This rich, Portuguese-Goan pork stew has a festive-looking, spicy-sour red sauce and is often served up at celebration meals, making it a spectacular alternative Christmas centrepiece

While traditional British Christmas food is rich enough to send you to sleep, in Goa they prefer to celebrate in more lively style with a feast at which the centrepiece is often sorpotel – pork in a festive, red sauce that’s hot with chillies and sour with the region’s beloved coconut vinegar. It’s best made several days ahead – “This is a dish that requires time,” notes Mumbai-based caterer Pauline Dias – and is traditionally served with steamed rice cakes, but it’s also delicious with rice.

Prep 30 min
Cook 2¼ hr
Chill Overnight+
Serves 4

A delicious way to poach a chicken, bollito-style, with a range of flavours to complement it

Before she moved, Ginia lived in a fifth-floor flat in a 1920s block near Piazza Vittorio. And before she gave up cooking, she used to make a bollito every other Sunday. Once upon a time, that meant an almost full bollito misto alla Piemontese , as her father taught her to make it: beef (muscle, tail and tongue), also a whole chicken and cotechino sausage boiled separately, then served together, sliced and steaming hot, with a selection of sauces. But as the years went on and the house emptied – of children, also of her husband (she threw him out) – her bollito streamlined.

By the time I met Ginia, the bollito was half a chicken, or maybe a boneless beef rib known as scaramella . Not that there was any talk of food when we first met in the international bookshop near Termini station. Browsing side by side, she asked me what I thought of Iris Murdoch, looked appalled when I said I hadn’t read her, then walked over to the desk and ordered me a copy of The Sea, The Sea. Two weeks later she sent me a message in capital letters – “LIBRO ARRIVES, BOOKSHOP WED 10” – and, after picking it up, we went for coffee, the first of many. She also seemed appalled when I told her I wrote about food. “Of all the subjects”. But then later we did talk about food – if the story involved something sinister or salacious, or a pub. Which is how we arrived at the bollito, and her ex-husband’s insistence that for it to be true bollito, the raw meat must be put into boiling water, but how she used to start from cold and he never noticed the difference. And somehow we arrived at Fergus Henderson ’s way of poaching a chicken, which she was quite delighted by, and in return she gave me suggestions for the sauces for boiled meat, whether for a bollito or a single poached bird, which is one of my favourite meals. Ginia suggested two or three condiments, plus mustard, with a poached bird, the sauces, and all ideally served in a compartmentalised dish. Leftover sauces are a gift for future meals and the saviour of leftovers. Ginia now lives in Berlin near her daughter, reads avidly and never cooks.

This month’s Cop28 climate summit will focus on greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Governments need to take note

One of our era’s great and inconvenient truths is that global food production and the climate emergency are intimately linked. Drought, flood and other extreme weather events threaten farming ecosystems across the world. At the same time, greenhouse gas emissions from animal agriculture play a major role in global heating. We know that the default western diet, with its heavy emphasis on meat and dairy, is harming the planet. Eating habits in wealthy countries will have to change, and livestock numbers be reduced, if climate targets are to be met and vulnerable food systems saved.

At the end of the month, this message will be heard front and centre in the next round of the UN climate negotiations. At Cop28 in Dubai, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization will foreground the need to transform patterns of consumption and production if the goal of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C is to be met. The emphasis on the impact of food systems is welcome and overdue. For various reasons it has been badly neglected at previous summits.

Kufteh, or Iranian meatballs, in an Italian-American red sauce, and a California-style autumn fruit crumble

While I always loved food, it took many experiences to discover my own cooking and incorporate my Californian Iranian upbringing. I crave simple, delicious food, rather than anything overly complicated; I use what some may think is a ridiculous amount of herbs, have more vinegars than oils and prefer fruit-based desserts over chocolate. I want you to love these recipes, but what I really hope is that you take the nuggets of info and techniques, and integrate them into your own cooking routine.

Take your tastebuds Stateside with these smashed potatoes with ranch dressing, sweet potato pie with whipped cream, and quick biscuits with sausage gravy

From Spain last week to the big old United States this, I think I’m still on some kind of imaginary summer holiday road trip. That’s the power of food, though: it can take you to places that life and logistics prevent you from actually ever getting to. In my mind, then, here are three deliciously dialled-up diner dishes for which I’d turn off any highway.

Spicy lamb meatballs tucked into a jacket of fig, and a Levantine salad of chicken and grape with juice-soaked pitta

There’s a giant fig tree in our neighbour’s front garden, which we watch closely every year, waiting for the arrival of the fruit and our favourite season. Celebration is called for, and these spicy, lamb-stuffed figs are the best way to kick things off. We’re all for stretching a meal to feed the many, and a grape and chicken fattoush does just that. By adding crisp pitta at the last minute to soak up all the juices, you turn a simple salad into a summer showstopper.

Crisp, fragrant, Asian-spiced pork belly with a scotch bonnet apricot relish

It was in the Dordogne where my love for apricots began. I doubt I had ever tried one before (back then, we barely even knew what rocket was), but as I helped my exchange family’s grandmother make kilos of jam from the ripe, golden fruits, their sticky, sweet flesh and almond-scented kernels bewitched me. Apricots can be underwhelming in the UK, all dry and flavourless, so seek out a discerning greengrocer to get hold of the real deal. As much as I love apricots in puddings, they also lend a deeply fruity tang to savoury chutneys and relishes.

Spiced pork chops with apricot chutney, a nectarine and cucumber salad with a Korean chilli dressing, and roast beetroot, Georgian-style, in a plum dressing with blue cheese

I love cooking with stone fruit: it’s so versatile, and as happy to keep its shape (brushed with oil and chargrilled, for example) as it is to be taken to the point of collapse in a hot pan. Either way, its natural sweetness is ready to be dialled right up and used in all sorts of chutneys and dressings. Chutneys, especially, being so sweet, tend to keep well, too, so make more than you need to have to hand for a few meals ahead.

Enlarge / A vector ecologist displays a vial of live lone star ticks. (credit: Getty | Ben McCanna )

A little over a decade ago, researchers discovered that bites from lone star ticks could cause some people to develop a food allergy to meat and meat products —an allergic condition called alpha-gal syndrome (AGS) , which can vary from mild to life-threatening.

The condition is named after a carbohydrate called galactose-α-1,3-galactose (aka alpha-gal), which is commonly found on proteins in most mammals—with the important exception of primates, like humans. Alpha-gal shows up on all sorts of non-primate mammalian tissue, which means it's also in meat—such as pork, beef, rabbit, and lamb—and animal products, like milk and gelatin. Its presence on animal tissue is one of the big, long-recognized barriers to xenotransplantation—that is, transplanting pig hearts into people, for example. Human immune systems will, in part, reject the organ because of the presence of the foreign alpha-gal.

But, in recent years, researchers have also discovered that alpha-gal is in tick saliva . And, for reasons researchers still haven't worked out, some people bitten by ticks develop a type of antibody called anti-alpha-gal IgE . This antibody may help protect people from tick bites but also renders them allergic to anything with alpha-gal—i.e., mammalian meat and animal products. It's a double-edged sword that's been hypothesized to be an " allergic klendusity ."

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