Things feel particularly odd for us now too, as we find ourselves confined to the UK for the foreseeable future, while we wait for our visa applications to be processed. We’re not allowed to travel while they’re being dealt to. For people who are privileged to travel as much as we do, that feels a bit odd. A bit like being grounded, as Phil said on our way home from St Pancras last night.

And yet we have no reason to complain, because there is much to look forward to, and more than anything, there is so much to be grateful for. We have had the most extraordinary Summer. The best ever. It has been long. It has been hot. It has been busy. It has been endlessly fun. We have made the most of every moment, as the wall planner that hangs on the wall of our kitchen confirms. In truth, I am quite exhausted and my body is run down. I am ready for a quieter time.

We have eaten well this Summer. Good food has been bountiful, and lots of it has been enjoyed in the company of friends and family and in beautiful places. We are the lucky ones. Here’s my little record of the thirteen best things I’ve eaten this Summer.

One - Le Grand Aioli

It wasn’t exactly the most summery of evenings - grey, cold, a little drizzly; some might say a typical London Summer’s evening. Ironically, it would be one of the very few bad evenings there were, the night we decided to go to the Garden Museum in Lambeth for Alex Jackson’s Le Grand Aioli. My booking for an al fresco table turned into a booking for one indoors.

I adore Le Grand Aioli. I first cooked it a few years ago after reading a recipe in one of Claudia Roden’s cookbooks. Last year we ate it in Marseille. Alex Jackson’s was the best iteration I’ve had - beautifully poached salt cod, perfect new potatoes, tender florets of cauliflower, crisp radishes, beefy tomatoes, snappy green beans, jammy soft boiled eggs and lashings of salty aioli.

Two - Spiced chicken, coriander and peanut salad with herby yoghurt sauce

I wrote about this salad, which I took in a large plastic tub to the cricket at Lord’s. Equally as good as Peter Gordon’s salad is the sensation of popping open a bottle of champers at the cricket.

As it so happens, we ate this salad while it was pissing down with rain too.

Three - Lamb shanks with mashed potatoes, cauliflower gratin and green beans

It’s fair to say that in early June I was convinced we were in for an absolute shitter of a Summer. I mean, who eats lamb shanks in the Summertime? Thankfully, the weather improved markedly. Anyway, we went to my aunty and uncle’s place for lunch on an overcast Sunday and ate comforting plates of food that didn’t feel especially right for the season, but that were perfect for our sore heads and tired souls (as well as plenty of good food this Summer there has been no shortage of plonk).

Four - Cherry clafoutis with jersey cream

We shared the clafoutis straight from the pan it was cooked in with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law al fresco at Quality Wines. By this point it was hot, and we were happy.

That clafoutis was something else. My dish of the Summer.

Five - Cold roast pork with anchioade and marinated green beans

We’ve been lucky to have lots of family in town this Summer. We went to Cafe Deco in Bloomsbury with my brother-in-law and his partner who were visiting from New York. It was one of the hottest days of the Summer and most of us were sweaty messes sitting inside the un-air conditioned restaurant. But boy the food was a salve.

As well as that most perfect roast pork, I had a bowl of cucumber and melon gazpacho and a little bowl of perfect English cherries that came served on ice. I ate the cubes of ice.

Six - 3x dinners at Captain George

It is perhaps cheating to claim three dinners as one favourite meal, but you just have to trust me when I say that Captain George in Sifnos is worthy of that kind of treatment. Fried anchovies, marinated anchovies, grilled octopus, grilled whole sea bream, fried squid, fried courgettes, courgette balls, grilled halloumi, boiled greens, homemade chips, I think you get it…

Seven - Chicken Messina

My favourite recipe of the Summer has been Diana Henry’s Chicken Messina, which I have cooked multiple times and written about too. I’m convinced it’s the kind of dish I can cook year round, which I am sure I’ll do once I get sick of Wintery soup and stew and slow cooked braises. This has been a go-to when feeding a crowd, which I’ve done a lot of this Summer.

Eight - Scotti’s BLOTs

The discovery of the Summer was adding a little raw onion to my BLT at Scotti’s. Lynne calls it a BLOT, Al calls it a BOLT.

Scotti’s is currently shut for staff Summer holidays, and truly, I am a bit lost without it. Its reopening is one of the things I am most looking forward to.

Nine - Raspberry sorbet and poached nectarines

Eaten at 40 Maltby Street late one Saturday afternoon. Extraordinary, truly extraordinary. Everything else we ate was delicious too, in a great surprise to nobody, because it’s 40 Maltby Street. Special mention of the goat’s curd and girolle toast.

Ten - Hamburger and Caprese salad

There was no shortage of fishy things to eat at the Bagni that we frequented in Moneglia, and I of course ate plenty of the stuff. But it was the homemade hamburger for me. The kind I could imagine a Nonna whipping up a bunch of for her hungry people; the kind that came with a big wadge of perfectly juicy tomato and a heavy-handed lick of mayonnaise. We each had a hamburger and shared a plate of Caprese salad, which was one of our better decisions of the Summer.

Eleven - Melon ice blocks

The Bagni served these most incredible little rockmelon ice blocks that came in small white paper bags with a little stamp on the front. The ice block looked homemade and genuinely tasted like fruit, rather than a whole bunch of processed sugar. I ate so many of the things. Sometimes I ate two in a day. Life is for living.

Twelve - Phil’s fruit salad

We became a bit obssessed with the fruit salad at Bagni Letizia when we visited Moneglia last Summer. We were lucky to have it there again this Summer, complete with a scoop of vanilla ice cream drizzled with chocolate sauce that goes cracky as it sets. But it was Phil’s homemade fruit salad that was the pick of the bunch. Balls of melon, fresh peach, blueberries, strawberries and Kiwifruit. I am thrilled that he bought a melon baller in Amsterdam this weekend just been so that fruit salad making (with obligatory melon balls) can become a permanent feature of our lives.

Thirteen - Fish lunch

One of our (few) disappointments of the Summer was our visit to Sestri Levante coinciding with the biggest tropical storm of the Ligurian Summer - something like 40,000 lightning strikes in 24 hours. Though one can hardly complain about being in Liguria on holiday. Anyway, since we couldn’t go to the beach, we went out for lunch. I had a whole grilled sea bass, which an earnest young waiter filleted for me after showing me it whole. It came served with thin potatoes cooked with fresh tomato, dainty little olives and pine nuts. The fish was fresh and perfectly cooked, and is some of the best I have eaten on this side of the world. My second favourite plate of food of the Summer.

What a happy time. Godspeed to all who will soon embark on Euro Winter.

If you have Puspa’s chicken curry with white bread toast, you will undoubtedly end up with extra white bread to hand. The best thing to do with it is to have a New Zealand style sausage sizzle. Spread pieces of bread with butter, top each slice of bread with a slightly burnt sausage (use good quality ones) and some caramelised onions, and squeeze over tomato sauce and mustard, preferably Al Brown’s habanero mustard if you’re lucky enough to have a bottle all the way from New Zealand in your fridge.

If you carefully manage your white bread consumption, you’ll be left with four pieces that you can use to make fish sandwiches. I’m going to do this tomorrow night. I’ll spread toasted white bread with tartare sauce and then fill the sandwich with a piece of fried breaded cod, cos leaves, thinly sliced cucumber, thinly sliced red onion and gherkins. I might finish everything with a little splash of hot sauce.

The only people swimming today are us and boys under the age of ten who are beside themselves with excitement at the washing machine waves. Good for boogie boarding.

They have literally had to rebuild the Bagni. They've put all of the furniture back out, but in the process, found a new configuration for it all. They've thrown large rocks into the ocean and swept new sandy beaches with rakes.

We had anchovies three ways for lunch. And half a litre of white wine and little melon and lemon flavoured ice blocks that come in stamped white paper bags. Soon we'll go and have aperitivo and a last swim, though I might get up early and swim in the morning. This will be our last time swimming until 2027, what with a looming English Winter and no passports for at least eight weeks as we await our new visas. I am already talking about the next seaside holiday. Phil says to stop it and reminds me to just enjoy this one.

==

Last night Phil made fruit salad. Fruit salad is as much seaside food for us as ice blocks and fishy things. His had small balls of rock melon, wedges of melon, halved strawberries, blueberries and thin rounds of Kiwifruit. It was perfect.

We ate the leftovers this morning for breakfast with pots of thick yoghurt topped with chunks of apricot that I bought from the grumpy grocer. We had a slice of cipolle focaccia and a hard boiled egg each too.

==

This morning there was an elderly man choosing grapes from the produce stands outside the grumpy grocer’s shop. Each bunch of grapes was carefully placed in a small rectangle box.

Last year when I went to buy a lettuce, I took the head of lettuce out of the individual plastic punnet it was sitting in and went to put it into a plastic bag. The grumpy grocer growled at me. So now I am wise enough to know that the old man choosing grapes shouldn't be taking bunches from different boxes and shoving them into a plastic bag. He certainly shouldn't be breaking smaller bunches from the larger bunches.

The grumpy grocer has a real go at him. He has a real go back. I just laugh. I'm the preferred customer today. For once.

==

I am sad we didn't get to enjoy Sestri Levante to its full potential. We had a lovely time, but boy I'd have liked to swim and sunbathe there. We had good food though, because what else do you do when it's pouring with rain?

For lunch I had a grilled small sea bass that was presented to me whole before the earnest young waiter who wore a tight black waistcoat, a baggy and unironed white shirt and clumsily set bow tie, whisked it away to fillet it. The fish came served with thinly sliced potatoes cooked with tomato, little black olives and pine nuts. It was the second best fish I have eaten in Europe, after the sea bream I had at Captain George's in Sifnos last month. It was the best thing I have eaten this holiday.

Phil insisted that we have dessert because it was raining. We had the Pina Colada dessert, which was the most kitsch thing ever. A little round of chocolate cake sat on top of thin slices of pineapple, and was topped with ice cream and a thick coconut cream. The whole thing was showered with dessicated coconut and topped with a glacé cherry. Just so fun. I pity anyone who doesn't smile at the sight of it.

==

The pull of Moneglia is strong for me. It feels like our Summer holiday place now. We know where to go. We recognise faces and they recognise ours. Some people know us by name. It feels good here. Fun, easy. But there's more of the continent to explore and we will. We've vowed (even though we aren't talking about next holidays) to go somewhere new next year. But we've vowed too that we will absolutely be back.

There are generations of families that holiday here. You see many grandparents with their grandchildren. I said to Phil as we walked to the train station on Thursday morning, “those kids don't know how lucky they are to have grandparents who have a place here.” I believe that to be true, but I believe it to be true that we are lucky to have this place and to know it too. It is special. And maybe one day I'll be one of the Nonnas who has their little people come to stay, because I will always be happiest by the seaside. The Italian seaside - there's nothing like it. Viva Moneglia.

The dish is trofie al pesto alla Genovese, a Genovese dish of trofie, which are small pieces of pasta shaped like little worms, tossed with pesto, and sometimes small pieces of potato and green beans. It's a dish I've only ever eaten on the Ligurian coast, and a dish I like a lot.

When we were in Sestri Levante yesterday, I went out in search of a bottle of cold white wine to drink in our hotel room, principally because the guy running the hotel bar couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery, as they say. Wine took far too long to arrive. Anyway, it was pouring when I went out, and thundering and lightning, which made the search for cold white wine desperate in both senses of the word. I tried a supermarket, no luck. Tried a greengrocer, no luck. Stumbled into a deli selling beautiful cheeses and salami, again no luck. Finally I bought a bottle of red wine at a Carrefour Express and huffily told the poor young guy behind the counter that he should put some white wine in the fridge. At least he laughed, good sport. If I'm ever the Mayor……

Anyway, after buying red wine and a bag of corn chips, I decided to go back to the deli and buy some finocchiona to nibble on. While a kind woman sliced my salami for me, I noticed a shelf of homemade pestos and other provisions, and so decided I'd buy a jar of pesto to take back to Moneglia. As I traipsed my jandaled feet through puddles back to the hotel, I remembered the fresh trofie in the fridge at the grocer across the road from our Airbnb and decided that was Friday's dinner sorted.

When we arrived back in Moneglia on Friday morning I popped into the alimentari for trofie, green beans and two potatoes. He's warming up, but on the whole, the grocer is a bit of a grump. The kind of guy who would probably tell you people are annoying. Anyway, I like him because he has excellent taste in music, he wears cool Adidas shorts and trainers, his shop is beautifully presented (like a proper old grocery store with things lined up on shelves and wrapped sweets in glass jars), and his produce is top quality. I could sense he thought it was weird I was buying everything for the local pasta dish, except for pesto. Then he saw it start raining and thundering again and said what I presume was “fucks sake” in Italian.

To make the pasta, I peeled and small diced two potatoes, and topped and tailed a big handful of green beans, which I chopped into bite sized pieces. I cooked the potatoes in boiling salted water, and added the beans as the potatoes came close to being cooked. I drained the two and left them to sit while I cooked the trofie in salted boiling water for four minutes. I drained the trofie, added it back to the pan with the contents of the jar of pesto, the potatoes and beans, and a decent glug of pasta water. I seasoned everything with salt and then spooned it all into bowls, which I showered with a few basil leaves and a little swoosh of olive oil.

I found it all pretty straightforward cooking, and was happy with my work. I would perhaps make the pasta a little wetter in the future; in hindsight the pot I used might've been too small, but that's holiday cooking and Airbnb kitchens for you.

We ate the trofie with a leafy salad at the indoor dining table tonight, with the French doors thrown open, so we could still hear the sea and hubbub of people on the streets, but avoid the rain that is still threatening. As I ate, I wondered what the grumpy grocer will be eating for dinner. I reckon he'll have used a tub of pesto, so as to be able to regale his family with stories about his stupid/annoying customer who bought everything for trofie al pesto alla Genovese except the pesto, for fucks sake.

It was the kind of burger you can imagine a Nonna whipping up lots of for her large family. Basic patties but very good bread and a little lick of strongly flavoured cheese, lots of mayonnaise, lettuce and thick slices of beautifully juicy tomato. Simple, good stuff.

We had our burgers with a plate of Caprese salad. The tomatoes were impeccable.

Then we had a little espresso, went for three more swims, had a rock melon ice block, another swim, a glass of wine on the balcony overlooking the choppy sea, and a final swim of the day. 8 swims all up.

(Writing this from the platform at Sestri Levante, where it is bucketing with rain and our train to lunch has been cancelled. Viva Italia!)

Last night we got home late after a long day at the beach. While Phil de-sanded himself and the towels and the terrace, I made a garlicky tomato sauce using some of the fresh tomatoes that were looking a bit had it, and a tin of Mutti whole tomatoes. I cooked it in a rickety old pan that I liked the look of, but that was actually a bit of a faff to work with because of its lack of handle/s. Though I liked thinking about what our Airbnb host Fernanda would've cooked in it over the years.

Once the de-sanding was complete, we drank gin and tonics and ate a plate of sliced melon with prosciutto crudo on the terrace. The melon was one of the special little green melons with a red wax seal that Phil adores and had been desperate to buy. The papery thin prosciutto almost melted under the pads of our sweaty fingers.

Phil was left on the terrace drinking cheap Ligurian white wine while I finished dinner. I sloshed some more water from the tomato tin into the tomato sauce, and warmed that up, while I brought a pan of salted water to the boil. I made a little salad of lettuce, radicchio, red onion and cucumber, and dressed it with nothing more than a big spritz of lemon juice. I cooked the last of a box of spaghettini in the boiling water for just a few minutes and tossed that through the tomato sauce to cook a few minutes more. I pan fried us each a steak of fresh tuna, seasoned with a little salt, until it was just cooked. I spooned the pasta into bowls, topped each mound of pasta with a piece of tuna, and finished everything with black pepper and a little shower of small, fresh basil leaves. It was a bloody good plate of food.

I will confess that in amongst all of the doing, there was a frying pan of hot olive oil knocked off the stovetop and all over the kitchen floor. And so there was swearing and berating myself for not choosing a dinner that was even simpler than it already was; or at the very least one that involved significantly fewer dishes and pans on the hob. But between stirring pots and mopping floors we got there.

Dessert was simple. A creme caramel flavoured budino from the grocery shop across the road. No effort required and no prospect of kitchen disaster. Then we finished our drinks and went and watched a disco covers band sing and dance in front of a crowd of hundreds of Italian holidaymakers. So many kids and elderly people (and middle aged people, too) singing and dancing. It was a joy, even if they didn't sing enough Italian disco classics for Phil (I'm not sure how he knows them?!) We love this town.

The panino are filled with thinly sliced turkey, tuna sauce and salad. Like the chicken Messina I have taken to making over the Summer. Delicious.

We spot the regulars we came to know well last year. There's the old woman who always has gelato for lunch. Today she has four different flavoured scoops in a bowl shaped like a pineapple. And there is the old couple who always had a hot dog and shared a bottle of Peroni for lunch.

The Mayor and Mayoress are there too. They aren't really the Mayor and Mayoress, I just call them that because of the prime front row seats they occupy, and his habit of reading the paper each day. They are the colour of roasted walnuts.

The Mayor looks no different. The Mayoress has a blonde ponytail this time, rather than the severe silver bob she had last year. She also seems much slimmer, not that I really like commenting on people's body shapes. I wonder if she's done Ozempic, maybe she's been unwell or she's just lost weight. Anyway, it's good to see them. They finish their lunch with a shot of something strong.

I will always love Bagni Letizia. As our Airbnb host said when he told us to go, “It's a guarantee,” (except when it's so popular you can't get a sun lounger until mid-September).

There were beautiful marinated white anchovies. Four butterflied anchovies topped with some sort of stuffing and then breadcrumbed and fried. And lightly battered anchovies that sat in a saor-like marinade of vinegary onions and raisins. Three slices of tomato and a handful of lettuce leaves for health.

2.5 days in Moneglia and I have already chalked up 18 swims. Swims is a stretch. Dad asked me what my favourite stroke is when I messaged him yesterday's tally*. My reply was Floating.

18 swims surely makes me an anchovy at this point.

*Dad keeps a tally of his daily steps, which is why I have taken to messaging him my daily swim count. We both keep a note of the recipes we cook and the dinners we eat too.

Phil loves rock melon and prosciutto. He ate it regularly when we were here last year.

This morning when I bought espresso at the Bagni I saw little paper wrapped ice blocks in the freezer. Rock melon flavoured. I bought one, ate it, and said, “Geoff [my Dad] would say that this is a little taste sensation.” In essence it was blitzed up melon, frozen solid. It tasted like fruit.

After lunch we each had a melon ice block. My second of the day. When in Rome. I asked Phil to hold mine while I whipped off my beach dress. Then I walked straight into the ocean to finish my ice block in the water. I shoved the wooden stick down my togs, and it stayed there for the duration of my 40 minute swim. As I said, when in Rome.

There is an elderly man sitting on a deck chair, rather than a sun lounger, in front of us. He wears a little cream coloured bucket hat and short shorts that he pulls up high over his belly button. I would hazard a guess that he is in his 90s. He comes early in the morning, and then disappears for a while.

Yesterday he opened his backpack and took out a single plastic wrapped chocolate filled croissant. The sort you buy in bulk bags in the supermarkets here. He opened the little plastic packet with his teeth, removed the croissant, broke it into two, gave one half to his partner or companion (I can't be sure which), ate the other half, and then went for a swim.

That is a 90 year old’s life to aspire to.

Happy birthday to Phil's dear grandmother Rylvia, who is 95 and enjoying lunch and a bottle of 0% white wine at the pub with her family. Also a 90 year old’s life to aspire to.

As I was nibbling on peanuts in the hot sun - it’s 27 degrees right now - I suddenly thought to myself that I have spent so much time outside this Summer. And that I have had so many good meals and drinks al fresco. What a treat. Here are some of my favourites. All of them in London.

==

Most Wednesdays we go to the pub for a drink, sometimes two, sometimes three, and then we come home for a burger. I make simple cheeseburgers with lots of mayonnaise, smoked sriracha (better than mustard and ketchup) and pickles. On warmer nights I have taken to wrapping the burgers in tin foil and then we eat them on the roof. Sometimes we have a bowl of McCain’s oven chips. Simple but perfect. I love this weekly ritual.

==

The best thing about being a regular at Scotti’s is that you can always get a seat at one of the outdoor tables because you know the house policy is that people must share tables. If people were to say no to you sharing their table, you could just go and tell Lynne and she’d have words. I love having breakfast in the sun at Scotti’s. My favourite in the Summer is a BLT, which I have taken to having with a bit of onion at Lynne’s suggestion. Lynne calls it a BLOT, Al calls it a BOLT. I have also started having my BOLT/BLOT in a crusty bread roll rather than between two slices of toasted brown bread, which is what I usually have.

Friday just been I felt like a change, so I had one fried egg on one piece of buttered brown toast with a sausage on the side. It was such a nice plate of food.

==

We have been eating lots of little chimichurri marinated bavette steaks that are part of the Waitrose Summer range. You can buy three packs for £12, so I always have some in the freezer. Each pack has four little steaks, which is enough for two of us. Recently we had our steaks with a delicious salad I just made up of chickpeas, cherry tomatoes, red pepper, red onion, lots of Italian parsley, fresh chilli and lemon juice. The other night we ate late so we ate on the couch while watching Netflix with the windows wide open. I chopped the steaks into slices and we had them on top of a big leafy salad with a green goddess dressing.

==

On Saturday we went to Kew Gardens to see the gardens but primarily the Henry Moore sculptures. I packed a picnic: M & S Japanese milk buns filled with ham off the bone, cheese, piccalilli, lettuce and cucumber; a box of M & S dinky sausages and thick wedges of watermelon. We ate by a lily pond.

After Kew we went to the tennis club where I am a social member for drinks. We were only going for one or two but we finally left at 10pm. Eventually Phil and our friend B went and got us some pepperoni pizzas from a shop round the corner. They were basic but boy they were good. They came with little pots of ranch dressing for dipping the crusts into.

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On Friday I ended up outside The Barley Mow in Marylebone, which is probably more of a Winter pub, but actually a great Summer pub because you can sit at picnic tables and watch the world go by. I read my new book, Heart the Lover by Lily King, which I had picked up at Daunt, drank a glass of soda water with a wedge of lime (so “refreshing”, as my nephew O would say), and listened to the two women next to talk about shaving armpits lol.

==

Earlier in the month I made chicken schnitzels, which we had with heaps of cherry tomatoes that I tossed with tamari and dill. Kind of weird, but it worked. We ate on the roof at the little table for two that looks over St Paul’s, rather than the bigger table.

==

Not a meal, but after having a really delicious dinner inside Andrew Edmunds, we finished our glasses of wine on the street. I loved that.

For dinner I had chicken Caesar salad for my entreé (so good), cecina with roast tomatoes, Swiss chard, saffron courgettes and goat’s curd (I adored it), and a really delicious almond and polenta cake with a poached peach and mascarpone, which made me think of Mum, because she loves peach desserts in the Summer.

==

One night instead of making cheeseburgers I made chicken tikka burgers. I marinated chicken thighs in Patak’s chicken tikka paste, before grilling them. I spread burger buns with homemade raita, and filled them with the chicken, red onion, lettuce and some Geeta’s mango chutney. They were a hot mess.

==

Yesterday evening I roasted us a bone in chicken thigh and chicken drumstick each - perfectly crispy skin - and we had them with little roast potatoes and courgettes that I braised with lots of garlic and lemon zest. It was a dinner inspired by Anna Tobias, who is the Head Chef at Café Deco, which is one of my favourite places to eat here. We ate on the roof and it was a bit breezy but breeze is nice at the moment.

We both commented on how delicious the food was but that we were actually still a bit full from the al fresco lunch we’d had at Diwana Bhel Poori. An Indian buffet where there are so many salads and things to choose from will do that to you.

==

After the buffet we walked to Regent’s Park, where we sat in deck chairs and listened to some bands at the bandstand. I walked to the newsagent near Baker Street Station and bought us cold drinks and the FT Weekend. I know it sounds a bit wanky, but it was so nice reading the paper in the park and the FT is such a well-written newspaper. We are firmly cemented in British culture now.

==

Better go make tonight’s dinner. We’ll eat on the roof.

O and A are both good little eaters. Good little eaters because they will eat basically anything. Their favourite foods seem to be gherkins and pickled onions. There was one night where I cooked them dinner after a splish splash underneath the hose on our roof - chicken nuggets, potato smiley faces, triangles of pita bread with hummus, a big platter of sticks of cucumber and slices of capsicum and carrot sticks and little radishes and cherry tomatoes and hard boiled eggs. They ate a whole jar of gherkins and pickled onions between them. Gherkin and pickled onion bribes became the way we convinced them to eat the other stuff. That, and Phil making hard boiled egg eating a competition. Every one wants to keep up with Phil’s capacity to eat hard boiled eggs.

On their last night in London we had sausages, garlic breads and a big salad (with gherkins) on the roof. A BBQ of sorts. “That’s pretty cool bread,” A said, when I put the garlic breads in front of him. After a little munch the boys were back to playing with the hose, and squirting one another in the face with it, or in the case of O, watching the planes fly past (he knew which ones were Cathay Pacific). As much as they are good eaters, they are also boys. Food isn’t as exciting as throwing sticks at pigeons or stubbing toes. And so, by the time they went to go home to pack their bags to head to Greece, they were hungry again.

I decided to make them ‘party bags’.

I put the leftover cherry tomatoes and cucumber slices and radishes into an IKEA ziplock bag each. And wrapped up a sausage each in tin foil, just like Mum used to do for us for school lunches when we were kids, which for some reason used to embarrass me no end.

I have never seen two people so excited about party bags full of vegetables and tin foil wrapped sausages rather than sweets and stupid plastic toys.

A and O both came into the kitchen and asked me what else they could add to their party bags. So they got more vegetables and a gherkin each and the last little pieces of asparagus. Phil came into the kitchen and found the bag of sweets and gave them a couple each. I think he thought that might make him the favourite, but I’m not sure it did. Though let’s be honest, Uncle Fool is the favourite because Uncle Fool reads stories and builds trains with wooden blocks and makes huts.

When you live on the other side of the world there’s nothing greater than having your family come to visit, especially when you get to perform Aunty and Uncle duties. We hope they’ll be back soon and still think party bags are just as cool.

==

We stayed in a small house, that I am almost certain would’ve once been a boat house, right on the beach at Kastro. The place had a rooftop that overlooked the ocean and Cantina, which is one of the best and most popular restaurants on the island. You have to book months in advance.

I like staying in an Airbnb when we’re away for a longer period of time, because it means you can do some cooking, or at the very least have breakfast at home. We were well sorted across six mornings with a packet of ground coffee, a box of peaches, a box of cherries, a big tub of Greek yoghurt, a jar of honey and a jar of peach jam, a tub of walnuts, two blocks of butter, a dozen or so eggs, some big tomatoes and loaves of brown bread from the taverna next door to us.

We spent our first full day lying on the beach beside us, alternating between reading books and swimming. I popped back to our accommodation mid-afternoon to make ham, cheese and salad sandwiches, which I wrapped in tin foil and carried on a wooden tray to the beach. We drank rosé from our thermos flask. A French woman asked me if I’d picked up the food to takeaway from the nearby taverna.

As well as a pebbly beach, there was a platform across from our Airbnb that you could lie on and dive into the water from. One day I took down a tin foil parcel of grilled sausages, a squirty bottle of Dijonaise and a bowl of Greek-ish salad. I say Greek-ish because I didn’t have any olives, dried oregano or green capsicum. That was a great lunch. I got some jealous looks, and yeah, I noticed.

==

Right next door to our digs were two places to eat: one described as a restaurant, the other a fish tavern. On our first night the ‘restaurant’ didn’t look particularly busy. And there always seemed to be a crying baby inside it. Sure, people were there, but it wasn’t as popular as the fish tavern, Captain George’s. So it was Captain George’s that we went to on our first night. It was so good we’d go two times more.

The setting was hard to beat - right on the edge of a sea wall, waves raucously crashing and spouting and spraying as you ate. And the family who ran the place were generous and kind too. The food lived up to the location and the service.

We had a basket of the house brown bread, which was lighter and fluffier than it looked, and a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers and capers. Then we ate the most perfectly cooked deep fried anchovies, a plate of thin slices of courgette that were also deep fried (delicious with a squeeze of lemon) and a steak of fresh tuna that was also beautifully cooked. Cold rosé came served in a beat up old tin jug that didn’t have a spout. It was, at that point, one of my favourite meals ever.

I said to Phil that we needed to find ways to become friends with the family who ran the place so that we could ask them for brown bread for breakfast. As we paid, I tipped generously and told them we were staying next door. “You’re our neighbours!” the oldest brother who seemed to run the show said. I said to Phil on our short walk home, “We have to go back for dinner tomorrow. We’ll definitely get bread if we do.”

==

And so on Monday night we did go back for dinner. We had more of the brown bread and rosé. A plate of grilled halloumi and another of boiled leafy greens that were delicious when seasoned with extra salt and a sprinkling of lemon juice. Then a plate of grilled octopus, which sat in a marinade of red wine vinegar and dried oregano. It was amazing. We had fried potatoes too - sort of like chips but not quite - and a plate of chickpea balls, described as a local specialty, which looked like pretty dry, ugly things when they arrived, but were so soft and moist when you cut into them. There was as much dill as there was mashed up chickpea. I loved the things.

When we paid, I asked if I could ask a favour. I was allowed. The favour was whether I could buy some extra bread to take home for breakfast. I was told they were close to running out of bread for that night’s service, but if I came back around midday the next day I could have “one piece.” I arrived shortly after midday and was given one piece, which happened to be a whole loaf. When I pulled out my card to pay I was told absolutely not.

==

On Tuesday afternoon we swam off the rocks that surround the Chrisopigi Monastery. A spiritual experience, literally. After our splish splash and sunbathe we zoomed on our bike back into Apollonia and after picking up some more supplies (water, wine) from the supermarket found ourselves at Lakis for a drink.

From what I can gather it’s been there for years and is the island’s only remaining traditional Kafenio, or coffee house. It’s run by a grandfather who always wears a red polo shirt, and its clientele is predominantly grandfathers who slowly sip on cups of coffee. It’s the sort of place that sells coffee and soft drinks and booze, and also packets of crisps and ice creams. It is, allegedly, the place where you can buy the cheapest draft beer on the island. I’d believe it: a small draft beer cost 2 Euro.

The house white wine came poured from a large plastic bottle, but it too was only 2 Euros for the glass, so no complaints. We were amused that chocolate coated ice creams, not dissimilar to Magnums, but with a snappier chocolate shell, were more expensive than the plonk. The wine was poured right to the rim of the glass.

==

We’d go back to Lakis several times more for coffee and booze and ice creams. On our last day in Sifnos we sat there eating slices of spanakopita and chicken pie from the bakery across the road. The chicken pie was piping hot, and the 29 degree temperature did nothing to cool it down. I carried the pie carefully on the scooter, all the way to the queue for the ferry.

I liked that no matter what, the grandfather in the red polo shirt who ran Lakis always gave you table service.

==

Across from Lakis there was a pharmacy. Now I’m not one to normally get excited by cosmetics and beauty products, unless we’re talking about Aesop, but I’d seen on Instagram that you can buy quite brilliant stuff from Greek pharmacies. So as I was waiting for my next drink to arrive I popped across for a look. The perfumes and moisturisers and skin care products and face masks were something else, and I was, for the first time in my life in a pharmacy, like a kid in a candy shop. The gregarious woman who served me might’ve been an influence. I walked away with a travel sized perfume and a face mask for each of us. She suggested I could do with an ageing cream. When I challenged her on whether I needed it she said I didn’t, just that it was nice. “She sounds like the one who convinced me to buy yoghurt flavoured sun block,” Phil said.

==

On Wednesday night we had dinner at Cantina, the famous restaurant that’s nestled on a cliff edge, that you have to book months in advance. The hottest ticket in town. We had to go given you could see it from our Airbnb’s rooftop and the little window that sat to the side of the kitchen sink.

The food was beautiful. Restauranty food, but beautiful. And the wine was really good too. Our favourite dishes were strands of zucchini marinated in fennel vinegar, served on top of zucchini cream with a spearmint pesto and breadcrumbs (Phil - “Remember when people used to make courgette pasta and how stupid it was?”) and the tuna gyros, which came with a homemade pita bread, sour cream, a spicy sauce and marinated onions. The mutton steak and chops with a beautiful sheep’s yoghurt tzatziki, chimichurri and the most shatteringly crisp potato were lovely, and so was the leftover bread ice cream with an apricot marmalade.

==

On Thursday we went to Vathy, which is one of the more developed parts of Sifnos. We went because we’d been told that Tsikali, a taverna right on the beach, was beautiful. It was. There’s nothing quite like sitting under big old trees at a table that is sunken into the sand, as are your bare feet.

The restaurant has been run for many years by a woman named Flora, though her family are now more involved in the operation. I immediately liked her, in her sensible sandals, and with her attentiveness to when people were ready to order.

The food we ate was brilliant. A caper salad, which was a beautiful tangle of capers and marinated onions, and not anywhere near as overpowering as I thought it could be. A spanakopita, which was made with the most remarkable homemade short crust pastry. Three perfectly cooked little meatballs that sat in a tomato sauce alongside a mound of fried potatoes. When Flora asked if we wanted the meatballs with fried potatoes, rice or pasta, I obviously said fried potatoes, and she said, “Of course.” We also had exceptionally good tomatoes stuffed with a dilly rice that came served with three fried potatoes swimming in a pool of the tomato cooking juices. I only wish I’d had room for Flora’s chocolate cake, which is supposedly quite something.

When I went to pay, Flora was having issues getting the Eftpos machine to connect to the wifi. We made about six attempts at payment, before she took to holding the machine up to the wifi modem, which was suspended halfway up the wall. Nothing changed. Her son bustled in, got grumpy with her for not doing things properly, and proceeded to take over. He couldn’t get things working either. I eventually paid him via bank transfer.

After lunch we had various swims and tried to convince the man who ran a beachside hotel to let us pay him to use his sun loungers that were reserved for guests who weren’t using them. He laughed at my suggestion I’d pay well. We had a beer each at the taverna at the end of the beach, which didn’t look as good as Tsikali, but claimed to grow its own green beans and watermelons. We played cards but gave up when the sea breeze meant we resorted to putting the salt and pepper shakers on top of our various piles.

==

Ready salted crisps and tzatziki on the beach in your togs with a flask of cold white wine. Nothing like it.

==

Paralia Vroulidia is a sheltered bay at the bottom of a steep cliff. Getting there felt like hiking down a mountain. Don’t even start me on getting back up. But it was worth it. Every, single, achy, puffy step. And not just because there were sun loungers and the water was crystal clear blue and calm.

We ate lunch at the beach club, Katerina’s it was called, and we loved it. We shared a bowl of chickpea soup, which is a Sifnos speciality. It was the first time we’d had it, and I regretted not having tried it elsewhere. The young boy who served us, Katerina’s nephew, I reckon he’d have been about 15, told us earnestly in his very good English how they make the soup in a large pot each night. He told us that usually it gets made on a Saturday (he got to Saturday after counting off each of the days of the week on his fingers) for family lunch on Sunday. Then we had pork and chicken souvlaki, which came served with fried potatoes. Both were great, but the pork trumped. It was so juicy and moist.

Katerina wore knee length denim shorts, a purple singlet that clashed a little with her red hair, and thick red rimmed glasses attached to a string that matched her hair. She walked round the restaurant from time to time checking everyone was happy by giving them the thumbs up. Once you’d finished your food, she delivered you a piece of her beautiful homemade cinnamon cake, baked fresh that morning.

I was tempted by the tin foil tray of pieces of watermelon that a German family had delivered to their sun loungers. Instead we had rock solid chocolate dipped vanilla ice cream cones at 5.30pm and they were perfect. And another swim. :)

==

On our last night in Sifnos we went back to Captain George for dinner. The wave show was particularly impressive - “like fireworks” was the description of the old Kiwi bloke sitting with his daughter and son-in-law at the table across from us. I liked when he said, “So what are we drinking?” and proceeded to order a litre of ouzo before anyone else could suggest anything.

Anyway, the food. Another bowl of tomato, cucumber and caper salad. Eight fresh anchovy fillets that were marinated in vinegar, and each adorned with a little piece of Italian parsley and small piece of lemon. Another plate of fried courgettes. A plate of deep fried squid, which was just so perfectly cooked. And a whole sea bream, which was cooked over coals, and so, so very good. Easily the best fish we have eaten on this side of the world.

I thought my first dinner at Captain George was one of the best meals I’ve eaten. If I’m honest, it’s all three dinners we had there.

Much as we could’ve stayed all night and watched the fireworks show, we sauntered home to drink the last of a bottle of chilled red wine on the roof with a small plate of cherries and the last of the block of chocolate that we’d kept in the fridge. No one was that excited about leaving.

We will so be back.

I first cooked vitello tonnato almost a decade ago, when I bought a copy of the Ducksoup cookbook. Ducksoup was one of the earliest London restaurants I remember following on Instagram. I thought it looked so cool; it was the kind of place that made me want to move to London. I’ve been here nearly two years and I’m yet to go. I guess other restaurants have since gone up the priority list, but I must go sometime, perhaps when my bank account is looking healthier and I don’t have a large visa fees bill to pay soon.

Anyway, there was a recipe for vitello tonnato in the Ducksoup cookbook, and it was the first - and I think possibly only - thing I cooked from the book. If I’m honest, I didn’t follow the recipe to the letter, because I used beef steak instead of veal, which is harder to get your hands on in New Zealand. I finally made vitello tonnato with veal when we were staying in Rome in 2024. I bought the veal from a beautiful little old-fashioned family run butcher’s shop not far from the Trevi Fountain. I remember the fat sausages, the marble chopping block and the vase of fresh roses on the top of the meat chiller so vividly.

When I was making a Berocca and cup of coffee on Monday morning I decided I needed to get back into cooking new recipes, rather than doing what I usually do at this time of year: buy yellow stickered reduced to clear meat at Waitrose, make a salad, maybe cook some potatoes or slice up a loaf of bread. I started flicking through Diana Henry’s book, A Bird in the Hand, and came across her recipe for chicken messina - a chicken-based version of vitello tonnato. An easy decision on what to have for dinner.

You poach chicken breasts in a pot of water that you add half an onion, a stick of celery, black peppercorns and some sprigs of parsley to. While the chicken is poaching, you make a spoonable (good word, that) sauce of mayonnaise, single cream, good quality tinned tuna, capers and chopped up anchovy. Once the chicken has poached and then cooled a little, you slice it into thin slices and top them with dollops of the sauce and a smattering of finely chopped parsley.

Diana’s recipe suggests having the chicken messina with a salad of dressed watercress and little black olives and a loaf of bread. I didn’t read the recipe through far enough when making my shopping list on Monday morning, and nor were bread, watercress or black olives part of the recipe’s ingredients list. But it didn’t matter - I was wise enough to know to buy a loaf of ciabatta anyway, and decided we’d have the chicken messina with a big bowl of leaves of little gem lettuce. That worked well.

It was a beautiful dinner, perfect for a still warm but slightly cooler (relievedly!) Summer’s evening. Phil said we would need to argue over who got the leftovers for lunch the next day. I should’ve claimed them, Cook’s Prerogative and all that, but I let him have them. Brownie points, you see, in the hope that maybe he’ll take me to Ducksoup.

No, a day of being at Sainsbury’s 10 minutes after opening time and spent clearing your inbox and occasionally checking the BBC to admire Andy Burnham’s wife’s blue dress (and to hear what he had to say, of course) isn’t quite like being on holiday in Greece. But the work day is finished now, and I’m sitting on the roof of our apartment building with my laptop and a glass of rosé that I shouldn’t really be drinking because the bottle it has come from was opened Friday week, but I will drink anyway, and were it not for the noise of cars and the view of the Shard and an ugly council estate building and the absence of the ocean, I could, with the blue skies and the warm temperature, pretend I am still somewhere in the Aegean Sea.

Anyway, I’m here to write about the food that we ate in Greece, and to tell a tale or two. I’ll do this in two parts - the first about the combined total of 36 hours or thereabouts that we spent in Athens; the second about our six nights in Sifnos. For those who find it nauseatingly boring reading about people’s holidays, and worse still what they ate, you can click the Back button on your phone or laptop screen now, while I indulge my desire to make a note or two.

==

We arrived in Athens at around 7pm on a Saturday evening. Our introduction to Athens was everything I expected it to be: a grumpy old taxi driver who didn’t (but did) take card payments, slow traffic, old buildings, hot weather. We made it to dinner shortly after 9pm and, because it’s us, weren’t one another’s best dinner time company because I was hungry (and desperate for alcohol) and Phil was dehydrated (he never drinks enough water) and tired (because apparently I got us to Luton Airport way too early).

Anyway, the food markedly improved our moods, as did my sturdy tumbler of white wine (the beginning of many). A Greek salad topped, as is the Greek way, with a large slab of sparkling white feta. A mountainous pile of fried small shrimps and anchovies and squid. A piece of sea bass cooked in olive oil, lemon and juice and oregano in a paper bag on top of a bed of deliciously mushy courgettes, potatoes, green beans and carrots. And savoro. I’ll come back to the savoro - I just wanted to say that the fish cooked in a bag reminded me very much of watching episodes of Jamie Oliver’s The Naked Chef in the early 2000s with my dad. He bought me a video cassette of the first season of The Naked Chef for my 9th birthday. Jamie was definitely the first person to introduce me to cooking fish in a paper bag.

Anyway. Savoro. Phil spotted savoro on the menu, underneath the heading FISH. My Google search suggested we’d like it - a dish of crispy fried small fish that then sit in a marinade of red wine vinegar, oregano, currants, shallot and pine nuts. Our three chubby little fish were delicious, and reminded me of the line from Nick Bramham’s recipe for Roast Chicken ‘Nduja Panzanella that I’d been emailed earlier that day:

The bread soaks up the tomato juices and vinegar like a sponge, transforming into one of the food world’s great textures: crisp-gone-soft (I think also of Cantonese sweet and sour pork balls; a duck-fat roast potato smothered with gravy; rouille-smeared croutons slowly dissolving into bouillabaisse).

Phil agreed with me re: food world’s great textures. But rolled his eyes when he learned I’d borrowed the line from Nick. I’d spent most of the taxi ride into Athens waxing lyrical about how I had the Quality Wines guys’ list of where best to eat and drink in Athens. Lucky me.

Anyway, delicious dinner. Holiday mode activated.

==

A boring breakfast before visiting the spectacular Acropolis.

Three drinks each in one sitting: sparkling water, espresso, freshly squeezed pomegranate and orange juice.

A more than passable pork gyros on the way to the ferry for lunch. I like the snack size of the gyros here.

==

As you know, I had the Quality Wines list of where to eat while in Athens. A privilege, if I’m honest.

I was grateful to receive both the comprehensive version and the highlights package, which I think is one of the most well constructed recommendation lists I have ever received, especially for someone only in a place for a limited period of time:

1. A breakfast and/or cake and coffee spot.

2. A bar.

3. A souvlaki shop.

4. A taverna.

5. A seafood taverna near the port.

I will endeavour to create this version of a highlights package for London one day.

==

I was struck by the oddity of the opening hours of certain places in Athens. Unfortunately the way our travel timings fell meant that the souvlaki shop and seafood taverna near the port on the perfectly crafted list weren’t possible for us to get to.

Many places seem to open early in the morning, even if they serve the sort of food you wouldn’t necessarily take for breakfast food, and close relatively early in the evening or late afternoon. The best opening hours that I saw were O Kosta’s (not on the perfectly crafted, aforementioned list): 10.25am - 3.4pm.

I’ll come Diporto shortly.

==

Anyway, we did manage to get to the breakfast and/or coffee spot, Stani. That place had more manageable hours: 7.30am - 9.00pm; with the exception of Tuesdays, when they open at 7am. No rhyme or reason, as far as I can tell, but that’s Greece.

Stani is an old fashioned dairy products café that has been in operation since 1931. We arrived just before midday and sat outside at a table with a couple who spend half the year in Athens and half the year in Melbourne (both Greeks). He had only one arm, the biggest smile, a raspy laugh, and a lisp. His partner couldn’t speak English.

I ate a plate of beautifully thick Greek yoghurt made using sheep’s milk that was topped with a drizzle of runny honey and a shower of roughly chopped toasted walnuts. It was a perfect plate of food.

The man ended up paying for our yoghurt and cake and bottle of water. I don’t really know why, he must’ve taken a shine to us. That, or he worked out that he needed to somehow make up for his questionable comments (those who know Shane Jones MP will understand when I say they could’ve come from the same convention).

==

We arrived back in Athens just after 5pm on a Saturday evening. It was hot. 36 degrees hot.

Phil’s first priority when we arrived at our hotel was a shower. Mine was going for a wander around the neighbourhood. I spied various wine bars and a cool looking burger joint. I ended up not far from Diporto, the underground restaurant that has been run by the same elderly man in a white buttoned up coat for many years, and so I decided to clamber down the stairs into his wine barrel lined cave to see if I could have anything to eat or drink. A small snack, I figured. I arrived twenty minutes before he closed for the day, at 7pm.

I was informed by his assistant that there was no food left - stews, vegetables, grilled sardines, the like - save for a spoon of chickpeas. I said I’d have them, and that I’d like a glass of white wine too. And so, I sat there with the last spoon of chickpeas that I squeezed with the juice from a knobby wedge of lemon, and a hunk of bread that was much too big for me, and a tumbler of wine that some would say was much too big for me too, but which I thought was perfect. “Sorry, I’m coming, just got distracted,” was my message to Phil as I trotted back sheepishly to the hotel.

I adore chickpeas, but they always hurt my tummy. It’s something I’ve learned to live with. I should buy antacids.

==

Phil and I had a glass of wine at Wine is Fine, and played three games of Gin Rummy (2 draws, 1 game to Phil) and ate a small plate of eggs mayonnaise (I let Phil have most - chickpeas and all that). Not Greek, but good. We had really good burgers at One - a chicken and salad burger for Phil, a spicy cheeseburger for me. And then we went to Galaxy Bar.

Oh my goodness Galaxy Bar.

A small bar that seated maybe 12 people, max. Dark wood panelled walls lined with old photographs and bottles of booze and a beautiful old clock that Phil made me locate the make of. Dim lighting and 1960s music. Bartenders in shirts and ties. And 10 Euro cocktails. We drank mai tais and cosmopolitans and dry martinis. And each time we ordered a drink we were delivered little plates of complimentary food to snack on - olives, pieces of cheese with a dollop of mustard to dip them in (very Belgian), a piece of grilled white toast spread with butter mixed with dried oregano, smoked salty almonds. I could’ve stayed all night.

The last time I had a cosmopolitan was in Akaroa, when I went on a weekend trip with friends in my third or fourth year of university. We’d gone out for dinner and I decided, I don’t know why, that I’d buy everyone a cosmopolitan. I say don’t know why because I didn’t actually have the money to buy them. I was, after all, a poor student. I remember snaking off to the loo to contact Dad to tell him I needed to borrow some money. I’m not sure if I told him why. I probably never paid him back.

==

Little time for much in the way of food on our last morning in Athens, what with tourist season queues and the new European border control systems to contend with. But still we had good coffee and a croissant and I bought a piece of oregano studded pizza bread to nibble on while we stood in the security queue.

Boarding our flight home was a comedy show. That’s what happens when you combine Greek security officials who try to be officious but are incredibly disorganised and Brits abroad who need special assistance because they can’t climb up stairs (apparently). The Greek woman running the ticket scanner at the departure gate asked me at one point if I was pregnant; perhaps with a view to bumping me into the priority queue. I told her I wasn’t and that she was the rudest woman I’d ever met.

I am the first to concede that I have a round belly. I always have, I always will. It becomes noticeably round if the dress I am wearing gets caught up in the strap of my handbag. I used to hate my tummy, and in many ways I still do. But I’ve come to accept that it’s part of who I am. I see it as a sign of a life well lived and enjoyed. And I will confess that part of the reason I was so taken by Andy Burnham’s wife in her blue dress this morning was that she didn’t seem to really care about the fact that she has a round belly too. She strikes me as a good sort, and she’s stylish. The kind of woman I’d want to be friends with. Give me a round happy belly over an inability to climb up and down the stairs of an airplane any day. One signals a more joyful life than the other.

I deliberately looked up what time the breakfast place opened. 10am. Civilised, and good for Phillip who has a greater need and capacity for sleep than I do. We left our Airbnb on our grunty scooter at about quarter past ten. The breakfast place was a six minute drive away.

We parked the scooter on the side of the street near a hardware store, and began the climb up winding rows of stairs. We passed two mangy mules loaded up with boxes and bags of supplies. A grumpy old man with a thick moustache was guiding them.

We arrived at the breakfast spot and the man who seemed to be in charge told us that he wasn't open yet. He'd be open at 11, because the mules were still delivering the day’s supplies. We decided to go for a little wander and come back. But the wander really was a little one, because by the time we'd seen the view out over Apollina and walked past the church, we were back where we'd started. It was still a long time until 11am.

There was a small group of French people outside the breakfast spot. One of them asked the man who seemed to be in charge if he could just have a coffee. That seemed an inconvenient ask to me, what with all of the mules that needed unloading. But the man who seemed to be in charge obliged, and was then scolded by the French man for not being open because when he asked last night whether they'd be open for breakfast at 10am, whoever he'd spoken to had said yes.

In the end we decided we'd go and buy a few more supplies from the supermarket and come back, but as we were leaving, I suddenly thought, I might just ask what time they'd actually start serving food. “I'm not sure,” the man who seemed to be in charge said. “The cook isn't here yet, I don't know when he's coming.”

“Fuck it, I'll make eggs at home,” I said to Phil. And so we ate one fried egg each and slices of tomato and slices of Gouda and pieces of buttered bread on the rooftop of our accommodation. Then we went swimming and I took a bowl of Greek salad and a tin foil packet of sausages down to the beach for a late lunch.

We went back to the breakfast spot the next day. Just before midday. But by the time they took our order the breakfast menu had finished. A shame, because their plates of eggs and tomatoes and cheese and bread looked good. But we had good plates of local cheese with roast cherry tomatoes, saganaki, rice and cuttlefish stuffed zucchini in an egg and lemon sauce, and a piece of pork terrine with mustard and pickles instead. The only thing that made it feel like breakfast was the freshly squeezed orange juice.

For the record: O Felos was the spot, and it was great.

I went inside eventually to make another coffee, but instead I saw the box of peaches on the top of the small fridge. Of the five, only one seemed ready to eat. I cut it in half with the characteristically blunt Airbnb kitchen knife, wedged out the stone, and put one half on a paper towel for Phil, before clambering up the ladder to our mezzanine bed to give it to him. “You are the best,” he said. Okay, I won't lie, my reaction was - Yeah, I know.

I was the best not because I gave Phil half a peach, and the slightly plumper half too, but because I took my half of peach back to my platform by the sea and ate it there. I thought to myself, actually, if all I can do one day is eat peaches by the sea and watch others bathe and splish splash in it, sure I'll be jealous, but that will be okay too.

As it so happened, I spent time at two Third Spaces on Friday (three, really, if you count Scotti’s, but I’ve written about Scotti’s enough already).

One of the Third Spaces was a sports club.

==

I have read a lot over the years about the restaurant at the Indian YMCA in Fitzrovia. Mostly I’ve read people lamenting that the place has become more expensive than it was in the 1980s through to early 2000s. I’m not sure why it’s worth spending so much time lamenting something so entirely unavoidable. Anyway, I’ve always been intrigued by the notion of a cheap, canteen-like restaurant where a non-homogenous group of people regularly gather to eat. And, of course, I have a soft spot for Indian food, and especially an Indian buffet.

When I arrived I was ushered to the buffet, where I was asked if I wanted pilau rice, chapati or both. I was then asked which of the four curries - chicken, lamb, fish, vegetarian - I wanted. A man ladled a couple of spoonfuls of chicken curry into a small white bowl and popped that my plate of pilau rice onto a plastic brown tray. I grabbed a bowl of salad and a little dish of mint chutney. I asked for a poppadom. I contemplated grabbing a plate of two big, crisp onion bhajis, but thought better of it when I saw the size of the plate of rice.

I paid for my lunch (£14, which I didn’t think was bad by London standards), collected my cutlery, um-ed and ah-ed about selecting one of the pre-prepared plastic cups of iced mint tea, and headed for the outdoor terrace where a number of other individuals and groups were sitting. The terrace was shaded by an awning in a striped green pattern - the kind of pattern that instantly took me to the seaside in Italy. Each of the outdoor tables was topped with a small glass vase filled with fresh roses. It was lovely.

I overheard a man (a university professor, judging by the conversation he was having with the young woman he was dining with) at the table next to me talking about how this used to be one of the cheapest places to eat in London, and that it was one of the first Indian restaurants in London. I liked that in spite of the price hikes it’s a place he still keeps coming back to.

For the record, the food was simple but very good. The chicken curry was rich and spicy and the poppadom was one of the crispest poppadoms I think I’ve ever eaten.

==

On Friday night we met our friends at the Gunnersbury Triangle Tennis Club near their place in the depths of West London. We’d been a few weeks earlier for a party, and were instantly drawn to the kitschness of the place, and the cheap booze. We loved the woman who ran the bar too, Emma. She wore a pen in her ponytail and was no nonsense, but seemed to genuinely care about every person she served, asking them something about themselves. She proudly told me that the mint she put in my water was homegrown - in fact, she grows three types of mint in terracotta pots outside the bar. Emma sold me bottles of Picpoul for £16 and insisted I have the bottle in an ice bucket.

When we arrived on Friday night, Emma remembered us but couldn’t remember our names. She and her partner Dan seemed genuinely thrilled we were back. She set to work making us a jug of Pimm’s, again using her own mint, and said she hoped it was okay that she made Pimm’s her way - no strawberries and no cucumber, just lots of citrus and mint. She asked in a somewhat apologetic way if it was okay that the jug would cost £14.

Emma came and talked with us as were sitting at a wooden picnic table alongside the tennis court. She told us how pleased she was we’d come back, especially because she knew we lived all the way in Clerkenwell. Her memory impressed me. We talked about members of the club and the Football World Cup and how hot it had been.

On Friday nights, two Japanese women sell food at the club from a pop up kitchen. They make platters of chicken gyoza and teriyaki chicken and chicken karaage, and sell little cardboard boxes of vegetarian and tuna sushi. We ordered a couple of chicken and gyoza platters and while we were nibbling away, one of the women came out with four pieces of sushi for us to sample. It was so good we decided to buy a couple of boxes. Phil went into the kitchen to make the order and pay, and the women squealed with delight to have more custom. “It worked,” one of them said as Phil walked in. Two chicken platters and two generously stuffed boxes of sushi cost us less than £20. Soon the women are going back to Japan for a holiday so there won’t be any food at the club, other than packets of crisps, of course, but there’s a pizza shop round the corner that you can go to if you want.

It was so nice to drink outside on a balmy evening, and to pay properly affordable prices for our plonk. It was nice to feel looked after by the people running the club (Emma kept bringing me glasses of ice cubes to add into my glass of wine; Dan kept checking if we needed anything). It was nice to be part of a little local community and to see what goes on at the club on a Friday night. I loved it so much I ended up paying for a social membership, which technically means I am allowed to drink there now. Apparently I shouldn’t really have been there on Friday night without paying a 50p non-member drinking fee, but Emma said I was allowed and she’s the boss. Now I have the code to the club’s gate and back door.

Since becoming a member of the club I’ve had an emailed club newsletter and it sounds like tomorrow afternoon they’re doing cream teas for people watching Wimbledon. £5 a pop too! I wish I didn’t have meetings so that I could go (yes, a rare Friday spent on the tools).

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In a world of investor-backed places and spaces that are designed for the Instagram and TikTok community rather than real-life communities, it’s these kind of venues that I wish we had more of. The thing we all have to do is frequent these places, even if there are subjectively better places we could eat and drink at. We don’t want a world where these community-driven and community-focused places don’t exist. We’d be poorer for it.

At this point it seems unlikely that I’ll make it to 52 new recipes this year, what with more gallivanting and hosting of visitors and heatwaves still to come. But then I remind myself it won’t always be this warm. Soon we’ll find ourselves in the depths of a London Winter and wonder why the fuck we ever complained about it being a bit too hot. Before I know it I’ll be spending three months of this year cooking 27 new soup and stew recipes.

Anyway, tonight I have cooked a new recipe, and for those who follow closely, you’ll notice that it’s a new recipe on a Wednesday night, and a recipe for something other than a burger. Never fear, we did still go to the pub. We just came home for bowls of pasta once we were done with our pints and iced glasses of house white wine.

The pasta was perfect, because I could quickly whip it up before Phil got home from work and we just ate it room temperature on the roof once we were home from the pub. The recipe suggests eating the pasta hot, but I figured it was the kind of pasta that would work at room temperature - almost like a pasta salad - and I was right.

The recipe is Ray McVinnie’s. One he posted on his Instagram feed recently. For Northern Hemisphere readers, Ray is a well-known New Zealand cook and food writer, and the long-time crush of his biggest fan girl, my Granny Kate. Kate used to snip Ray McVinnie recipes out of the Sunday Star Times magazine and other publications on the regular and tuck them away in an over-stuffed black clear file. She owned several of his cookbooks and copied recipes of his into her little black covered diary that contained some of her favourite and most reliable things to cook. Her best Ray McVinnie recipe was for an Asian-style marinated beef that was thinly sliced and served on white Chinese spoons with a tiny sprinkling of finely chopped chilli and spring onion. A smart little canape.

I thought of Kate as I cooked the pasta and browned the pork mince with onion and garlic, before adding tomato paste, cherry tomatoes, a cup of peas and handfuls of rocket. I thought of Kate as I sipped my glass of rosé, and how much I’d enjoy to have a glass of wine with her again. I thought of Kate as I ate my bowl of pasta and thought to myself, this recipe is “a do again”, the line Kate (and my granddad Kink) would always trot out whenever they thought a recipe was good. Really, I ought to scribble this recipe into Kate’s little black diary; add it to the annals of Ray’s finest. But unfortunately that diary is buried somewhere in a box in a storage unit in New Zealand.