I went to a dinner a few weeks ago where we made Baklava. It’s really quite a simple think to make, when you have ten hands in the kitchen! As a teenager, I used to devour a whole tray of baklava in one sitting. Nuts, sugar and cinnamon! Filo! What’s not to love?

I do love a good pastry, and these spinach and artichoke stuffed soft pretzels look amazing. My neighbour, Jessica makes the earth’s best pastry, so here’s hoping she reads this post and is tempted to rustle them up. Will trade pottery for pastry. I bet they’d go great with a Greek salad and a bottle of red.

Jason and I have cooked the same pastas for over twenty years. From our tiny galley kitchen in Florence, to the satsuma orange kitchen of our present day, pasta is on the table at least twice weekly. Our recipes are simple –– aglio e olio, penne con broccoli, penne con zucchini –– but good. We used to add a bouillon to most of our sauces, which we don’t do anymore, and we’ve traded durum wheat for kamut or spelt. But for the most part, our pastas are the same. The original recipes are all carefully recorded in a blue exercise book that Jason kept during his time in Florence. ‘Verdure Nicola’ refers to a recipe his landlord shared with him in the early part of his time there. Many of the recipes –– carbonara, spaghetti al forno, spaghetti alla puttanesca ––  are from Nicola, in fact. Some are also his Mum Frida’s, who sent her son to Europe adept with an iron and able to cook for himself. The recipe for La Bomba –– a multi layered puréed vegetable dish that his Nonna Stefania created –– is written on a loose scrap of paper, with her name in scratchy penmanship at the top. Aside from recipes, there are also pages of immaculately neat Italian grammar rules, as well as Jason’s notes on the Renaissance. There’s the odd phone number, address and calculation, (could he afford to buy that Vespa?) as well as pages where we tallied our card scores. We played a lot of Gin Rummy while we ate. I always won. He always made better pasta.

My grandfather was a great cook. We’d land in Bermuda, where he and my grandmother spent half the year, and within minutes of arrival, he’d be in the kitchen preparing a bolognese. Chicken à la King served on vol-au-vent was another favourite. Oh, the butter! In everything! Two whole sticks went into his tomato sauce! For dessert, there was always a baked apple, slathered in more butter and brown sugar. All this was prepared in his signature plaid shorts, (worn way above his belly button) a sleeveless, white undershirt and an apron. And at the end of the meal, my grandmother would always say, “excellent PAM, (his initials) just excellent.”

When my friend Kate got married she eschewed traditional cake in favour of five tiers of cheese. That’s my kind of cake. I’d take Brie over a Blondie any day. This spread right here –– five, six varieties of soft cheese –– looks delicious to me. Bring on the bread, crackers and wine, and that’s dinner and dessert in one.