I often buy lamb from The Wensleydale Butcher, who source animals from across the Dales. £75-ish, depending on the time of the year, will buy half a lamb butchered and vacuum-sealed into plenty of useful cuts. It’s remarkably good value, and the meat comes with cast-iron provenance.

‘Half a lamb’ means exactly that, and it arrives with a pack of about three or four hundred grams of liver. I normally chuck that straight into the freezer and forget about it.

But that’s not right. So, getting all Fergus Henderson nose-to-tail eating, I fished some liver out of its icy tomb and set to work.

This is a quick and easy kebab recipe for a simple lunch. It takes about twenty minutes to pull together

Firstly, the liver. You need about 350g for four healthy skewers.

If your liver is from a well-reared lamb, from a farm that looks after its stock, your liver is going to be fine and you don’t need to go to the bother of soaking it in milk. This is normally done to take the edge off the taste – it helps the liver flavour to mellow out, but in this case, you’re going to be hitting it with some serious spices anyway, so the benefits are debatable. If you want to, just pour some milk over the liver and let it stand for twenty minutes before tipping the now-horrifyingly bloody milk away.

Right about now is the best time to start thinking about getting some things together for Christmas, and this chutney is one of those things you’ll be quietly smug that you made way back in November when you spoon some of it onto a plate next to some cheese during that weird, dead week between Christmas and New Year.

This is a traditional recipe that’s described as ‘pub style’, which I think means that it’s got beer in it and nothing more. It makes a huge amount, at least four big jars, but recipes like this aren’t really practical to make in very small quantities, so be prepared to give some away.

Preparation is simple. All you need is a big pan and a bit of patience with a knife.

It’s a strange time to be a baker.

Our isolation encourages a regression to more basic needs, more elemental things. We remember, slowly remember, some of the things we used to do, the way things used to be. Necessity is a great leveler and an excellent coach, and the sudden resurgence of people discovering the joy of a fresh loaf of bread all over my Instagram feed is something truly wonderful. It reminds me that technical proficiency is merely an affectation. Simply ‘doing’ is the answer. The search for perfection is not.

Doing, learning, doing again, and again and again.

I feel lucky to have some experience of baking bread, but this is one of those areas where you’re always the student. There’s always something to learn, the key is to just start. Don’t they say that the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, or failing that, today? The same applies to learning how to bake a loaf of bread.

There’s power in that dough, power more potent than the mere flour, water and salt it contains. It teaches you to care, to nurture, to wait, to be patient. It forces you to stop and listen, to feel, to be cautious, to be bold. There’s nothing like it. It’s elemental and basic, alive and ancient.

Where to start? Here’s a list of resources and recipes to get you going. You don’t need much – flour, water, salt at the bare minimum, yeast or baking soda, a book or two.

Recipes

1. Basic soda bread – the easiest and quickest bread you can hope to make. This is a reliable River Cottage recipe.
2. Standard loaf of bread – nothing fancy, nothing pretentious, just a solid, reliable loaf of bread. Get the hang of this, and the variations are limitless – different flours, different additions such as seeds or oats.
3. Bagels – more advanced, but surprisingly easy, and very satisfying. Infinitely better than supermarket approximations. Bake these as a nod to the incredible people of NYC.
4. Naan – another straightforward and easy recipe that you can use to scoop up a curry or as a substantial wrap.
5. Sourdough – OK, hard to escape sourdough bread at the moment. Shortages of yeast have pushed a lot of people into giving it a go, with spectacular results in a lot of cases. Sourdough isn’t for the feint of heart. It’s a long and involved process that requires patience and judgement, but it’s by far the most rewarding bread to bake. Bargain on a week to get a starter established and ready to go. Use the method here to make your starter, and then flip to this recipe to make your loaf.
6. Scandinavian cinnamon and cardamom buns – and why not?

Books

There are lots of good books about breadmaking. Here are a few of the ones I use all the time.

1. Bread: River Cottage Handbook No. 3 – a small but mighty book, a tenner well spent. The basic recipe in here is the mothership for everything else. Open, accessible, well-informed. Start here.
2. The Handmade Loaf, Dan Lepard – a wonderful book, full of reliable and adventurous recipes, including a particularly good milk loaf and an excellent sourdough. 
3. Tartine Bread, Chad Robertson – I have very conflicting opinions about this particular book. It’s both a nemesis and a muse for me, something that’s helped me in subtle and important ways, whilst also haunting every sourdough loaf I’ve ever made. Every loaf, no matter how it turns out, has a nagging comparison to the Tartine country loaf to accompany it. It’s the gold standard, and it’s a stunning book, beautifully written and a great thing to have around. There’s lots of baling wisdom here. One for further exploration.
4. Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe’s Best Artisan Bakers, Dan Leader – encyclopedic and authoritative, this is a stunning overview of continental bread styles. There’s lots to try here, particularly loaves from Germany and Eastern Europe. Worth the investment

My recommendation would be to start with a soda bread, then move onto the basic yeasted bread recipe above. If you want to jump in and buy a book, the River Cottage book is a very solid starting point.

Stay at home. Bake bread.

Some new ground for two of Leeds’ existing and best-known independents, Sarto is a restaurant collaboration between the people behind The Brunswick on North Street, up past The Reliance, and the frankly awesome Laynes Espresso just outside the station.

It focuses squarely on pasta, and was born out of a series of test pop-up events that clearly showed the demand. Sarto serves a decent variety of fresh pasta dishes at pretty good prices in a space in Munro House, close to Leeds College of Music and the BBC.

The food is excellent. Fresh pasta, cooked well, with care and attention. Big bowls of rigatoni dressed sparsely with slow cooked shoulder of lamb and mint, fettuccine with wild mushrooms and cream, spike with marsala, big bowls of sourdough bread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar … you get the idea.

New York, New York. The king of cities. Bustling, frenetic, funny, edgy, and with literally thousands of places to eat.

Here’s a quick round up of the places we ate on a recent short break in the New York, based in the much-recommended neighbourhood of Williamsburg, over in Brooklyn, about five minutes ride from Manhattan on the L train.

First off, the grandfather of New York pizza is Di Fara’s in Brooklyn, but Brooklyn is a massive place, and after we realised it’d take the best part of an hour on the subway to get there, then having to face into an infamously slow and somewhat unpredictable service, we decided to give the relatively new Williamburg branch a go instead. Housed in a really good food market type place on N 3rd Street, this outpost is said to be the twin of it’s more famous brother, and it did not disappoint. I’d go as far as saying that this was the best pizza I’ve had outside of Italy. Light, and tasty dough, with a good zing of acidity through it, topped with perfect combinations of ingredients and excellent tomato sauce and slices of mozzarella. So good we ordered more.

Di Fara’s pizza, Williamsburg

These little custard tarts present something of a problem. They’re best cooked very quickly, at very high temperatures, so that the top and the edges scorch in an attractive way. That means that ordinary ovens probably aren’t going to cut it, but that pizza oven out in my back garden might just.

That thing is a beast. It hits 450c with ease, a flame rolling over the inside of the dome to cook a pizza through in about two minutes. It makes short work of a custard tart.

I experimented with a pack of ordinary, shop-bought puff pastry. It’s a wonderful product – consistent, dependable, quick, and it’s well worth having a pack or two stashed away in the freezer. Later attempts using homemade puff pastry, using this recipe, were better but far less convenient. There’s a great recipe for puff pastry here.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a book, a massive seven hundred and sixty-seven page hulk of a book about Nordic food, perhaps unimaginatively entitled The Nordic Cookbook.

My short review is that it’s well worth thirty quid of anybody’s money, and this is the first thing I’ve cooked from it and also one of the chief reasons I bought it.

Scandinavian baking is excellent. There’s an easy path between bread and cake that fits well into my way of cooking, and these cinnamon buns, rolled sweet pastry laced with cardamom and stuffed with butter and sugar are a superb example. They’re common across all of the Scandinavian countries in one form or another, and they’re fairly easy and forgiving to make.

Start with some milk, 330ml, in a pan along with 150g of butter and a tablespoon of ground cardamom. Heat the milk through until the butter has melted, then let it cool back down to about room temperature. Stirring helps to speed this up.

In a large bowl, combine together 750g of strong white flour and 20g of fast action yeast. The big, massive book states to use 50g, but that seems like an awful lot, and I prefer a slower rise to allow for better maturity of the dough anyway, so I cut my yeast quantity right back. It just took longer to rise.

Add 125g of caster sugar to the flour, a teaspoon of salt, and crack in an egg before pouring in the cooled milk and mixing to a rough dough.

Turn the dough out onto a work surface and knead for about ten minutes, until the dough is smooth and silky. Return it to a clean bowl, cover with a tea towel and let it kick back for an hour or so until doubled in size.

When the dough has risen, tip it out onto the work surface. It shouldn’t stick too much, but if it does, dust it with some flour. Shape the dough into a rectangle and roll it out to about 60x40cm.

Next, the filling. This is very simple.

Take about 200g of very soft butter and spread it evenly across the entirety of the dough. You may find that, whilst using a knife or a spatula appears more seemly, using your hands is far more effective.

Sprinkle the butter evenly with 100g of sugar. I use an uneven mix of soft brown, soft dark brown and demerara. Finally, sprinkle the sugar with two tablespoons of cinnamon powder.

Roll the dough up into a long cylinder by pushing the nearest edge away from you, and slice the roll into twenty even pieces with a sharp knife. Place each of the slices into a paper bun case and let them rise for about half an hour.

The bun cases are important. If you just leave the slices on a baking sheet, the butter inside them is going to just run out and all over the bottom of your oven. The paper case catches the butter and helps it to soak back into the dough, resulting in a better bun. Simple.

Brush the tops of the buns with an egg and milk solution (one egg, and a splash of milk), and sprinkle over yet more sugar if you want, then bake at 200c for 10-12 minutes or until golden and rich.

Eat at least one whilst still warm, with coffee, in the sunshine.

Chicken livers are extremely good for you.

They’re a rich source of protein, packed with iron and vitamins. They’re good for your brain, good for your fertility if you’re a woman, and great recovery food after a tough workout.

They should be top of the shopping list, but instead, they’re criminally underused, relegated to sad little packs in the supermarket fridge with all the other weird bits that nobody wants to buy.

This is a great tragedy, a travesty. Chicken livers are delicious, and worth so much more than a good blitzing to form a pate, although that’s a fine and noble thing to do with them.

I sometimes buy a pack of chicken livers, fry them off with nothing more than a little salt and pepper and eat them for lunch over the course of the next few days. Three or four lunches for about a quid? Thanks very much.

And yes, they’re ridiculously cheap, cheap out of sync with the massive flavour punch they deliver.

This recipe for a very quick, simple and easy ragu plays on the basic earthiness of the humble chicken liver. It takes about fifteen minutes to cook from start to finish and weighs in at a good chunk less than £1 a head.

Start with a standard 400g supermarket pack of chicken livers, and trim out the fat and sinew with a pair of scissors or a small knife. Drop the trimmed livers into a sieve and rinse them under the cold tap to get rid of any gunk or blood, then transfer them to a bowl and soak them in some milk. This seems like a bit of an urban myth, but the milk really does help to improve the flavour, and it makes the livers silky and tender.

While the livers are in the milk, slice up an onion and four cloves of garlic, and fry them in a little olive oil until starting to turn golden, then drain the livers and add them to the pan, tossing them around to cook evenly.

Liver cooks quickly, so be sure not to over-fry. Be careful, also to cook them through properly. Chicken blood is not something you want to be eating raw.

Season with salt and pepper, and add a teaspoon of dried mixed herbs, and then a can of chopped tomatoes. Stir gently and let the sauce bubble away while you cook some spaghetti.

When the spaghetti is cooked, fish it out of the water and transfer it straight to the the pan with the sauce, turning and moving it around to coat it evenly. If the sauce seems too thick, add a splash of the spaghetti cooking water. Finish with a handful of chopped parsley and some grated parmesan and serve immediately.

This recipe is adapted from the brilliant Cooking on a Bootstrap by Jack Monroe, which is worth a few pounds of anybody’s money, and will most likely save you many more.

I’ve been making bread for a long time, mainly using a simple recipe that I know by heart.

It’s very straightforward – a kilo of flour, 600ml of water, 20g of salt and 10g of yeast.

It makes an unpretentious, dependable loaf, but has the flexibility to take on new forms. Substituting half the flour for wholemeal, or mixing it up with a hundred grammes of rye or a couple of handfuls of oats makes the finished loaf very different, but borne of the same simple recipe of a kilo of flour and 600ml of water.

I’ve strayed all over the place, of course. I’ve bought book after book about baking bread, and tried dozens of different methods. High hydration loaves (don’t bother), sourdough, milk loaves, baguettes, all of them. All have their place. All are good, but still the simple recipe remains a backstop in my kitchen.

A kilo of flour and 600ml of water.

Some things are best left as they are. Some things don’t need to be messed with, don’t need to be improved, and this is one of those things. It isn’t fancy, it isn’t artisanal, but it is good and honest.

I’ve done one thing, made one tiny change to this decades old routine, and it’s worked. It’s made things better.

I habitually make bread on a Sunday afternoon, late afternoon, maybe at about four or five PM. The challenge is to get everything out of the oven by half ten at the latest, allowing enough time for a good, long, slow rise so that the flavour of the dough has time to develop as the yeast works its magic. It can be a push, and there are times when I wait and wait for a batch of loaves to cook, desperate to get to bed ready for Monday.

But there’s another way to get that long, slow fermentation. It gives better results with less of the hassle.

Using a pre-ferment, or a sponge, solves these problems.

It’s very simple.

The night before, or even early on the same morning I want to bake, I mix together half of the flour with all the water and all the yeast to make a very wet and loose slurry. The loose dough sits and gently bubbles away for many hours, slowly fermenting and developing flavour. When it comes time to bake, I add the other half of the flour, the salt, and any other ingredients that are going into that particular batch before mixing it together into a pliable dough and kneading it out.

This shortens the active baking time considerably, because the new dough made with the old pre-ferment only needs one bulk rise instead of two, so the process can be up to a couple of hours shorter. The first stage, overnight, counts as one bulk rise, and it’s then that the dough develops its flavour.

This method isn’t sourdough, although it shares some of the characteristics, and a slug of sourdough starter in the initial sponge along with the yeast works wonders. A sourdough is raised with only wild yeast, but it shares the same low, slow fermentation period to wake the yeast and bulk up the dough.

The end result of a dough leavened with a pre-ferment is excellent. The dough is easier to handle, more supple, and has an improved spring in the oven, exploding out of the tin or off of the baking sheet. The finished bread has an even crumb and a complex and deep taste, with a mild tang of sourness to it.

It’s well worth the effort, but it needs organisation. It’s also best to make this type of loaf in bulk. I bake this in batches using 4kg of flour, and multiply everything up accordingly. Kneading is an effort, of course, but it’s worth it. Another trick – use a homebrewers’ fermentation bin to mix, rest and rise the dough. They’re cheap, enormous, come with a good lid and you can see through the sides, so it’s easy to keep track of how well your dough is rising.

Sometimes, little changes make a whole world of difference.

A couple of years ago, I bought a pizza oven, a proper one, one that took four people to lift into place. I burn kiln-dried logs in it, and it hits almost 500c. It cooks a pizza in about two minutes, maybe less, and those pizzas are like nothing else I’ve ever tasted. The wood is alchemical, it performs magic, its smoke and heat grabbing hold of the food, enveloping it, transforming it. Later, when the fire burns down and the heat seeps away a little, I often roast a chicken in the oven, next to the glowing coals, an hour and a half or so of gentle, smokey heat. It’s the best way I’ve ever found of roasting a bird.

I’ve been converted to wood-fired cooking. It isn’t easy, not in the slightest. Controlling the fire and choosing the right moment to cook is a balancing act, a game of judgement and skill, one which I often get wrong. But that’s half the fun, that and smelling of smoke for the rest of the day.

More skilled people than me do the same thing far better. There are places locally that really know how to command a wood fired grill. Ox Club in Leeds comes immediately to mind, but the undisputed king of wood-fired cooking is Bittor Arginzoniz, owner and chef of his restaurant, Etxebarri, in a small village an hour southeast of Bilbao in Spain.

This is a book about Arginzoniz’s restaurant, and about his approach to both his fire and his food. Some books are worth just having around because they’re beautiful things, articles that make your life richer and enhanced. This is one such book, a heavy, big book of commanding presence and gravity. It’s a serious work, a serious effort, a book that speaks of a passion and a love of simplicity and straightforwardness, qualities to be treasured and guarded.

Etxebarri is the story of a restaurant, a chef, and a fire. It’s a simple tale, one of provenance, precision, authenticity, love, a book that describes the elevation of simple fire and simple ingredients into dishes of great inventiveness and heart. The recipes here are not necessarily complex, relying instead on first-rate ingredients, but critically, they require a command of the flame that will defeat me. Arginzoniz is often referred to as The Fire Whisperer, and it’s exactly this ability to control and feel a dancing, living flame that allows him to produce food sometimes described somewhat glibly as ‘the best barbecue in the world’.

I was lost in Etxebarri, caught up in its pages. It’s a wonderful book.