In Perth’s nightlife precinct in the 1990s, I made a lot of sandwiches – but the sandwiches also made me

• Read more in the a job that changed me series

Delivering pizzas, with all due respect, was a cruisy gig that fit in with my uni commitments. It was 1998, for Pizza Hut at Como, a well-established suburb 15 minutes from Perth’s city centre. I blasted hip-hop through my car stereo and brought home cash tips and – if I was rostered until close – any pizzas that were unclaimed or undelivered that night. Between deliveries, drivers sat in the alley behind the shop and shot the breeze while folding pizza boxes.

The job’s biggest downside was that it didn’t pay much, especially once you factored in the costs of fuel and vehicle maintenance. So I applied for a job as a “sandwich artist” at Subway in Northbridge, Perth’s nightlife district. I figured that switching to a job where I was on my feet instead of on the road would significantly extend the life expectancy of my hand-me-down Mitsubishi Magna.

Tasty, spicy fritters to dip into coconut sambol as a snack or treat, or serve with avocado or egg for a more substantial supper

These warmly spiced fritters are inspired by the tikki-chaat carts found all over India, which sizzle fresh chickpea, potato or lentil patties on hot-plates until crisp, then slather them with chutneys. The coconut sambol ushers forth the flavours of south India – coconut, mustard seeds and lime; add a teaspoon of tamarind paste to increase the tartness, if you like. A good dollop of yoghurt is a must, and a fried egg or avocado on the side turns these fritters into a satisfying supper.

A deliciously humble lentil and spaghetti dish, and a meat-free riff on meatball pasta made with aubergine veggie-balls

Some plant-based pasta dishes are light, bright and summery – pesto genovese, tomato sauce, aglio e olio – but some have an umami and complexity that is normally associated with more carnal pleasures. Here are two. Pasta with lentils is a firm personal and family favourite – my mum and I make this dish whenever we fancy something really comforting, and the earthiness of the lentils plays against grassy olive oil and parsley, and the texture of the pasta. True cucina povera – a humble meal, and deliciously so. Veggie-balls are also great things. Polpette (normally translated as meatballs) is just balls (of anything pulped), after all. They can be made of white fish, oily fish or vegetables. I particularly love courgette for its bright, green, fresh flavour, and, above all, rich, velvety, chocolatey aubergine. Of course, you can eat them on their own, but I also love them through pasta, as a vegetarian riff on spaghetti and meatballs.

Cool, juicy pears, cold ice-cream, hot chocolate sauce and a crunchy garnish – the perfect pudding

It’s always slightly embarrassing to realise that you’ve missed a pop culture reference, even if it’s 162 years old, so I won’t dwell on the fact that until last week I was unaware of the existence of Offenbach’s 1864 operetta about Helen of Troy, La Belle Hélène, after which today’s dish is named. In any case, the great French chef Escoffier was so moved by it, or perhaps by its popularity among Parisian diners, to name this simple dessert of vanilla-scented poached pears topped with hot chocolate sauce after the work’s heroine, played by the comely Hortense Schneider.

Though other homages (he includes no fewer than five dishes with that name in his 1907 Guide Culinaire, none of which involve pears) may, like the music, have faded from public consciousness, this particular pairing, if you’ll forgive the pun, has stood the test of time. As Nigel Slater observes in Tender: Volume 2, “The marriage of pears and chocolate is extraordinary. It is as if they were made for each other.” This, I think, is the duo at its “most sumptuous”.

This offshoot of a New York favourite isn’t reinventing the wheel, but it does bring a touch of Gallic glam to the neighbourhood

A faux-French, cult-hit New York brasserie has opened in Neal’s Yard, deep in the hairy armpit of Covent Garden among alleyways where holistic therapy rooms, walk-in back rub spaces, Neal’s Yard Remedies and 26 Grains cafe are its immediate neighbours. The windchimes and the whiff of patchouli part the air round these parts, and the footfall is yoga pant-clad and hungry for hummus. Buvette, meanwhile, has brought a touch of Gallic glam to the neighbourhood, and is clearly aimed at the Emily in Paris generation with its totalement français menu featuring croque monsieur with roast mushrooms and gruyere, rillettes de saumon or salade niçoise with haricots verts and a mollet egg; there’s also a Macvin champagne and muscadet spritz, pastis on the rocks, warm scones with jam, and almond croissants.

This is the London arm of Jody Williams’ West Village gastrothèque, and its menu is a pretty card listing 25 dishes to choose from, none of them above £18. It clearly thinks it’s a hot, fresh, new thing, but I’m not sure it’s anything new at all. We used to call places that looked like this Café Rouge: that is, recognisably French, and by that I mean recognisable if you have a working GCSE knowledge of La Rochelle cafe life. It’s that version of French dining that won’t scare the horses, or at least the horses that the French haven’t minced coarsely and served in their own gastroduodenal canals with an exemplary homemade moutarde.

Poach your leeks to perfection, then pair with pickled pears and nutty miso

I have a great respect for the leek, which is possibly the most demanding vegetable in its need to be freshly cooked before consumption. A warm leek, fresh from the pot, is an ethereal, collapsing sigh of diaphanous veils, whereas cold it can all too easily become a slippery and almost slimy mess of hopelessness.

Jackson Boxer is chef/owner of Brunswick House, Vesper and Dove, all in London, and culinary director of Cowley Manor near Cheltenham and the Henrietta in London

The annual Taoist celebration is held in the ninth lunar month of the Chinese calendar. During the nine-day vegetarian festival – also known as the Nine Emperor Gods festival – worshippers abstain from eating meat, consume only vegetarian food and perform rituals to cleanse body and mind

I wait each year for my cumquat tree to fruit. Then I make Mum’s jam

It’s citrus season, and the trees of my streets are heavy with the bright balls of fruit. My son sometimes picks me a lemon or two on his way home from school, and I help myself to the basket of limes that hang from the fence of a nearby house. The potted plant on my balcony fruited early this season, and for weeks I watched as the hundreds of small green cumquats slowly ripened. I finally picked them when they were fattened with juice and seeds and colour, the cat squatting on the ground to watch. When I dropped a cumquat she sniffed at the skin and turned away, as if sensing the sharpness of its flesh.

Since my daughter moved out several years ago, my household has shrunk. It is now only my son and me. And the cat. A scratchy, sullen creature who delights in ignoring us both unless we are sitting in the seat she believes is hers. My son has begun cooking for himself, and so I find my services in the kitchen required less often. Except for the yearly making of cumquat jam.

This moreish, flapjack-style oaty bake, flavoured with maple syrup and dotted with sour cherries, works as well for dessert as it does for breakfast

I’ve been making versions of these baked oats ever since discovering Heidi Swanson’s recipe in Super Natural Every Day. This is my favourite store-cupboard version, for when stone fruit and berries have slipped out of season. Morello cherries are a dark, tart variety of sour cherry, with an intensity of flavour and bright acidity that stand up particularly well to baking. I love them here paired with almonds and coconut drinking milk (the light kind sold in cartons, not the rich tinned variety). The cherries I use are whole fruit in syrup, which I drain and dot over the oats – they remain distinct while becoming deliciously jammy as they bake. Almost any fruit compote or jam will work here, though, so choose your favourite.

There’s something refreshing about unfiltered or unfined wines. We filter through a selection …

Centuries ago, Geoffrey Chaucer observed that “ther is no newe gyse that it nas old”. This truth – that there is nothing new under the sun – certainly applies to wine: every year, a well-documented or ancient viticultural practice is repackaged for a mainstream that greets it giddily as an innovation. Orange wine! Wine in kegs! Chilled reds! And, in 2026, cloudy wine, courtesy of Marks & Spencer’s peachy-opaque organic rosé, Trouble (a name that means “cloudy” in French.

Trouble is the first cloudy still wine available in a British supermarket, a development that has seemed inevitable since pét nat – pétillant naturel – hit the big time; it’s an ancestral method of making sparkling wine that involves bottling before fermentation has finished. Typically, pét nats are not disgorged (that is, the dead yeast cells left over from fermentation are not removed), which is what gives them a cloudy appearance. They are also often fresh and tangy, so they suit warm weather, but it’s hard to imagine a better pairing for a pizza takeaway on an autumn evening, and without prosecco’s divisive sherbety notes, to boot. (That said, look out for rustic, cloudy col fondo – bottle fermented, undisgorged prosecco – a hazy, lively and bracing take on the nation’s most popular fizz.) M&S, ever quick on the uptake, has an own-label English rosé pét nat (currently out of stock), while Tesco sells a pét nat chardonnay from Argentina.

From batch-cooked dal and chicken barley to sticky toffee pudding, these are the cosy dishes that make October evenings at home feel special

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After a summer spent travelling here, there and everywhere, I am welcoming more time at home and bingeable telly with open arms. And, like a lot of the nation, I am obsessed with this season’s Celebrity Traitors. It is my achilles heel; so much so that, earlier this year, I politely declined an invite to a hot industry party because it clashed with the final, and there is no amount of free champagne or hobnobbing that would’ve got me off my sofa. The beauty of such shows is that they are on early enough to make an evening of it. Strictly has become our Saturday night family ritual, while my eldest will usually join us for Tuesday nights watching Bake Off. There are bowls of food, eaten by the spoonful, mugs of tea and endless biscuits. It’s a small, cosy ritual that makes the passing of summer feel a little less bleak.

For ease, I try to live by the rule of one meal for everyone. On nights when we eat on the sofa, I like to make something in advance that the girls can eat after school and that we can return to later on. Nigella Lawson’s chicken barley, for instance, is a firm favourite and, importantly, if a little less glamorously, it reheats well. The same goes for Laura Goodman’s mac’n’cheese, a surefire hit and a fixture in our house.

An umami-packed dish for when you need a flavour hit in a hurry

Here is a simple, practical recipe that I trust will be useful to many who don’t have the time for lengthy kitchen preparations. Boil the spaghetti as usual, drain it, and toss it with a little butter and parmesan. Then, for four, take a spoonful of meat extract and dissolve it in a small saucepan with just a few drops of boiling water. Pour the meat extract over the pasta, stir and serve. You will be pleasantly surprised by the exquisite flavour the pasta acquires – achieved with such a negligible investment of time.

This is a roughly word-for-word translation of an Italian recipe for spaghetti con l’estratto di carne (spaghetti with meat extract). It is another dish from Ada Boni’s Il Talismano della Felicità (The Talisman of Happiness), which was published in English for the first time last month and, according to the food writer and editor Angela Frenda, is “still considered one of the most precise and accurate of all cookbooks”.

A thrifty and delicious crumble-like autumnal treat, a bit like a cobbler … or a buckle … or a grunt …

We have a family tradition of making our daughter a fruit pie of some sort for her first day of school each September. Last year, it was a simple apple pie, but we intend to make our way through the myriad heritage desserts, from crumbles and crisps to cobblers, buckles, pandowdys, grunts, slumps and sonkers. This year, we made a brown betty, a wonderful, crumble-like dessert made with stale bread. We kept things seasonal with apples and blackberries from the garden, but any combination of fruit works really. I sweetened this one with maple syrup, but use your sweetener of choice: each adds its own unique flavour.

Celebrate seasonal British-grown produce with four easy dishes guided by a natural ingredient in its prime

Early autumn is one of the most generous and comforting times of year to cook with British produce: sweetcorn is at its peak, squash begins to sweeten as the weather cools and bitter leaves such as radicchio provide balance to the season’s abundance. Today’s recipes are simple celebrations of British ingredients, using just a handful of carefully chosen components to let each vegetable shine. Whether it’s a buttery cheese tart for sharing; a fresh, herby corn salad; sweet roast squash with warm, spicy ’nduja; or bitter leaves lifted with a floral dressing, they all rely on cooking with ingredients at their seasonal peak and allowing nature to guide the menu.

Roast chicken thighs with roast squash, leeks and two punchy dressings

I’m delighted that it’s roasting tin season once again, and what better way to kick it off than with this chuck-it-in-the-oven sticky miso chilli chicken with squash and leeks? The sesame, miso, garlic and ginger marinade can go on the chicken ahead of time if you like (in which case, I’d include a squeeze of lime juice), but if you’re short on time, five minutes before cooking will do the trick. The vegetables cook under the chicken, in the manner of potatoes sitting under a rotisserie chicken, but with the added hit of flavour from the miso. Then, to make it really sing, there’s a punchy sesame, chilli and coriander dressing to finish.

A spicy Turkish dish with big flavours and big pasta, all topped with garlicky yoghurt sauce

Biber salçası is a Turkish paste made from concentrated cooked red peppers and salt. It comes in two varieties: acı (spicy) and tatlı (sweet). The hotter version adds a deep, umami heat to cumin-spiced lamb in this pasta recipe, which in Turkey is known as markana. Traditionally, markana is served with garlicky yoghurt and a generous drizzle of chilli butter enlivened with pul biber and sumac. With flavours this loud, it’s best to use a large pasta shape such as paccheri, because its cavernous middles can hold satisfying morsels of the filling.

Flavour Heroes: 15 Modern Pantry Ingredients to Amplify Your Cooking, by Gurdeep Loyal, is published by Quadrille at £27. To order a copy for £24.30, go to guardianbookshop.com

A pleasingly proper curry-filled pie with a zingy chutney to go with it

This is one of my all-time favourite pies, pie born out of the Midlands. While studying at University College Birmingham, the now head of department at the college of food there, Lewis Walker, and I were in digs together and regularly ended up in very late-night balti houses after big nights out. These pies remind me of that really special time. It wasn’t much before my university days when balti cooking emerged in 1970s Birmingham, apparently created as a way to appease the British palate of the time. Its roots are in Pakistani-Kashmiri cooking and the base of the curry always has to contain tomatoes, onions, peppers and chillies, although variations can be built on those foundations. They’re a wonderful celebration of multicultural Britain.

A smooth and satisfying soup in nine easy steps

Pumpkin soup, so delicious in theory – sweet, velvety, lightly autumnal – is so often disappointing in reality. Thin in flavour and consistency, thanks to squash’s high water content, it’s likely to make even the most conscientious cook regret not chucking those Halloween offcuts on the compost heap when they had the chance. This, I hope it goes without saying, is not that sort of pumpkin soup.

Prep 20 min
Cook 1 hr
Serves 4-6

This fantastic tart is a minor miracle invented by a legendary chef, yet it has very few ingredients and an intriguing technique for baking it

Often, the greatest dishes are made from very few ingredients and with pretty standard techniques, and this tart is one of them. It’s based on an old Frédy Girardet recipe that, despite his reputation as one of the all-time greats, calls only for a simple application of process to deliver a knockout result (which is one reason I put it in my latest book). A pastry case is spread with sugar and cream, then dotted with butter and sprinkled with cinnamon. The pastry is not blind baked, but filled and baked in a very hot oven. That sounds wrong, but it is not: a fierce heat is needed to bake the pastry under its filling and to meld the cream, sugar and butter. A pinch of flour is mixed with the sugar and, as it all boils up, that smidgen of flour holds everything together as it bubbles and reduces until it takes on the appearance of condensed milk while the pastry cooks and toasts at the edges. I still use Girardet’s quantities because, unsurprisingly, they work perfectly. Merci, chef.

Henry Harris is chef/co-owner of Bouchon Racine, London EC1. His book, The Racine Effect, is published by Quadrille at £40. To order a copy for £36, go to guardianbookshop.com