark, alone in the kitchen while my friends ate next door.

Two plates of the same carrots, a week apart: one was a polite obligation and the other was the reason we sat down.

I used to run workshops with a whiteboard split into clean and dirty columns, and I have been unpicking it ever since.

I once ate a soup I had spent forty minutes making in six minutes flat, and it started a long, slightly silly experiment.

I stopped writing shopping lists and started buying whatever looked alive, and my cooking got simpler almost immediately.