No Set Menu

Today I’m asking the big question: why might your favourite food be a hard sell… and what can a festival do about it? Just because you like a particular ingredient, or even love it doesn't mean anyone else will. And what if you're part of a community and see that the people making this food are struggling, and you have an inkling that you know how to fix this. What do you do? How can you help? What are the best steps to take? Well in this episode we’re looking at the success a goat meat festival held in Trinidad in October called…wait for it…GOATOBER, and speaking with the organiser Franka Philip and her work promoting it.

Sometimes as cooks, chefs, bakers and makers, we can appear to the outside world as big softies, barely equipped to cope with life outside of food. But what if there was a war around you, how would that affect the way you cook, you bake, you live, you sleep even? Today I’m speaking with the Lebanese Palestinian food writer living in Beirut, Hisham Assaad, about his new cookbook “Taboon: Sweet & Savoury Delights from the Lebanese Bakery” out with Smith Street Books. And we’re talk about baking and clowning and cooking during a war.

Today’s big question is: what if you up-sticks and move to France, buy a crazily dilapidated but hugely beautiful old house, what are the challenges you’ll face? Listen and you’ll find out where it can go wrong, what the locals will think of you, and whether you can be too old to even contemplate it. I’m speaking with the fabulous Debora Robertson, longtime Telegraph columnist, BBC broadcaster, with a passion for both food and gardening. Debora is author of “Notes from a Small Kitchen Island”, a beautiful cookbook and life-story out with publisher Michael Joseph. It’s filled with simple but sophisticated recipes that I cook from, and admire, so much. Listen and be happy!