The Farm Table: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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First-generation farmer and chef Julius Roberts shares honest tales of farming life and easy, thoughtful dishes to reconnect us to nature and the seasons. Here are the tools to achieve beautifully crisp crackling and the juiciest meat – you need to start the recipe the night before, but it is the drying overnight in the fridge that achieves that heavenly salty crunch. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from.

Place the pork on a baking tray lined with baking parchment and pat the skin dry one last time before generously seasoning with flaky sea salt. The frustration of crops that don’t take, the grief observing a goat mourning her stillborn kid, the pressing knowledge that this world, this ecosystem you’ve assembled, relies on you and you alone. His mind wandered to those formative experiences, “hands in the mud, hiding in the woods, foraging with Granny,” and, after a gruelling period, “all of that instinctual stuff just kicked in quite hard.The restaurant had fostered a deep appreciation for its host of passionate suppliers who were producing the very best organic and local ingredients, “the juiciest tomatoes you’ve ever seen, trays of thorny artichokes, blue-skinned pumpkins sealed with red wax and whole lambs slowly reared on permanent organic pasture.

These mini puff pastry tarts celebrate the complementary tartness of rhubarb and mellowness of vanilla custard, all tied together with an apricot jam glaze and light dusting of demerara sugar. And if you want more plants in your life, do listen in next week to Nik Sharma on his latest book Veg Table. From growing your own and eating what’s readily available to making the most of leftovers and consuming less meat, “we do have a lot of power. We make a lot of hay which is a big job, but generally summer is a pretty peaceful season on our smallholding. The aim was self-sufficiency and this new direction came in the form of four hairy rare-breed Mangalitsa piglets: Snap, Crackle, Pop and Alby.They’re so important in my life, they dictate everything I do, from what I wear and work on that day, to what I’ll eat that week.

Just bought this book for my daughter who had seen a couple of recipes on television – having taken a look through myself, I will be saving some ideas before I gift her the book! These dishes are familiar (Roberts readily admits that these are the things he and his family have cooked forever), but they chime right now for their simplicity and seasonality; it’s the kind of food that you want to cook right away.

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