Quick fix — Snacks

Chocolate Fruit and Nut Rounds – the perfect handmade gift for your loved one: Using tempered chocolate (see How To), make 5cm discs of melted chocolate on baking parchment. As the chocolate is setting, push toasted pistachios, yellow raisins and cranberries into the pools of chocolate. Allow to set and serve with coffee after supper.

Purple sprouting broccoli, or ‘PSB’ as we call it in the kitchen, is a brassica and close cousin of the tighter headed and more common calabrese or green broccoli. Don’t worry too much about the lower leaves that come with it, it’s the tender purple heads that hold the sweet flavour. Be careful not to overcook it – best steamed and checked for done-ness with a round-ended knife to see if it slips easily through. Simple melted butter or a more adventurous hollandaise sauce are both a very good friend to PSB.

Preheat the oven to 110ºC/225ºF. Wash and halve a punnet or two of cherry tomatoes and lay them on a baking parchment-lined baking sheet, cut side up. Season each with sea salt, one or two thyme leaves and drizzle with light olive oil. Cook for about 2 hours, depending on size. Try one: they should have shrunk to half the size and taste intense. Place into sterilised jars and cover with sunflower oil. Keep in the fridge and eat within one month

Wafer thin slices of Chegworth Valley apples and celeriac make a great addition to a salad of bitter leaves and toasted walnuts, dressed with De Calabria Extra Virgin Olive Oil, lemon juice and a little Borage Flower Honey from the London Honey Company.