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Riverford - amazing veg provider and general disruptor in veg! 

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Riverford - amazing veg provider and general disruptor in veg! 

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This is the rabbit hole I go into when researching food. Come chat to me any time about veg boxes - I can talk about them for hours!

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Cornbread and pinto beans - a US southern classic

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Cornbread and pinto beans - a US southern classic

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One from my Alabama relatives! Great with some chilli flakes thrown in the mix too. Often paired with slow-cooked pinto beans - there are many southern-style pinto beans recipes online that I use as a foundation, although I use veg stock instead of chicken stock, and vegan chorizo style sausages instead of ham hock!

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Pour the batter into the cake tin or frying pan and smooth the top with a knife. Bake for 25 mins until golden and a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 10 mins, then turn out, cut into wedges and serve. You can make up to 2 days ahead and store in an airtight container, or freeze for up to 1 month.

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Pour the batter into the cake tin or frying pan and smooth the top with a knife. Bake for 25 mins until golden and a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 10 mins, then turn out, cut into wedges and serve.

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The best of all the vegan pies - also got the approval of my carnivorous father-in-law (which is a BIG deal)

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This pie came about because firstly, I adore pie. It was my pregnancy craving, steak pie followed by cherry or apple pie. I would buy packets of Mr Kipling and polish them off by the half dozen. Something about the crumbling, yielding collapse of the pastry, the hot-or-cold, sweet-or-savoury, the lingering lubrication, satiation, of a layer of fat and gravy disappearing down my greedy gullet. I make a pie most weeks, more so since cooking vegan food than ever before. This particular pie came from a longing for something 'meaty', but not meat, of course. A hearty, wholesome, dark and brooding pie that would fool even the hardiest of carnivores. And so I rolled up my sleeves, and I got to work. (For the record, my friend Phil, the only 'man' I call when I need heavy stuff hulking about and my erstwhile recipe guinea pig, sat in my kitchen and scoffed half of it in one sitting. Phil is absolutely, definitely not a vegan, but I'm working on him.)

Serves 6 comfortably, or 8 with sides.

For the filling:
120g dried green or brown lentils, 27p (£1.15/500g, Sainsburys)
6 fat cloves of garlic, 8p (40p/2 bulbs)
1 large onion, 9p (90p/1.5kg, Sainsburys Basics)
2 tbsp flour, 1p (55p/1.5kg, Sainsburys Basics)

2 tbsp oil, 3p (£3/3l sunflower or vegetable oil, Sainsburys)
300ml red or dark ale, 27p (£1.10/4x330ml cans, Sainsburys Basics bitter)
1 veg stock cube or a pinch of salt, 3p (35p/10 stock cubes, Sainsburys Basics)
2 tbsp tomato ketchup - or puree for the puritan palate - 1p (45p/460g, Sainsburys Basics)
2 large carrots, 10p (45p/1kg, Sainsburys Basics)
400g mushrooms, 85p (85p/400g, Sainsburys Basics)
1 tbsp meat-style gravy granules, 4p (£1.35/170g, Bisto)
1 tsp lemon juice or light coloured vinegar, 3p (55p/250ml, Sainsburys)

For the pastry (base and top, for that is the only kind of pie):
I confess to using ready made pastry more often than not these days, but if you want to make your own, I have a lovely recipe here. Anyhow, I use 350g Jus-Rol shortcrust pastry at £1.25/500g. Which works out at 87p per large pie.

1 tbsp cooking oil, to glaze, 1p (£3/3l)
First pop your lentils in a saucepan that will easily hold thrice their volume. Cover in cold water, but do not salt for they will seize. Bring to the boil at the back of the stove, where they can br forgotten for a while. Reduce to a simmer and roundly ignore them for around half an hour, only interfering should they start to dry out a little, by adding a splash of water.
In a separate pan, peel and chop your onion and garlic. Stir in the flour and oil - it will look dreadful, but give it a chance - and bring to a low heat, mixing well to a rough, chunky paste. Add a splash of the ale, which will fizz pleasantly, and mix to loosen it. Add a splash more, mix, splash, mix, until half of the ale is combined. Set the other half to one side. Crumble in the stock cube, and squeeze in the tomato puree, and mix well.
Dice or slice your carrots and mushrooms, and add them to the pot. Bring to the boil, then reduce to a simmer, until the lentils behind them have softened.
When the lentils have cooked and the pie filling is glossy and unctuous and reduced in volume, it is time to combine the two. Drain the lentils and rinse thoroughly to get rid of any residual white scum, and tip them into the pan that contains the mushrooms and ale. Mix well together - you may find you need to add a little more ale to the mixture, so do. Add the gravy granules and mix well, bearing in mind that they will thicken the liquid when cooked, so it can afford to be a little runny at this stage. Finish with a dash of lemon or vinegar to brighten it, as the ale can be quite a heavy, mouthfilling flavour.

At this point, if you are cooking the pie now, turn your oven on to 180C and ensure that there is a shelf in the middle of it for best results.

Roll out your pastry. Lightly grease a pie tin or similar receptacle - I find a loaf tin makes a very pleasing pie in an emergency, and a Victoria sponge tin creates a thinner one with a good pastry-to-filling ratio. Any leftover filling can always be frozen to make future pies, or eaten as a casserole, so the size of your tin is not prescriptive. Lay the pastry carefully in the tin, pressing it gently into the corners. The weight of the filling will do the rest for you. Spoon the filling in, working your way from the outside to the middle, and gradually so as not to overbear and thus tear your precious pastry. Fill it to the top - don't be shy - underfilled pies have their own circle in Hell in my books.

Now make the top. I am naturally incompetent at delicate tasks, my rough-hewn hands more suited for heaving large objects around, fiddling in u-bends, smashing together flatpack furniture, than delicately fiddling with pastry, and so, as with many things, I have found a method that is both simple and idiotproof, and looks astounding. I make my pie crusts with tessalated or overlaying cookie-cutter shapes, the effect of which is beautiful and elicits squeals of delight from guests of all ages. I highly recommend it - and if the pieces overlap, there is more pastry per mouthful, which can only be a glorious thing. Roll out your excess pastry to around 4mm thick. Take a cookie cutter of your choice, or if you live in a household without small children, you can use a small glass for the same effect. Cut circles of pastry and carefully lay them on top of the pie - it doesn't matter if there are gaps, in fact, they rather pleasingly get sticky with caramelised gravy, so embrace them. Start from the outside and work your way in, until the pie is covered or all the pastry is used up.

Glaze with a little oil (I have discovered the secret to perfect vegan pie glaze, but this recipe is complex enough, so I will write about it another time - I have to have *some* secrets!). Place it in the oven and bake for 40 minutes, or until the pastry is golden. You may wish to re-glaze halfway through, for extra sheen. I did, but then this is my living, and I need to tempt you here any way I can.

And serve. I found this quite sufficient on its own, my excuse for no sides being that it contained 5 of our 5 a day (onion, mushroom, tomato, carrot, lentils) and because in our household, we like pie.

I would love to hear your thoughts below!

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Mushroom, Lentil and Ale Pie, 34p [VG/DF/V]

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This pie came about because firstly, I adore pie. It was my pregnancy craving, steak pie followed by cherry or apple pie. I would buy packets of Mr Kipling and polish them off by the half dozen. Something about the crumbling, yielding collapse of the pastry, the hot-or-cold, sweet-or-savoury, the lingering lubrication, satiation, of a...

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The BEST vegan pancakes ever in my opinion 

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The BEST vegan pancakes ever in my opinion 

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The Fluffiest Vegan Pancakes Recipe by Tasty

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Here's what you need: flour, organic sugar, baking powder, salt, non-dairy milk, apple cider vinegar, vanilla, maple syrup

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I am not the only one for whom many of life's most intimate details come flooding back at the sight, smell and taste of particular foods. Everyone I speak to seems to have a favourite or, in some cases, a most hated dish with which they can recall particular moments of their lives.

In many cases the taste or smell of a sweet, a cake or an entire meal is capable of painting a picture with richer, deeper brush strokes than any snapshot in their photograph album. It is curious that, while I struggle to remember my mobile phone number or grapple helplessly to recall the closest of friends' names when I am required to introduce them to someone, the merest sniff of chocolate ice cream has been known to bring back memories from 20, 30, 40 years ago with frightening clarity. Put that same ice cream on a little wooden spoon and I can recall the cinema I was in when I ate it, the feel of the (red) velvet seats on the back of my bare knees, the colour of the ice-cream attendant's overall (lemon, with green piping). Details more glowing than if I had eaten that ice cream two hours ago.

In his bestselling book Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby tells his life story through the football matches he has been to. While my own personal madeleine was not so much Arsenal's victory against Tottenham as the sensation of pulling a tooth out while chewing a Bluebird milk chocolate-covered toffee, it is true to say that memory triggers are as varied as the lives of those who seek to evoke them. Memories of food and the part which certain crumbs play in people's lives fascinates me. It satisfies both my incessant nosiness and acute greed. So much so that I have just spent several weeks talking with everyone from Alan Bennett to Vanessa Redgrave for a television series about the dishes through which they could tell the story of their lives.

I wrote Toast partly to unravel the emotional mess that was my own childhood, unwrapping humbugs and licking ice-lollies in order to relive something that happened a lifetime ago. My legs are still stinging from the slapping my Dad gave them when I spilt raspberry juice on the new dove grey carpet; the scent of violet cashews brings back fond memories of the soft, black leather handbag belonging to a favourite if somewhat pungent aunt; the tiniest sniff of a barley sugar awakens the horror of a good hiding I once got for hunting through my mother's bag (mushroom, to match her shoes) in search of her gold tin of 'travel' sweets. The whiff of Robinson's Barley Water reminds me wincingly of once pissing my pants.

Curiously, although the flavour of beetroot in vinegar might still instantly transport me to the back lawn of 67 Sandringham Road, Wolverhampton on a summer's day in 1965, it is actually what hits the nose - sweet, earthy, acidic - rather than the tongue that really hits the mark. In terms of total immersion in a time long gone the nostrils seem to win over either the eyes or the taste buds. When people say tomatoes don't taste like they used to they may be commenting on the changes in commercial production of the fruit (the variety, the soil, the modern chemicals) or simply on their own taste buds' inability to experience a flavour the way they used to. Yet I would argue that it is the aroma from the freshly snapped stalk of a home-grown tomato that is more likely to whisk them off to Dad's old greenhouse than putting one in their mouth.

I can reveal that Richard E Grant sniffs almost everything he eats. A legacy from a childhood in Swaziland where he checked the fish on his plate was fresh; Janet Street Porter hates the smell of stewed lamb because of the vision of her mother that appears at the first twitch of her nostrils; Vanessa Redgrave adores the comforting scent of a proper cooked breakfast. The nose can act as our own personal Google, searching out essential facts from the mass of information that goes to make up our lives.

It isn't all rose-tinted nostalgia. Victims on BBC1's Crimewatch often mention their attacker's smell. The whiff of their clothing, breath or hands becomes inseparably linked with the trauma of the incident. A smell can reveal vital clues because it can open up pieces of your brain that remain closed by the horror of it all. Despite finding eggs exquisitely beautiful to look at, the smell of their sulphurous yolks unwillingly brings back painful images of my father's weekly force-feeding sessions. One sniff and I start to heave. Such moments are the opposite end of the spectrum from the aroma of ozone and vinegar that is so effective a tool for summoning up an ideal fish and chips on the pier in Brighton. It doesn't mean they are any less powerful.

Of course, food linked with memorable events is more likely to kick off a few reminiscences than something we eat every week, which is why we probably remember birthdays more clearly than the average Sunday lunch. Even so it was nothing more than a mundane pickled herring that whisked me back to St Ives on a magic-carpet ride of onion, dill and vinegar the other day. And not only just to St Ives, but to the car park where my young niece slammed her fingers in the car door. Sharp flavours that brought back every tearful moment of a painful event. Having had many a herring since that dark day, it was only this one, with its distinctive piercing whiff of dill and white vinegar, that opened that particular box. And how one particular mango out of the hundreds whose juices dribble down my chin each year, was the one that reminded me of a woman I once met in a hotel in Sri Lanka. A crazy woman, who played opera at full blast from the bedroom of her hotel in the early hours of the morning - and yet someone I had completely forgotten about till every line in her face came back to me with one bite of that absurdly juicy fruit. And what exactly was it about that mouthful of boiled potato that reminded me of my school history teacher?

Of all the food triggers that can pop up in our lives there are a few that have done it for me more than others. Treacle tart makes me think of a mysterious uncle, gammon and parsley sauce is unmistakably linked to a row with my stepmother, grilled kippers to an Edinburgh bed and breakfast where I tossed my bacon into a plant pot in the dining room, eggs mayonnaise of being sacked from a job in a hotel, cucumber soup conjures up one of the happiest days of my life, a bowl of chocolate tapioca (don't even go there), and a certain recipe for fish soup with fresh coriander that allows me to relive a dirty weekend in Paris blow by blow. Recipes that all spark deeply detailed recall of not just where I was and whom I was with, but of details so bright and sharp they could have happened yesterday; to tell the truth, probably a damn slight clearer.

· A Taste of My Life is on BBC1, at 11.30am Saturdays

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I am not the only one for whom many of life's most intimate details come flooding back at the sight, smell and taste of particular foods. Everyone I speak to seems to have a favourite or, in some cases, a most hated dish with which they can recall particular moments of their lives.

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 'Food can embody our personal histories, as well as wider cultural histories.' - Nigel Slater.

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 'Food can embody our personal histories, as well as wider cultural histories.' - Nigel Slater.

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- 2 x Avocados
- 2 x Garlic Gloves
- Squeeze of Lemon Juice
- Quarter of a small onion (Finally chopped)
- Handful of baby tomatoes (Finally chopped)
- Salt and Pepper to taste

Blitz together until blended with a bit of texture. Mum has always been the queen of dips ever since I can remember and this is always a winner.