I’ve never cooked as much as I have this spring and summer. Cooking has been sustenance, pastime, balm and escapism. I’ve shrugged off the reins of my usual Chinese habits and cooked more eclectically: Thai food, Sri Lankan curries, crumpets, quiche. But I think the meal that’s given me most satisfaction was a roast guinea fowl, prepared according to Judy Rodgers’ famed chicken recipe in the Zuni Café Cookbook. I fancied making something simple – forgetting that the recipe is five pages long and meticulous. The bird was pre-salted, sprigged with herbs, roasted in a hot oven and then served in pieces on a complicated, delicious bread salad made with green leaves, pine nuts and currants. On the side were boiled Jersey royals with tarragon mayonnaise and grilled asparagus. Finally, because Chinese thinking suggested something was needed to balance the richness of the other dishes and perk up the colour scheme, I made a salad of sliced pink grapefruit with chopped shallots, chives and olive oil. Roasting a whole bird rather than parts felt like a joyful symbol of the easing of lockdown, and the possibility of cooking for other people once again. fuchsiadunlop.com Pan-roasted duck breast, peas, onions and herbs Stephen Harris Chef, The Sportsman I’d been experimenting with dry-ageing duck, salting the breast, then leaving it in the fridge skin-side up so the skin gets very dry. I went into the garden at the Sportsman and picked white onions, a couple of handfuls of peas, lemon verbena and thyme that still had the flowers on. I pan-roasted the duck, and while it was cooking, sliced the onions and cooked them gently with butter and a tablespoon of water. I podded the peas, chopped the pods and added those to the onion trimmings and a little dried mushroom, and made a stock. When the duck rested, I added the peas to the stock and onions, with a little more butter, and stirred through the herbs and flowers. I put it in a shallow bowl, then sliced the duck on top. When you have fresh produce like that, the key is to cook things very gently: that’s all it needs for the flavours to shine. HO thesportsmanseasalter.co.uk Grilled lobster with herb butter Jane Baxter Chef I’ve been cooking at home a lot. Let me first tell you about my failure. My son and I got interested in reproducing takeaways, because some of the offerings where we are in Devon aren’t great. We made a green curry; burgers; a kebab – and the bread to go with it. Our soup dumplings looked really good, but when I steamed them all the liquid came out. My son still liked them, maybe most of all, so it was all right. We’ve been buying fish and supporting local fishermen, as there were still a few people down here going out. Because my son really loves lobster, one Sunday we grilled one with herb butter and asparagus. Being locked up with a 17-year-old wasn’t ideal, but seeing his face as he ate lobster, that was the best thing in lockdown for me. HO wildartichokes.co.uk Outdoor cooking Rukmini Iyer Food writer Lockdown has left me with an urge to spend as much time out of the house as possible, so I’ve been taking every opportunity to cook outdoors. I load up a tray, lay my chopping board and bowls on a garden table, and slice my way through a mountain of vegetables to barbecue. I’ve also been making flatbread and naan dough outside; and by taking everything out on a neatly organised prep tray I can whisk up a dressing while I turn things on the barbecue. I’ve been trying to buy sustainable British charcoal and using dried garden twigs to smoke food. There’s that nice feeling of going slightly feral by cooking outside over an open fire. Even my dog has developed a taste for lightly barbecued cauliflower. HO The Roasting Tin Around the World (Square Peg) is out now; rukmini-iyer.com Spring’s elderflower and lemon ice-cream Nigel Slater The Observer’s food writer The lettuce had been cut and the potatoes dug. The chard sat in bunches like floral bouquets. The radishes in wooden crates, their leaves tied together with white rubber bands. And then the restaurants closed. The markets too, and with them, the possibility that the vegetables may have been harvested in vain. Worse still, the cycle had begun months ago, long before lockdown. You can’t tell a field of peas to stop growing. A shuttered restaurant is just the visible face of a long chain that includes not only furloughed staff but suppliers, laundries, maintenance workers and drivers. The need to find a home for the food being grown for their tables was urgent. Box schemes were set up where you could order online and food arrived at your door. Beans and spinach found a home, flowers found a vase, farm workers could be paid. The box scheme I joined brought cucumbers and dill, parsley, heads of lettuce and bags of rocket, all delivered by the restaurant for which it had been grown. As I clicked on “vegetable box – buy” I scrolled down to find the restaurant’s kitchen had been busy too. There were ginger cakes and rye loaves, cookie dough and cordials. It was then I saw the ice-cream. The elderflower and lemon ice-cream arrived tucked among the chard, in a waxed cardboard tub. I prized off the lid to find not the creamy white ice I expected but one the colour of apricots. Here was an ice somewhere between ice-cream and sorbet, fruit and flower, as sharp as it was sweet. It had the soothing notes of vanilla and the fizz and froth of sherbet. I tucked in, slowly, a teaspoon at a time. The Fern Verrow vegetable box and Spring ice-cream are available from springrestaurant-shop.co.uk A prawn and peanut salad obsession Ravneet Gill Pastry chef and author All my friends know I am not a salad girl. When I’m working in restaurants, I just eat carbs, pasta and rice. But lockdown has changed me. I’ve been baking every day; it’s sugary and you’re tasting all the time, so I haven’t wanted big heavy meals. I was craving fresh Asian food, so I started making a prawn and peanut salad. I’ve been thinking about this salad, a lot. It’s taken weeks and weeks, and I’ve finally nailed it. Black vinegar is key, and you need good fish sauce, loads of lime juice, a bit of sugar and lovely vegetables. I always use the pre-roasted, salted peanuts because I’m lazy, and for prawns, I go to my fishmonger or Waitrose. The dressing is acidic; it has that balance of sharpness and a bit of sweetness. It’s super fresh, crunchy, and I just feel healthy when I eat it. Now I’m a salad person. MTH Ravneet Gill’s The Pastry Chef’s Guide (Pavilion) is out now Secret pizza from a van Dan Saladino Presenter, BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme This summer I became a hunter-gatherer, my senses highly tuned in the search for food. This didn’t just involve foraging, it also meant going down on hands and knees on the floor of my local Co-op, peering under shelves. I became more of an opportunist. Six weeks into lockdown, a friend of a friend spread an unbelievable rumour on WhatsApp: at 7pm a van with a wood-fired pizza oven would be parked at the bottom of a lane nearby. “Don’t mention this to anyone,” it ended. Was this illegal pizza? If I went out for margherita would I return as a super-spreader? That night the sky was dark but as I rounded a corner into the lane, I saw something magical: a fairy-lit van framed by a rainbow. As I waited, I talked to a furloughed worker from a bookshop and we helped each other with the impossible task; what to choose when you don’t know when you’ll get to do this again? I opted for the prosciutto. By the time I got home, it was 8 o’clock, so the pizza waited as I clapped with my neighbours. Was it the best pizza I’ve ever tasted? No. But it was the one I needed most. Last Harvest by Dan Saladino : A Search for the World’s Most Endangered Foods is published by Jonathan Cape in 2021 Biang biang noodles with spicy cumin lamb sauce Mandy Yin Chef-owner, Sambal Shiok One of my desert island dishes is the spicy cumin lamb hand-pulled noodles from Xi’an Famous Foods in New York. So when Ixta Belfrage, a development chef at Ottolenghi, posted her recipe on Instagram, I decided to recreate it. These noodles are known as “biang biang” in Chinese. It’s phonetic, the words “biang biang” sound like the noodles when they are slapping on the kitchen counter. I used cull yaw, the meat of an older ewe, from Matt Chatfield, who usually supplies leading restaurants. The meat loses the lamby smell and ends up being more beefy. The noodles have this beautiful bouncy, chewy texture and the sauce a deep flavour from the cull yaw with the spice from cumin, and heat from Sichuan peppercorns. The joy of lockdown was having the time to recreate these dishes. Now I have the knowledge that I can make them too. MTH sambalshiok.co.uk Sanchez Cantina Allan Jenkins Editor, OFM It was the octopus tostada. Maybe the empanada or the deep leafy green mole what won it. Late-June Copenhagen felt almost post-covid. Numbers near zero, everything already opened for a month. We were nervous but needing to eat. We had wanted somewhere small. Simple in the best sense. Nothing fancy that would take too long. So Sanchez near the main station in the old red light district, at Istedgade 60. A cantina, not a New Nordic restaurant. We sat at the side bar by an open door, separated from the kitchen by sheets of Perspex. The meal was a sort of Mexican omakase. No choice. A small series of small plates of exquisitely crafted food. Rosio Sanchez was once a development chef at Noma. She knows which combinations work. Brilliant iterations of Mexican classics served with a smile. There were a couple of beers, there may have been a mescal. We watched the cooks work. Perfect plate after perfect plate. Our taste buds danced. All our food senses wide awake. We relaxed and we remembered why we eat in restaurants. Mapo tofu omelette rice box and sweet potato fries from Rice Error Jimi Famurewa Restaurant critic, ES magazine It has been a joyfully erratic summer as far as eating goes; a dance of last-minute barbecues, restaurant DIY kits, and one blustery family picnic that united deli-bought quiche and hot fistfuls of chicken-shop chips. Fittingly, then, there was something wholly unplanned about my most vivid food memory. Feeling a building hunger after a mid-July work meeting, I rode my bike towards Borough Market, weighing lunch options and dismissing all of them. Then I spotted Rice Error: the Bao restaurant group’s lockdown-prompted Taiwanese takeaway and delivery spin-off, operating out of a tucked-away hatch. Minutes later and I was perched in an abandoned courtyard, unwrapping a bamboo box to reveal a rumpled duvet of fluffy omelette, splotched with sriracha and nestled on a lively, umami-forward tumble of Chi Shang rice and mapo-spiced aubergine and tofu. There was a bag of sweet potato fries; double-crisped by a salt-flecked batter and served with a neon purple, unaccountably delicious, pickled plum ketchup. The sky was as grey as the pavement, my only companions a couple of morose, crumb-seeking pigeons. Every bite felt like a holiday. The first watermelon of the year Itamar Srulovich Chef and co-owner, Honey & Co, Honey & Smoke, Honey & Spice We were getting ready to reopen Honey & Smoke after more than 100 days of lockdown – we hung sanitisers and put tape on the floor, briefed and trained the team, we burned sage for a ritual cleanse. The restaurant’s head chef plated the new dish for the team to taste – courgette kibbe with cashew tahini and a summery salad in pale green, dotted with cheeks of apricot. It looked so appealing: normally it would be devoured in seconds by everyone in the area, now we all stood around it, far from each other, not sure what to do, realising that we cannot all taste from the same plate. This was one of many little heartbreaks when we realised what the new normal entailed, like not being able to hug someone you haven’t seen since March, or sit together at staff lunch – small things we must do to stop the pandemic. It is a longstanding tradition in our company that whenever someone opens a watermelon they set a plate for staff and guests. As we all stood around that kibbe, one of the chefs came from downstairs with a platter of beautifully sliced watermelon and we each took a slice and sunk our teeth in – cold, sweet, refreshing, a distillation of so many summer memories, as good as it always was. An old tradition; a new way for all of us to share food. What a weird summer this is. honeyandco.co.uk Joseph Benjamin’s paella Gary Usher Chef-owner, Elite Bistros Joseph Benjamin restaurant in Chester started doing food to reheat at home. The two best things I ate this summer were by them. The first was a paella, which comes in a proper paella pan, for which they charge a little deposit. It has chicken, runner beans, butter beans, and saffron – obviously. The other thing is their beef – they do a brisket you can pick up. They’re known in Chester for their Sunday roast, and they started doing it for people at home while they’ve been closed, and it’s just as great. When lockdown started they were doing other things, like cooking for homeless people in Chester. They’re good guys. HO Dal pakwan Chetna Makan Food writer One Sunday, I woke up with an urge to cook something I’d been craving for days, a much-celebrated Sindhi recipe – dal pakwan. I am lucky to have got this recipe from my mum’s neighbour, who would always send us a tiffin box full of it whenever she made it for her family. Making dal pakwan took me right back to my parents’ dining table. The dal (lentil) used in this dish is chana dal. It’s cooked with the most basic of spices and finished with fragrant ghee tadka (tempering). This is then served with pakwan, which are deep-fried flatbreads but more like crispy pastry. The crispiness of the pakwan with the spices and creaminess of the dal is enhanced with fresh herbs and chutneys – zingy coriander, and sour and sweet tamarind. The dish is finished with crunchy onions and juicy tomatoes. All this together on a plate is heaven. chetnamakan.co.uk Yum Yum Caribbean Claire Ptak Chef, author and owner, Violet Bakery You can smell the smoke from Yum Yum Caribbean in Hackney Downs from my front door. One day, I walked outside, and … “They’re back! Yum Yum is open!” I always get the fried chicken, rice and peas, and coleslaw. The chicken is so tender and crispy, seasoned really well and I’m sure there are a few secret ingredients in there too. It reminds me of being home in the US and having amazing fried chicken. I was worried about Yum Yum because it is an independent business, and knowing what was going on for me, well … When I smelled that smoke, and went by the shop, it made me feel optimistic that businesses are going to reopen and be OK. I’m still really worried, and we don’t know what will happen, but it made me feel proud of people for persevering because it’s hard, it’s really hard. MTH violetcakes.com Bouza Anissa Helou Chef and author I started making bouza, Arabic ice-cream, some 25 years ago when I wrote Lebanese Cuisine. Since then, I have had off and on phases. However, with the lockdown in Sicily, where I am based, I renewed my passion. I had all the ingredients in my pantry: best quality salep, a thickening agent of ground and dried wild orchid tubers from Safranbolu in Turkey, mastic from Chios, and rose and orange blossom water from Lebanon. I was able to buy unpasteurised milk from a woman in a nearby village who had 200 cows grazing in the mountains. I also had Kashmiri saffron. I spent days whisking salep into simmering milk to give it the incredible chewy and stretchy texture that is so typical of bouza to make the base for either the pure milk version flavoured with rose water and mastic, or the Iranian bastani flavoured with ground saffron infused in rose water. I had ice-cream in the morning, in the afternoon and before going to bed. Truly the best thing I had this summer! The Seaside Boarding House’s fish soup Jeremy Lee Chef-proprietor, Quo Vadis I sat on the terrace of the Seaside Boarding House – set on a cliff at a point where Chesil Beach becomes the Jurassic Coast – tucking into a tureen of fish soup rich with crab and any fish landed fresh that day. Made fragrant with tomatoes, saffron and herbs, it was accompanied by a feisty rouille so good you could drink the whole bowl while munching on thin slices of bread cooked crisp with olive oil. Alastair Little, an old pal of Mary Lou, who runs the Boarding House, gave the recipe to her after their years in Soho when Mary Lou ran the Groucho, and Alastair ran his eponymous restaurant on Frith Street.