A Year From Oak Cottage

I have cooked under pressure for most of my adult life. Tickets printing, pans clattering, someone asking where the garnish has gone. I was good at it, and I loved parts of it, but somewhere along the way I stopped tasting the day properly.

So I have come to Oak Cottage for a year. There is a small kitchen, a garden that needs work, a compost heap with opinions and enough weather to make every plan provisional. I want to grow as much as I can, cook with what is ready, waste less and remember why I fell in love with food in the first place.

What this year is about

• Cooking with the seasons rather than against them.
• Growing herbs, vegetables and soft fruit in a cottage garden.
• Using the whole ingredient when I can.
• Writing recipes that real people can cook after a long day.
• Letting the kitchen be warm, useful and a little imperfect.

The first recipes are already here: bread for soup, tomato soup for the garden glut, a lemon cake for spring, scones for breakfast and a beef stew for weather that refuses to behave.

It feels strange to start again in my forties. It also feels right. I will take both.