Glossy, rich and fleeting, apricots always make summer special

The wait for lunchtime feels endless. I take a white loaf, carve off a thick slice and toast it until its crusty edges have singed. I spread it with thick white ricotta straight from the tub, then prise a ripe apricot in two, flick out the stone, cut the fruit into thick wedges and lay them on top of the ricotta. Depending on what is to hand, I will then grind over the faintest amount of black pepper or a few crushed pistachios. The hot, chewy toast, velvety curd and sweet-sour fruit will keep me going until lunch is ready.

Apricots are at their best for such a short time in the summer that I tend to feast on them whenever I can, tucking into their soft, fluffy skin and almost jelly-like flesh at every chance. They can, of course, disappoint, and in truth that is often the case. The trick is to take matters into your own hands, ripening the fruit at home. Buy them unrefrigerated (chilling seems to sound the death knell for this fruit), then ripen them on a sunny windowsill or simply on a dish in the kitchen. They may take a day or two to become lusciously ripe, but I am convinced the wait is worth it.

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In the Belgian city, a group of tireless campaigners have joined together with one life-changing aim: to ensure most of their food is local and organic. Have they succeeded? And what lessons can we learn?

This is not a Hollywood story: it’s a Belgian story, for a start. It’s not even certain to end well; that’s a bit up in the air right now. But it’s a story about how things – important things – could be different. How they could, perhaps, be better. It’s a story about Liège, a city whose 19th-century heyday as a coal and steel powerhouse is long gone. Like many ex-coal and steel towns, Liège is poor, with increasing numbers of households living in poverty, but it also has a strong solidarity culture, a diverse population – and the best waffles.

So far, so Belgian. But why are we talking about Liège? Because in 2013, a group of activists who wanted to make food and city life better, greener and fairer, brought 600 people – all with an interest in food production – together. It asked them to imagine what could be different in Liège, within one generation. It’s an interesting question, the fundamental one really: what change can we concretely effect within our lifetimes? What they arrived at was this: “That in 35 years, one generation, the majority of food consumed in the Liège region would be grown locally in the best ecological and social conditions.” That’s a nice, if wordy, aspiration. But the thing is, they’ve tried to make it happen and even – to a degree – have succeeded.

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Once the preserve of farmers, now the dog trials, sheep shearing and food stalls are starting to appeal to everyone

One of the highlights of the Great Yorkshire Show for Bridlington farmer Geoff Riby – other than his ram winning the Beltex male champion in the sheep class competition – was watching Lorenzo the Flying Frenchman perform in the main ring at the Harrogate show ground.

Riby has exhibited at the fair since 1972 and has seen this annual event evolve from an industry trade fair promoting tractors to the sort of festival that would feature one of France’s most skilled equestrians on the bill.

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New Zealand v Alsace and South Africa v the Loire, the same grape in different areas brings very different rewards

Te Whare Ra Toru, Marlborough, New Zealand 2022 (£20.35, lescaves.co.uk ) The wine world has a bit of a thing for events in which the wines of a supposed upstart from the New World are tasted alongside the wines that inspired them in the classic European regions. It’s a habit that dates back to the Judgement of Paris, a tasting that still looms large in the wine trade imaginary despite taking place almost half a century ago in 1976, when a Paris-based British merchant, Steven Spurrier, got a panel of French experts to blind taste a bunch of California wines against the very best of Bordeaux and Burgundy. Sensationally, two California wines came out on top, announcing the US region’s arrival as a serious fine wine player on the world stage. The most recent event of this type I attended pitted a set of wines from New Zealand against their equivalents in Alsace. “Alsace Rocks, New Zealand Rolls”, was designed to be more instructive than competitive, but it certainly showed how far top aromatic New Zealand whites, such as Toru, have come.

Domaine Zind Humbrecht Heimbourg Pinot Gris, Alsace 2017 (£32, thewinesociety.com ) The gorgeous aromatic ripple of tropical and temperate fruit (pineapple and mango meets apple and pear) of Toru’s Alsace-alike blend of gewürztraminer, pinot gris and riesling set the tone for a tasting in which the New Zealand wines performed much stronger than this Francophile expected, with many of the New Zealand bottles matching (if never quite out-matching) the equivalent Alsace wine they were tasted against. The Toru, for example, was not at all out of place in the company of the immaculate silkily textured honeyed blend of 13 grapes from one of my favourite Alsace producers: Marcel Deiss Berckem 2018 (£26.95, leaandsandeman.co.uk ). And it was a surprise for me, too, that Prophets Rock Pinot Gris 2020 from Central Otago, with its sumptuous succulent pear and quince and gentle floral tones, was able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the luxuriously plush but fluent wine made from the same grape variety, pinot gris, by one of the world’s most celebrated white winemakers, Olivier Humbrecht in Alsace.

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A small ambitious team, classic cooking techniques and a pie to sigh over – the Lark is ascending

Lark, 6A Angel Hill, Bury St Edmunds IP33 1UZ ( larkrestaurant.co.uk ). Snacks £2.50-£7, plates £11-£28, desserts £10-£12, wines from £25 a bottle

Some words are more abused than others. “Special” is one of those. Russia’s murderous war on Ukraine is apparently a “special military operation”. The Royal Mail’s “special delivery” service invariably means you’ll receive a card through your door from someone who couldn’t be arsed to ring the bell, even though you were in, telling you to go and collect your package from the post office. And then there’s the use of special on menus, which may indicate that the kitchen ordered too much of something nobody wanted to eat, and now it’s been repurposed as a soup still nobody wants to eat.

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The actor and host of Bake Off: The Professionals talks about her love of soggy bottoms, what she ate while on Strictly and her favourite Nando’s

I have a massive sweet tooth. I don’t think I’ve ever met a cake or a biscuit I didn’t like. So I was really chuffed to get this gig [presenting Bake Off: The Professionals ]. I imagine somewhere there’s a montage of all the times that I was caught snaffling things I shouldn’t. And you know what? I don’t care. I regret nothing.

I love cereal so much. I have to be careful what I have in the house because otherwise a box of Frosted Shreddies is not going to last longer than a night. It’s always been a celebratory thing, or commiseratory as well. Some comics if they’ve had a bad gig, they’ll buy a bottle of vodka on the way home. I would buy a packet of Fruit ’n Fibre and two pints of milk.

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Wall-to-wall cookery shows and recipe books can undermine our confidence. It’s time to be kind to yourself in the kitchen

I was tired and a bit overworked, and that’s when it happened: the lid fell off the jar at the wrong moment, and all was lost. Or was it? For a long, despondent minute, I considered the disaster before me. In my best Le Creuset pan on the top of the oven were the sausages I was turning into a pasta sauce for dinner, and about 10 times the amount of chilli flakes I’d intended to add. Oh no! Thoughts of takeaway pizza floated into my mind. But I hated to waste both the sausages and my efforts up to this point, so I decided to plough on regardless. Some like it hot, and we two are among them. How bad could it be, really?

The answer is: not bad at all. I might not have fed it to guests, but we both ended up having seconds. It was … memorable, I guess, and later on, as I loaded the dishwasher and worried vaguely about what I might cook tomorrow in this, the busiest and craziest of weeks, I got to thinking about kindness in the kitchen – kindness to myself, in this instance. Don’t worry. I’m not about to turn into some gruesome self-help guru. All I mean is that, sometimes, I should give myself a break. In fact, we all should. If perfection is elusive, equally, seeming catastrophe is rarely that. Most dishes can be salvaged. Nearly everything is edible, in extremis. Delia Smith – Delia bloody Smith! – loved the cake I panic-baked for her when I interviewed her last year . It hadn’t risen properly. As I took it out of my bag, it resembled nothing so much as a house brick wrapped in foil. But as I heard later – she said this to her audience during an event at Conway Hall in London, and some of them were kind enough to email me afterwards – she and Michael, her husband, devoured every last cardamom-scented crumb.

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Having friends over to eat is part of who we are, with set-piece encounters feeding into plays, films and books. Talk of their demise is premature

I know. The dinner party is always over, or about to be so. In my long(ish) life, the announcement of its passing has been made several times , and on each occasion it has somehow risen from its bed like Lazarus, and tottered once more into the kitchen, wooden spoon in hand.

Still, I’m minded now to regard the situation as extremely serious: the patient, it would seem, really is in intensive care, and may not live to see another lasagne, nor even a small bowl of olives. Nigella Lawson, who is effectively the Mother of the Nation these days, says she’s out of the habit of throwing them – and if she is, so must we be. For where Nigella treads, we follow, breathing deeply the better to pick up the heady scent of cardamom.

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A strawberry and scotch bonnet jam to serve with meats or cheese, and a refreshing watermelon and tomato salad with hibiscus and citrus dressing

I have always believed that the best way to enjoy fruit – especially summer fruit at its peak – is to bite into that sweet or sour, tart and juicy flesh. But there is something to be said for cooking with fruit, preserving its essence in jams or pairing it with chillies, florals, citrus, acid and spice for an explosion of flavours. Here are two fine examples of how I love to celebrate summer fruit in savoury dishes.

Africana: Treasured Recipes and Stories from Across the Continent, by Lerato Umah-Shaylor, is published by HQ, HarperCollins, at £22. To order a copy for £19.36, visit guardianbookshop.com . Follow Lerato on instagram @leratofoods

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