Thyme

This butter is delicious with eggs, seared fish, steaks, pork chops, chicken, or to spread on savory muffins or scones. When making it, it is important that the butter is still a little firm, but not so cold that it won’t whip in the mixer. Take the butter out of the refrigerator a half hour to an hour before making the compound. For best results, don’t freeze this butter.

The ideal here would be the pale, plump zucchini varieties you find in Middle Eastern markets. I visit one near London’s Edgware Road that even has them ready prepared, their seeds removed for stuffing, and packed into little plastic crates. If these torpedo-shaped squashes escape me, and they often do, then I use the ubiquitous type, halve them lengthwise and scatter the filling loosely over the top rather than making a clumsy attempt to stuff them. The classic zucchini stuffings of the Middle East vary from family to family but usually include cooked rice or ground lamb, or occasionally walnuts, pine nuts, or hazelnuts, stirred into softened onion and then lightly seasoned with allspice, tomato paste, and parsley. The effect is a moist filling of elegance and pleasing predictability. I sometimes want something more unusual. A stuffing that intrigues as much as it pleases.

A tomato’s flavor intensifies in the heat of the oven. All its sweet-sharpness comes to the fore. I eat these warm, sprinkled with a little herb vinegar, sometimes sandwiched inside a crisp and chewy baguette.

A warm scone is an object of extraordinary comfort, but even more so when it has potato in it. The farl, a slim scone of flour, butter, and mashed potato, is rarely seen nowadays and somehow all the more of a treat when it is. I have taken the idea and run with it, mashing steamed pumpkin into the hand-worked crumbs of flour and butter to make a bread that glows orange when you break it. Soft, warm, and floury, this is more than welcome for a Sunday breakfast in winter or a tea round the kitchen table. Cooked initially in a frying pan and then finished in the oven, I love this with grilled Orkney bacon and slices of Cheddar sharp enough to make my lips smart—a fine contrast for the sweet, floury “scone” and its squishy center.

Good with lamb.

If you crush a cooked potato with the back of a spoon or fork, its broken edges are receptive to any dressing you wish to drizzle over it. Cream and garlic is a rather sumptuous treatment for a virginal new potato, but it works very well.

Goat cheese—sharp, chalky, a little salty—makes a sound addition to the blandness of a potato cake. The fun is coming across a lump of melting, edgy cheese in among the quietness of the potato. This is what I eat while picking eagle style at the carcass of a roast chicken or wallowing in the luxury of some slices of smoked salmon. It also goes very well with a humble smoked mackerel.

It’s mid-June and I have returned home with four lamb steaks. It’s the sort of thing I buy when my mind is elsewhere. I think I was after a “nothing-special” lunch of ease and straightforwardness, yet once the steaks and their fine frame of white fat had been brushed with olive oil and the leaves and flowers of thyme, and were sizzling on the blackened garden grill, I realized I had an extraordinary treat on my hands. Instead of a mound of petits pois at the lamb’s side, I blitzed the peas to a smooth purée with mint and melted butter.

At the top of the garden, past the sunny stone terrace, the little beds of vegetables and the unruly shrubs, is a thicket, less than ten feet (three meters) deep but just enough to give the whole garden an unkempt, relaxed feel. Here lie the compost bins with their lids of rotting carpet, green plastic bags of decaying leaf mold, and four small trees of damson, hazel, mirabelle, and a King James mulberry—the latter being a “guardian” tree planted in the northernmost corner to protect the garden from the north wind. In between grow drifts of snowdrops, wild garlic sent by a friend from Cornwall, and fraises de bois, with which this garden is littered, and whose flowers twinkle like tiny stars in spring. The work in this part of the garden is mostly done in winter, if only because the leaflessness of the trees makes it possible to see what you are doing. It is always dark and cold here, and damp, too. I come in from turning the compost or cutting hazel twigs with my feet like ice, my fingers numb. Invariably it’s a Saturday, when I have been early to The Ginger Pig for my sausages. I leave them to bake with parsnips and stock. A slow bowl of food, which often sits patiently until I come in, too chilled to the bone to do anything but eat.

Eventually, possibly toward the end of your meal, you reach the point where the salty, herbal juices from the meat mingle with the sweet creaminess of those from the parsnips, a moment of intense pleasure. While winter was in its death throes, and the first white narcissi were starting to peak through the damp earth, I produced this for Sunday lunch with a leg of lamb spiked with tough old rosemary twigs. We passed round a bowl of winter chicory and watercress for everyone to take handfuls with which to clean the mixture of juices from their plates.