Midnight Chicken: & Other Recipes Worth Living For

Women cannot live by toast alone - and although it might feel, at some points in your life, as though the effort to make anything else might kill you, that will not last.

This is what you learn to see, when you sit alone in a forbidden place, reading faster than you can turn the pages You learn how very strange and lovely the world is and can be. How there is always more to find out, how there is nothing new under the sun - and that you are not alone, not really, not ever, with a book.

There’s also some really solid kneading to be done here, which is the best cure for a troubled heart: hands in the dough, window wide, something jaunty on the radio.

This may have looked like a cookbook, but what it really is is an annotated list of things worth living for: a manifesto of moments worth living for. Dinner parties, and Saturday afternoons in the kitchen, and lazy breakfasts, and picnics on the heath; evenings alone with a bowl of soup, a or a heavy pot of clams for one. The bright clean song of lime and salt, and the smoky hum of caramel-edged onions. Soft goat's cheese and crisp pastry. A six-hour ragù simmering on the stove, a glass of wine in your hand. Moments, hours, mornings, afternoons, days. And days worth living for add up to weeks, and weeks worth living for add up to months, and so on and so on, until you've unexpectedly built yourself a life worth having: a life worth living.

I love recipes like this, reading them and making them. There’s something brilliant about a recipe that doesn’t ask too much of you; a recipe, in fact, where getting it exactly right would be exactly wrong; a recipe you can fiddle with, and tend to when you remember.

He taught me to enjoy cooking, to delight in cooking, to use cooking as a kind of framework of joy on which you could hang your day. A breakfast worth getting out of bed for. Second breakfast. Elevenses. Lunch. Afternoon tea. Dinner as glorious reward for a day done well, or consolation for a day gone badly, or just a plain old celebration of still being here, of having survived another one. Supper. A midnight feast.

It’s not terribly fashionable any more to like bread. It’s sort of lucky that I’ve never managed to be fashionable, because I’ve always loved bread: I love it wholeheartedly and overwhelmingly. Sometimes I think there is no meal – no matter how thoughtful or beautiful or delicious

And I was scared, and I was stuck. It was ridiculous, laughable: sometimes anxiety is. Often it is. It doesn't make it any less real, or any less difficult to manage.

Taste the soup now, and season with salt: you’ll need less than if you add it any earlier. Ladle into bowls, and swirl (if you like) with a tiny dash of cream. For restaurant-style pretty, spoon the cream into the centre, and swirl it with the wrong end of a spoon. Scatter the pistachio-pepper mixture in a line straight down the middle of the bowl, bisecting the pretty cream pattern, and grate over a very fine dusting of Parmesan. Notice how completely beautiful it is. Serve, and sit with the dark burn of November earth, and the musty taste of late autumn, and the fierce bite of the pepper, and feel warmed, as if you were sitting by a bonfire in the field with the flames rising in front of you, and your best friends beside you, and the whole world waiting for you.

I walk through the supermarket convinced that this time will be the time live up to my trolley, and it never is, and the fridge is where all those good intentions go to die, where they stay until I fish their grim corpses out of the bottom of the vegetable drawer.

In my life I have had several moments of total clarity. Not revelations, necessarily, but times and places where I have, fleetingly, felt that everything in the world was more real than usual, and that everything was brighter and truer and clearer than ever before.

The feeling of eating the last oatcake has stuck with me: a funny mix of joy and salt and homesickness, and sharp cheese, and knowing how far I was from an oatcake shop, and my grandparents, and the green-grey moorland. There’s no landscape like the Staffordshire moorlands (they aren’t moors; that’s important). On the edge of a national park, but not nearly so beloved, the earth dips and swoops in lazy curves that seem almost-but-not-quite like somewhere you’ve been before. I wasn’t born there, and didn’t grow up there, and yet some part of me – some mining ancestor deep in the bone – always knows: this is where the bones come from. This is a kind of home.

The scrubby, grim little kitchen of a Tiny Flat in the East End can be an absolute paradise, and everything in it can be tinged with glory, because for this minute we are alive, and looking, and that is as much as anyone can ask for.

Wherever you are, and whatever you are doing, you probably have a minute - ten minutes, even - to step outside and breathe in and out.

Adventures remain; wheat fields remain; the stars remain. Somewhere outside the city, it goes on. It must. They say this kind of thing doesn't happen any more, and perhaps they are right, but I hope they aren't. It would break my heart.