I spent seven months in Jerusalem in 1987, playing saxophone on the streets for six days a week. On Saturdays, I was reliably informed by some yeshiva students, the rabbis put a drug in the air that sends the whole city into a torpor. Everyone, Christian, Muslim and Jew, walks around as if the atmosphere has become a thick fudge. I would collapse and sleep the whole of Saturday afternoon.

At sunset, people would pour into the streets and the music would begin. I played mostly on Ben Yehuda Street, a famous pedestrian mall with pavement cafes and eccentric shops. It was great fun. And every day I managed to collect enough shekels to buy coffee and a couple of felafels and know that I’d survived another 24 hours.

Once, and exactly only once, I got served a really lousy street felafel. I was almost relieved to know that you could get a poor one, that the quality wasn’t an accident.

I spent one day in Haifa, which takes it for granted that you want harif, chilli, with your felafel. I had learned the word earlier in Jerusalem when an appalled visitor from Haifa was served one without “harif, harif!” Haifa manifested the best felafels I had in Palestine, no question.

We went a couple of times to Abu Shukri near the Via Dolorosa in the Old City, one of the most famous restaurants in the world and one of the friendliest and most relaxed. According to legend, the owner of this family restaurant tastes every batch of hummus made.

Looking back at that whole experience, the felafels stand out vividly in my mind, my entire day was centred around them. They only cost two new shekels with pita bread and condiments, they were ridiculously cheap and very filling. I could make 20 shekels in an hour when the crowds were out. There were limited spots for playing with lots of competition, but it was generally quite amiable and there were some interesting collaborations, I found myself playing duets with a singer called Shulamith completely out of the blue.

I met all kinds of people on that street. I had a long chat with a Palestinian villager sitting on the pavement observing the scene. “I love it here,” he said. “In my village, people are always watching you, anything you do, everyone knows. Here nobody knows me. I love it.”

One day I was playing some jazz when a girl in her 20s stopped to listen. I said, what would you like to hear? She said: As sad as you can play, you can’t be as sad as me. Challenge accepted, I said, and played Round Midnight with feeling.

“That was pretty sad,” she conceded.

We went and had a beer. Lili was a Jewish girl living in a Palestinian village and working with a theatre group. She invited me to visit the village, so we went a couple of days later and met the owners of the house where she was staying and a few members of the ensemble. Lili translated for them, while the mother spoke very good English. “Where are you staying?” she asked. “In Baka,” I replied. “Oh, we have a beautiful house in Baka, we were chased out,” she said. “We’ve still got the title deeds. We tried to show them and they just laughed at us.” She went to get the deeds for me to see. They were under Turkish law.

The theatre group told me about endless police harassment, how their shows were banned, how they got arrested for a performance because it featured a Palestinian flag.

I had just fled South Africa, where the heat was coming down in a big way, there were major street protests and people getting killed daily, including some prominent activists in my own teacher union. Here I was feeling the same anger at very similar repression.

This was all quite enough for me. I called in my longest shots, an aunt in London whom I’d not seen for 25 years, a college friend in Birmingham who now worked for the tax department and played saxophone, and they helped my pay my airfare and get out.

I told some of the Jews I knew, there’s going to be an explosion among the Palestinian youth, it’s going to be exactly like Soweto in South Africa.

“You foreigners always say the same thing, you don’t understand, we’ve got the Arabs under control,” I was told more than once, using almost exactly the same words. I learned very quickly to shut up. And I ran, at the very end of November 1987.

Just over a week later, the first intifada erupted. Young Palestinians armed with stones and slingshots became the front line of the resistance. Nobody in the vaunted occupation intelligence services remotely saw this coming. The uprising was the completely spontaneous reaction to an accident in Gaza in which a military vehicle killed four Palestinians. The suspicion was that the incident was deliberate.

It truly was Round Midnight on those streets. There were several suicide bombings right on Ben Yehuda where I played that tune. The world would never be the same again.

Until then, the greatest danger on the streets was gangs of young Haredi or ultra-orthodox Jews who were cooped up all day over the Sabbath and came streaming out looking for trouble wherever they could make it. This was all instigated by their rabbis. They would attack couples they thought were immoral and generally harass secular people. I was an obvious target, they kicked over my saxophone case in which I was collecting money, jeering at me. After that I would stop playing and pack up the moment I saw them. The worst were the clean-shaven Sephardi types in neat black suits and gangster hats, I even started recognizing the different pinstripes, I was quickly finding out who was who in this very weird zoo.

I learned a lot on those pavements. But the one thing that stands out in my memory is that there was always a felafel stand within a block or two. You could survive on those streets if you could play real sad and pack up and move real fast.

Or play funny. One gentleman asked me if I could play How Much Is That Doggy in the Window. Of course, I said, and played the beginning for him. “Can you go woof woof?” he asked. “Of course,” I said, and played it to the end with a big woof woof. He was delighted and gave me a 50 shekel note, my best single score on those streets. Never look down on a cheap trick in music. It can buy you 20 felafels and a couple of coffees.

For the record, hummus means the chickpea itself in Arabic. What Westerners call hummus is properly known as hummus bi’tahineh, you can’t imagine it without the sesame.

Along with hummus bi’tahineh, which is my go-to for unexpected pot luck events, I’ve always had good fortune with pancakes made with gram flour, as our Indian shop labels it. Chickpea flour is very versatile, and for people who always worry about getting enough protein with vegan food, here the wrap itself is high protein. Gram flour pancakes are a treat for another day.

Right now, chickpeas feature very high on the weekly agenda. On Wednesdays I cater for my gardener and housekeeper. I’ve got a big property, I need their help and they need the jobs. So however unemployed I am, I make sure they are looked after.

Yvonne likes chickpeas and basmati rice, a taste she acquired working at another house in our valley. Ntokozo likes potatoes. So I’m pretty consistent and they don’t complain. I make a chickpea stew with rice every week, sometimes using a can, at the moment cooking them myself.

It’s extremely important to soak dry chickpeas. The usual recommendation is 8 to 12 hours at room temperature. I find if I soak them for about an hour in hot water it’s quite adequate, they swell up nearly to their full size. I pressure-cook them for 30 minutes. The batch I have at the moment were still quite hard, so I did them for 20 more minutes and they were fine. It’s a long time since I had to resume a pressure cook like that, I’m not sure why this batch was a problem. It’s probably climate change.

There’s no doubt that your body has to adjust when you switch to a bean-heavy diet. It takes a while for your gut to adapt, but it will, never fear. Chickpeas can cause problems if they’re not well done and you eat too many. Soaking helps remove sugars that cause bloating and gas, and proper cooking is essential for easy digestion.

The stew itself depends on what veg I’ve got to hand. Cabbage, red cabbage, carrot, butternut, celery, green, yellow and red peppers, spinach, courgettes, pumpkin, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, leeks, I’ve used them all. Okra is very popular, it’s called mdwandwe here, it’s indigenous and home growers sell it business to business in town. The small lady’s fingers are best, the big ones can be woody. Okra is just one of the very best foods for the gut. Once you realize how that glutinous texture helps coat and soothe your gut lining, you’ll acquire the taste. There’s a reason it’s the sacred food of Candomblé, the religion of black people in Brazil.

The overall concept of the stew is based on fasolada, a white bean soup/stew that’s a staple of Greek cuisine and was a mainstay of my early cooking.

I’ll tell you one mysterious thing, though, the dividing line between East and West in cooking. It’s celery. I’ve found that you cannot use curry-type spices with celery, they just don’t work for some reason. So if there’s celery, I might put in a bit of dried basil and a bay leaf. We have some oregano growing outside, fresh herbs go very well, especially basil, coriander and rocket.

If there’s no celery, I can use some spices. Paprika and coriander is a safe combination, sometimes a little cumin, plus black pepper, that’s all. I have a neighbour who did a consulting job in Madagascar and brought us packets of highly aromatic red peppercorns as well as poivre sauvage, fantastic wild black peppercorns, I use the latter in the stew, they’re very subtle so you can put quite a few in. I grind them with a granite pestle and mortar. I actually don’t grind coriander seeds, it’s the one spice I buy ready ground, I never get it fine enough and it can stick in the teeth. I’ve got an electric grinder but it’s reserved for coffee beans.

And of course onion and garlic, and almost always tomatoes. Red onions are great but I can’t afford them at the moment. Tomatoes have been very erratic on our markets lately, if I’m caught without I’ll use some tomato paste, generally put in quite early. Canned tomatoes are very expensive at the moment, I’m avoiding them. We also get fantastic and quite cheap bottles of strained tomatoes here with a very smooth and satiny texture, this also goes very well, it’s one of my favourite products.

I have my own technique for frying veg in this kind of situation. I was given an unforgettable lesson in stir-frying by a Chinese lady in Johannesburg, she taught me to fry every vegetable separately, so that each was cooked for exactly the right time.

My first Chinese cookbook used the term “stir-fry-toss”, saying that a very hot wok meant you had to keep tossing the ingredients all the time so they didn’t burn. I used this technique for years. This lady instead pressed the veg down against the wok, so it really sizzled. Then she stirred and repeated. And a light bulb went on in my head.

I always knew that woks operate at high heat to cook fast so that you don’t waste fuel, but it was only when I saw this expert pressing the veg down with a spatula that I actually understood what this really implied. A few minutes watching her was worth more than all the Chinese cookbooks I’d read put together. I now use this principle of concentrating heat throughout my cooking. When I quench a pressure cooker under a tap in the sink, I put in the plug, so I can use the resulting hot water to wash up.

However, doing each vegetable separately is quite tedious. My technique is to fry the onions and garlic a bit first, using very little oil, along with the spices if I’m using them. I put in the onions first so the garlic doesn’t burn, burnt garlic can destroy a dish. This all gets pushed to one side of the pot.

Then I put the heat on the other side of the pot, add a bit more oil, let it heat up and put in the first veg, the one that will need the most cooking. This could be carrots or celery or cabbage, depending on the day. I press the pieces down against the pot, make sure they get a good sizzle, then mix them with the onions and fry it all together briefly.

The only problem comes when the onions are watery, the liquid can interfere with the fry. In those cases I do the onions a bit longer.

Then I shunt it all to the side of the pot and repeat the process, I put the heat under the clear side, add a little oil, let it heat up and then do each veg in turn in the same way. I have a big iron pot with a wide base that’s ideal for this. Iron doesn’t transmit the heat so effectively, so you can get one side of the pot really hot while the other side is relatively cool.

I rotate the pot as I go, so there’s no single “hot spot” where all the frying gets done.

The trick is to use very little oil each time. I’ve seen videos in fancy Italian restaurants where they fry each vegetable separately for a soup and then drain the oil. I’m sure they can reuse the oil for something but I prefer my method. When I do a proper stir-fry, I may do two or three veg at a time this way, then put them all together.

If I haven’t got tomatoes, or if the ones I have are a bit pale (as they often are, at the moment) I put in some tomato paste early and let it fry up with the veg. It means a little paste goes a long way. I’m a great fan of a good tomato paste to amplify the tomatohood of a dish. If things start to stick and burn, I add some liquid from the can or the pressure cooker.

I’m a believer in butternut, it’s very cheap and versatile and works well in these stews. Red cabbage is also great, as long as you cook it properly. It always gets fried first if I use it.

I use olive oil whenever I can. One of the best-kept secrets in world cooking is South African olive oil, it’s really fantastic and far better quality than the Spanish so-called extra virgin we get here in Eswatini, we never touch anything from the European Union, their standards are terrible.

I worked for a year as a copy editor at Farmer’s Weekly, the oldest magazine in South Africa, and we reported on the absolute outrage that South African olive oils were causing by winning major international awards against all comers.

Right now the price of all olive oil has gone through the roof and I’ve been reduced to using sunflower oil. Please don’t get me started on the subject of oils. This is one of the biggest issues in healthy cooking and I’ll write a long story about it one day.

For now, I’m using sunflower oil and not worrying about it. The best hint I can give in this regard: always avoid “cooking oil”, buy an oil that can at least theoretically be used in a salad dressing.

Once the veggies have gotten themselves together, I add the chickpeas and more of the liquid and let it all get used to itself for 10 to 15 minutes with the lid on, making sure the chickpeas are really soft and integrated. They should take on some of the colour and flavour of the stew. I put in a little salt at this point, not too much if I’ve used a can. People tend to autocondiment with salt here, it’s a cultural thing, so I just put in a couple of pinches for the chickpeas to absorb. You never add salt when pressure cooking, it makes the beans hard.

And along with rice and sometimes mashed potato, that’s the troops’ lunch. I really enjoy cooking for the workers because it means I get to eat too. It tastes even better the next day.

There are three avocado trees on our property, one of which produces really fantastic small avos, and mashed avo on the side goes very well with this dish, always with a squeeze of lemon, we also have several lemon trees. I get more enthusiastic comments about the avo than anything else, so I always provide some when I can.

A windfall once saw 90 avocados on the ground at one shot, we were giving them away and stuffing ourselves with avo toast.

So that’s the centrepiece of the weekly cooking rhythm here. I’ve taken a few pictures of versions of Troops’ Chickpea Stew. I hope you see why I don’t provide fixed recipes. It changes each time, depending on what’s available. But in essence, it’s very consistent.

I can guarantee that chickpeas will feature in future articles. There’s enormous variation in canned chickpeas, we have quite a few brands available and the best happens to be a house brand that’s usually the cheapest, they’re always soft and make great hummus straight from the can into the blender. But it’s always best to soak and cook your own, this is where the pressure cooker really becomes indispensable. I’m going to hold off on this subject for a while, but if you’re serious about bean-heavy vegan cooking, in the long run a pressure cooker is essential, in my opinion.

On the streets of Palestine, for the workers of Africa, from pavement carts in Guadalajara, it’s garbanzos for the win. I wouldn’t be writing this if it weren’t for felafel.

Next article: To go with Troops’ Chickpea Stew, how to make perfect basmati rice every time, once you’ve figured out the brand.

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I’ve been reading The Len Deighton Companion by Edward Milward-Oliver, published 1987. The blurb on the front cover reads: “Whenever I need to know something about my books, I call him. His detailed knowledge is extraordinary.”

It’s an alphabetic listing of publications, topics and people — real and fictional — from “abduction” to “Zeppelin”, Deighton was a great enthusiast for the vast rigid airships that made the first scheduled air passenger crossings of the Atlantic, as he described in his master historical novel Winter. Much more space to stretch your legs than on the biggest jumbo jet from Qatar.

So I wanted to check something about him a couple of days ago and to my deep sadness found that Len Deighton passed away on March 15 at age 97. I can’t believe I didn’t hear about it. The working-class intelligence agents in his books could always outquote the Oxbridge-educated senior staff when it came to Latin, so it’s fitting that he left us on the Ides of March.

My guess is that most of you are not familiar with his work, but for me, he was just the greatest author of the 20th century, even above my other icon, George Orwell.

His early books, The IPCRESS File, Funeral in Berlin, Billion-Dollar Brain, got turned into movies, launching Michael Caine’s career.

Right from the start, however, he was also famous for his cookbooks. He would tell journalists that he grew up in a grand house with 15 servants, and then add that his parents were two of them. His mother was the cook and she taught him the basics, he was quite scared of his father, the chauffeur, an intimidating perfectionist, so Len would hide away and help knead the bread.

If you can’t take the heat, stay in the kitchen.

Len Deighton was therefore one of the first real celebrity cooks, in Britain at any rate. He taught a whole generation of men that it was cool to spend time in the kitchen. He trained as a graphic artist and was art director at a New York advertising agency for a year. He would use a graphic shorthand to note his recipes — why say “egg” when you can just draw an egg?— and this led to a series of Cookstrips in the Observer from 1962 to 1964. This is one of them:

I’ve got nearly all of his books, but I’m missing Où est le garlic: French Cooking in 50 Lessons. The title came from Deighton’s attempt to get the pages of the book impregnated with a garlic aroma. The warehouse staff were not happy with the idea so it was nixed. Hence the title.

Deighton was particularly known for his innovative covers. He compiled Len Deighton’s London Dossier in 1967, featuring a cover with a keyhole cut in it, with an eye looking through at you. When you opened the cover, you found it was Twiggy’s eye. It’s a collection of 14 essays by experts in various aspects of life in London, including how to obtain an illegal firearm. It’s a vivid picture of the city at the height of its Swinging London era.

Now I spent 1967/68 in London, I was 10 years old, I went to primary school in Swiss Cottage. My parents were on a “working holiday” in the UK, so I was right there at the time. Reading Deighton’s observations brought back so many memories.

I’ll tell you just one angle he provided. We went to a number of open-air markets like the famous Petticoat Lane. I was horrified to find scrawny puppies and kittens in cramped cages being sold on the streets. Deighton says if you think the English are kind to animals, you’ll change your mind when see how they’re sold at these markets.

I now think those sellers were deliberately provoking people into buying the poor creatures to rescue them, they were actually trading on English sentimentality towards animals. Either way, nothing missed Deighton’s sharp eye.

Len Deighton will surely go down as one of the greatest writers ever on the subject of warfare. His factual history of the Battle of Britain, Fighter, completely rewrote the existing narrative and started a critical reevaluation of this episode and its strategic importance.

But his epic novel Bomber made an equal impact. He was told he’d written an anti-war book. He didn’t accept this. He said it wasn’t a pro-war book or an anti-war book. It was just a war book, period.

It’s the story of an entirely fictitious bombing raid on June 31 1943 that goes horribly astray when the pathfinding flares are dropped in the wrong place. Instead of bombing Krefeld, ten million pounds of high explosives and incendiaries are dropped on the small (and entirely fictitious) town of Altgarten. The devastation is described in chilling detail, the lives and intrigues and secrets and loves that are mercilessly incinerated through a tragic combination of errors.

He begins the book by saying that this is all a work of fiction, there’s no town called Altgarten and there was no June 31 in 1943 or any other year.

The book ends with the photo department trying to work out which town they just obliterated. “Flight Sergeant Booth here, sir, Photo Section. The attack hasn’t hit Krefeld, sir, I’ve just been studying the negs. Street patterns are nothing like it. I don’t know, sir. It doesn’t look like anywhere. It doesn’t look like anywhere.”

However, Len Deighton did produce one of the greatest unquestionably anti-war movies of all time, Oh! What a Lovely War — one of my top three films of all time. Deighton said that the only real fault with his research was that he spent “too much time and effort” getting the music right in his novels, and it shows in this movie. He had a fascination for musical theatre and always wanted to work on the stage.

This was the first movie Richard Attenborough directed. Paul McCartney met Len Deighton to see if the Beatles could act in it. Eventually so many people started claiming to be co-producers that Deighton actually removed his name from the credits, just to stop things getting too crowded. He later said that was probably a mistake.

The final scene of this movie is unforgettable. I can’t help thinking that it anticipates drone warfare in the most chilling way.

For me, though, it’s the Bernard Samson series that is Deighton’s crowning achievement. It’s three trilogies — Game, Set and Match; Hook, Line and Sinker; and Faith, Hope and Charity — plus the historical Winter, making ten books altogether. It’s the story of a top field agent whose wife defects to the Soviets. He goes completely off the reservation in a way that proves to Moscow that he was totally deceived by his wife.

In fact, it’s a long-term double-cross, his wife Fiona is only pretending to defect, but the whole plan is to use his very clear distress as proof that this is for real and that Fiona fooled even the great Bernard Samson.

As he is hatching this plot, the devious old head of British intelligence has a metalwork scroll installed on the wall of his office. It says “Only Ignorance Is Invincible” — meaning that if they can completely fool Bernard, the whole operation might even work and keep Fiona alive. It’s an incredible plot and it sustains seamlessly across the nine novels. Winter provides historical background, a Berlin family saga from 1900-1945 that sets the scene for the Samson series, showing how his father Brian became head of the Berlin field unit.

The book centres on two brothers of the wealthy Winter family. Paul Winter, quite an amiable character, becomes a top lawyer in the Nazi regime, smoothing the way for many horrendous abuses including mass deportations. Peter Winter, who happened to be in America when the war broke out, becomes a senior US intelligence officer. So it’s literal war of brother against brother.

Spoiler alert: they die together in the snow in 1945, shot while Peter is trying to help Paul escape Allied captivity.

I moved house a lot over the years and I formed a habit, as soon as I moved I would sit down and read all ten novels in sequence. I must have done that at least half a dozen times. Only when I’d gone through that ritual did I feel at home in the new place. Don’t ask me to explain.

I wrote a letter to Len Deighon about 12 years ago, I typed it on a manual machine and posted it via his publisher, they confirmed by email that they’d forwarded it to him. I should have the carbon copy somewhere. I told him what his books meant to me. I told him I was planning to write The Unemployed Cookbook and said there was only one person I would ever approach for a celebrity recipe and this was him. I said, you must have been down to one potato and a clove of garlic at some point. What would you do?

He never replied — he said that he received more letters than he could answer — but I’ve actually already mentioned him twice in The Unemployed Cookbook. In fact, as a vegan cookbook, TUC starts with Deighton’s basic principle for cooking meat, if that’s what you want to do, go to it.

Personally, I rate his novel City of Gold as his greatest book, set in Cairo during World War 2, just as Rommel is preparing to attack with a real-life spy giving him complete information about the Allied troop movements and running rings around them, cheered on by many Arabs. I might be biased, as it’s his only book set in Africa, but at a boarding house in Johannesburg I met an old guy called Bill who drove trucks in Egypt during the war. I gave him my copy of the book, he told me that it was exactly what Cairo was like. It’s set against the pending war in Palestine, with Jewish extremists stealing British weapons to use in the war against the Arabs — and later against the British themselves.

I took it out of the local library and read it again recently. I still think it’s one of the greatest novels I ever read.

Len Deighton was a truly amazing researcher. He was particularly interested in the machinery and technical advances that won battles and wars, like radar and jet engines. He planned to write a book on Vietnam and spoke to many airmen who’d fought there. One of them took him up in an F-4 Phantom jet. Deighton was enjoying the ride in the rear cockpit when he heard “It’s yours” over the phones. He touched the stick and the plane wobbled. Oh my God, he thought.

The aviator who told this story — I can’t remember his name — said that if Len Deighton ever dies, he’ll arrive at the gates with his notebook and his little camera, asking Saint Peter — so, how do you actually organize this?

Rest in peace, Len Deighton, sir. Apparently he spent his last years in an exhaustive study of fountain pens and their mechanics. He wrote millions of words as background notes, drew innumerable sketches of equipment, took countless photographs — he worked in photo analysis in the Royal Air Force after the war. I truly hope someone puts together a working museum of all his material. It must be one of the most comprehensive archives of warfare and so many other topics in the world. But not least cooking, the Action Cookbook. With all respect and gratitude for so many hours of pleasure and illumination, The Unemployed Cookbook is hereby dedicated to the memory of Leonard Cyril Deighton.

This is my final background article before we really start cooking. I’m writing here explicitly for newbies who have never spent much time in the kitchen and who are wisely nervous of confined spaces featuring sharp blades, boiling oil and hissing steam.

The kitchen is by far the most dangerous room in the house for general accidents, although bathrooms slips-and-falls are responsible for more ER visits. Statistically, the most deadly room in the house is the bedroom, followed by the lounge. You’re much more likely to die in the bedroom than the kitchen. However, the kitchen is by far the #1 cause of household fires.

So if you want a long life, stay in the kitchen and tend the flame. Let’s avoid the cuts, burns and scalds, let’s make sure we never slip in the scullery. There is one very special aspect to unemployed cooking: you are not generally in a hurry. You are not serving 520 entrées simultaneously at a banquet with a team of Ecuadorean cooks working to rule. You are your own Ecuadorean cook, you do things in your own time, the same way you know, every time. Consistency is everything in cooking. You need to develop your own systems for your kitchen, turn these systems into routines, then into rituals, then back into routines again, so that you can run on automatic pilot with full and immediate attention if there’s any problem.

Looking at the situation coldly, if you’ve been living on prepared food up until now and are contemplating cooking for yourself for the first time, I know exactly where I would start. I would go and buy a really good can-opener. Never sneer at canned tomatoes from Italy, for one thing, a single can can carry you across three meals. We had an emergency can of tinned peaches I opened the other day, they had expired and they were delicious.

Canned food is picked when it’s at its peak ripeness, it’s often nearly as good as fresh produce in food value. I’ve gone through extended periods where I used no cans at all but that was quite a luxury. I always try to have a can of baked beans as an emergency backup. Beans on toast is extreme comfort food for me.

A can-opener and a spoon and you are on your way, mark my words. One thing about unemployed cooking, this is survival level, you are not competing with the pretty pictures on Instagram.

The third item I would get is an abrasive kitchen sponge to clean the spoon. When I was a kid there was a brand called Spunz, pronounced the German way, I can’t find any trace of it now. I’ve always thought the spunz was one of the great advances in kitchen technology.

This is a fact you should factor into your cooking right from the beginning: cooking entails and includes cleaning up, there’s no way around it. There’s only one further thing you need to brand in your brain in this respect: the longer you leave it, the worse it gets. If you’ve drained some rice noodles in a colander and you clean it straight away, there’s no problem at all. If you leave it for a few days, those noodles stick as though they’ve been superglued and you have a major task on your hands.

So learn to clean up as you go, right from the start. Future you will thank present you when they come into the kitchen and find a rack of spotless dishes and pots.

The way I work, I generally recycle things straight from the rack back into the action. However, there is a place for everything in the cupboards and when I’ve done a big clean-up I do manage to put the pots where they belong. When sharing the kitchen, this led to the fairly frequent complaint, “How on earth do you expect me to find things when you keep putting them in the right place?”

Right now I have a very small kitchen, I call it the galley, a big change from my old place, where the person who designed the house was a professional chef. It was our dining room and main living room as well.

My present kitchen has very good cupboards; however, they are exactly at head height, so I’ve taken a few skull injuries here. I bend down to get something out of the lower cupboard and then stand up. The kitchen is seriously the realm in which to get into good habits. Shut the cupboard doors. Tighten lids properly — I was reminded for decades about a bottle of Nescafé that got broken when I didn’t tighten the lid. It was a good lesson to learn. There’s nothing more disheartening in the middle of a cook than to break a bottle of something sticky and having to clean up goo and shards of glass in a hurry. Just don’t do it.

And don’t spill water on the floor, it’s difficult but very important. You cannot afford to slip in the kitchen. I have a single cylinder gas cooker on a bar stool, if I bump it, it’s a disaster. If you do spill water, immediately put newspaper down so you can see the extent and avoid any immediate slippage.

We come now to the vexed question of knives. For years I had a genuine French Sabatier carbon steel knife I bought in London in 1978. It really would slice a piece of paper under its own weight. I sharpened it myself. I gave it away when I went overseas in 1987.

I went on a hunt for a replacement around 2012. The nearest big shopping centre for us in Eswatini is the city of Mbombela, formerly Nelspruit. I found The Knife Shop in one of the malls, this guy had Japanese knives that were themselves as thin as a piece of paper.

However, he had the whole range of Victorinox kitchen knives in all colours. He said his wife could choose any knife in the world she wanted and she only used the Victorinoxes. That was good enough for me. I bought three Victorinoxes and a very nice Wüsthof Gourmet kitchen knife for heavier stuff. Just about all my chopping for the last ten years has been done with a small, sharp-ended Victorinox. You can’t sharpen these blades, it’s just amazing how they keep their edge.

The chopped red onions of my icon picture were an everyday cut with the small Victorinox. This is quite fine enough for me.

I also have a ceramic knife that I’ve become very attached to, again, you can’t sharpen it. I read that chopped lettuce doesn’t go brown so quickly if you use a ceramic knife. Now, I’m a great fan of chopped lettuce. You can put some in a bowl of hot rice with a splash of soy sauce and create something instantly. But the lettuce does go brown very fast, even if you put a bit of lemon on it.

I did a quick test one day with some spinach stalks. This is a real unemployed-on-the-street story, so bear with me. Vegetarian street food of any kind is hard to find in Johannesburg but there are pie stalls that sell spinach and feta pies, the only remotely vegetarian option. These have a very distinctive spinach flavour and it was only on experimentation that I found this comes from the stalks of the spinach, which they clearly use in bulk in their pies.

So I really like the spinach stalk flavour, it has all the best connotations for me of something warm to eat on a cold day on the street.

I did the test fairly systematically, chopping small piles alternately with each knife so there was no significant time difference. You can see that the stalks chopped with the metal knife are quite a bit browner. Unfortunately for some reason the sample was not balanced in terms of greenery. I’ll do this again properly some day, but for me, this is enough proof. I do a lot of chopping of fresh herbs when I can, coriander, basil, sage. I always use the ceramic knife and chop really fine, it makes a huge difference.

Anyway, that’s the cheerful little orange knife with which I do nearly all my chopping. Really, nothing fancy is needed.

I’ve said before and will say again, the single most time-consuming task for me in the kitchen, but also the most rewarding one, is cleaning fresh herbs. I always wash them very thoroughly and clean out all the stalks. Then I chop them really fine. Yellow lentils just with fresh coriander stirred in quite late is one of the best dishes I make. Fry some thinly sliced garlic until it’s just going brown, chuck it on top for a last sizzle, and you have a tarka dhal to match anything from north London to north Punjab.

Much of your life as a vegan cook is just chopping, so it’s worth getting well set up to do it. In Japan, the sushi chef is known as itamae, the person behind the chopping board. That’s you.

As far as chopping technique goes, I was taught how to hold a vegetable and cut away from my fingers by a guy who had been a cook in the South African army. He was amazed that I thought I knew how to cook and didn’t know how to chop a carrot. It was a very good lesson.

If you want an excellent example of how to do it, watch Mr Miyagi giving a lecture to the boy about to take The Next Karate Kid, Hilary Swank, to the prom. The boy enters while Miyagi is sharpening his knife. Look carefully at how he holds the marrow and slices away from his fingers, his technique is impeccable. This way, he doesn’t even have to look at his fingers while he chops. He looks straight at the boy while slicing menacingly.

The general principle is always to make sure you are cutting away from yourself. This especially applies to anything with a tough skin, even a tomato. The last time I cut myself was when my knife slipped on a wet tomato. I was given a new, larger, very sharp Victorinox for my birthday in February and it caught me by surprise. There was blood.

I had a girlfriend, an architect with a penchant for handling all kinds of tools up to lathes, welding and brazing. She always said “You only cut yourself with a blunt knife” if there was an accident with my Sabatier. I have to say, it’s not true. Sharp knives are dangerous, make no mistake. But equally, blunt knives are really dangerous.

You can hold a potato in your hand and peel it by cutting towards your palm, if you know what you’re doing. Just in general, look at the way you’re cutting and make sure that however the knife might slip, or just go straight through what you’re slicing, your hand is nowhere in line where that knife may go.

Again, these are habits. Habits are a fascinating thing to study in themselves, so discipline in the kitchen is a really good way to get to terms with your own personality traits. Practise cooking as genuine self development, growth.

And this brings us to a difficult but important subject, a great and universal moral drama.

There is a vast existential war going on in every kitchen, the war of the Packaging Bastards versus all of humanity and the entire planet. There’s a very essential implement you need to fight this war, I would actually rate it as more important than your first knife. This is a really good pair of kitchen scissors.

As far as I can tell, there was a major conference of the Packaging Bastards around the early 1950s. They swore a secret war on all of us. Why they hate us so much has never been revealed. This will be a true war of death by a thousand tiny cuts, they decided. No matter how careful you are, no matter how hard you try, no matter how diligently you study the container and the perforations marked on it, the odds are that you are going to spill something and/or cut yourself.

This is the sacred creed of the Packaging Bastards, as far as I have been able to discern it: first and foremost, wherever possible, make them bleed. Literally, we like seeing blood. But just hurt and hassle them in any way you can. Psychological damage is also good, stoke up feelings of frustration and impotence.

Next thing, almost as important: waste the product. Spill as much as you can when opening. Make it impossible to get the last bit out.

There’s a famous saying from Jeremiah Colman, who made a fortune selling mustard. When someone asked him the secret of his wealth, he said “I make my money from the mustard that people throw away on the sides of their plate.” He wasn’t telling the whole truth, he made his money from one of the first truly global marketing campaigns, establishing the brand as a household name around the world. But he’s right, scale allows you to live off the margins. Waste is an essential part of the design.

The third element of the Packaging Bastard creed seems to be: “And go forth and pollute the environment, for thousands of years if you can, so that long after we are all dead, our toxic legacy will live on.”

The Packaging Bastards are also among the world’s worst liars and deceivers, putting less product in bigger bags and inflating them with air. They put glossy pictures on their products showing all kinds of exotic fruits, nuts and vegetables, none of which are inside the package. This is all legitimized by tiny words, real fine print, saying “Serving Suggestion”. Illiterate people learn pretty quickly what this means.

Your best defence against the Packing Bastards is exactly that good pair of kitchen scissors, and taking every care, every time. It’s so easy to spill stuff when you’re opening a packet. I always hold the packet facing me and cut off the right corner, so I don’t spill when reopening. I close it again with a couple of elastic bands or else decant into glass. I’m just saying, work out your own system and stick with it.

Remember, even the tiniest victory over the Packaging Bastards is a victory for all humanity and the planet itself. Minimizing the rubbish you throw away is the greatest victory of all. I really think they want to drown us in our own garbage and they are winning.

However, much as I know they are liars, I always take the instructions on packets very seriously. They are a very good indication as to the reliability of the product itself. The point is, there are very good products inside some of this packaging. If the kitchen has done its stuff and communicated well, the instruction for rice noodles that says “Add boiling water and leave for three minutes” may actually be trusted. We are at around 1,200 metres above sea level here, over 4,000 feet, so our boiling point is quite a lot lower than it is at sea level. You learn to compensate. But it’s always good to have some idea from the packaging.

We’ll talk all about reading labels later. Just be warned, packaging is one of the most deceptive and dangerous industries on this planet, never approach packaging without some thought and lots of care. I’ve tried to prise apart hard transparent plastic packaging that has left me with deep gashes like razor cuts, unbelievable. Take care. Use your scissors.

Apart from fighting the Packaging Bastards, the most dangerous activity in the kitchen is deep frying, this what causes the worst fires. I never do this, it’s just too difficult in a small kitchen like mine. There are so many problems with deep frying, from smoke and oil wastage to cancer risks, that I don’t apologize for not even trying.

I really want to try an air fryer one day, though, they seem to have something going for them. Everyone I know who uses them loves them.

So the most dangerous thing I regularly do in the kitchen is use a pressure cooker on a gas ring. I use the pressure cooker all the time, sometimes three times in a day. If I’m doing a couple of sweetcorn, I put them in the pressure cooker for ten minutes, it’s the very best way to do them.

Pressure cooking is not that hard when you get used to it. Par excellence, this is cooking you do by ear. I can sit here writing and hear the pressure cooker’s regulator rocking gently in the kitchen and be sure that everything’s fine.

The only problem comes when that rocking stops. This means one of two things: either your gas flame is too low, the pot has lost pressure and your cook is literally losing steam. Or else, the vent has gotten clogged, pressure is building up, and there might be a dangerous explosion that wrecks your entire kitchen. I cannot believe that people actually put pressure cookers on electric rings, there’s no way you can control the temperature quickly and accurately enough to be safe. Please promise me you won’t ever try what’s in that video linked above.

We’ll have a lot more to say about the pressure cooker up ahead. Genuinely no pun intended but I do not want to pressure you into buying a pressure cooker. Len Deighton says that it’s all a matter of situation and convenience. It may take 90 minutes to simmer beans that would take 30 minutes in the pressure cooker; but you don’t have to supervise the slow cook, you can safely walk the dog.

Below is a little movie I shot of my pressure cooker regulator a few days ago. You don’t want to let too much steam out, you just want the regulator rocking gently. This one is actually a bit high, I probably turned it down a bit. I’ve got an essay up ahead called “Cooking With Your Ears”, this is the prime example:

Boiling a big pot of pasta is another dangerous and very steamy job, especially on a hot day. One of the maxims of our kitchen is that whenever you start cooking, you boil a kettle of water first. No matter what you’re doing, there’ll come a point where you need hot water. Just always watch out, do not scald yourself, do not spill, make sure steam doesn’t go in your face.

If you ever do burn yourself, get it under ice water as soon as possible, within seconds if you can.

There’s one very stupid way to burn yourself that still catches me out, and that is tasting food that’s too hot and burning my tongue. Especially if you’re just tasting, you don’t want it too hot anyway. Let it cool down. And here’s another tip: don’t taste too often. For a lot of cooks, constant tasting and adjusting is the norm. I really don’t think it’s necessary tasting more than twice in a dish, early and late. Tasting too often can make you add too much salt, which is one of the easiest ways to ruin a dish, especially when you’re starting out and want everything to taste good.

And for God’s sake wash the spoon after you’ve tasted. I saw a restaurant that had a sign saying, “In this kitchen, we lick the spoon.” Well, the same in my kitchen but I always then wash that spoon and put it back in the rack. If they don’t add that part, the restaurant is saying “We spit in your food.” Seriously, you need to watch all your basic hygiene, it’s part of keeping safe, it’s essential discipline. Just imagine at every point that the people you’re cooking for are watching your every move. In truth, I’m much more obsessive and fastidious when I’m alone, I try to look more relaxed when other people are around.

Watch out for your eyes, especially when you have a pan spitting or you are chopping something fine. You do not want a fragment of green chili in your eye. If you do chop chillies without gloves, make sure you scrub your hands with a nail brush. And don’t rub your eyes.

I wish I could find gloves that lasted in the kitchen. I don’t even have oven gloves, another essential safety feature, I use kitchen towels. I have a very finicky electric oven, it’s easy to burn yourself while taking out a tray. Just be careful, study the situation, work out how things slide in and out.

In my 50 years of cooking, I’ve only had one health incident, back in the 1980s. I had two very special friends over and made a curry that involved an unusual blend of freshly ground spices added at the very end, a finishing masala —like garam masala, but not roasted. It was very spectacular but both my friends got food poisoning from the raw spices and were throwing up all night. I was mortified. We were unaffected in our house, we did a lot of curries. This taught me a real lesson. I don’t ever take any chances with health or hygiene or funny ingredients with which I’m not familiar.

Here’s a final perspective. I meditate, I have a mantra that runs in the back of my mind. However, I find cooking is the one time when it always comes to the fore. Cooking is a truly contemplative experience for me, almost every time. No matter how angry or frustrated with the world I may be, I promise you, I calm down when I cook. This is one of its greatest benefits. Right from the start, just accept that you’re in the kitchen for a certain length of time, and for that time, create as much of a bubble of tranquillity for yourself as you can.

I often work with the radio on, or some podcast blasting from my work station. I find the radio a very good link with the outside world. I have lots of video recordings of myself cooking at our old place, always with the radio playing, it’s an integral part of the scene. I’ll put some of them up when I have time.

As I’ve said before, it’s crucial that you have a clear idea as to how long each cook will take, how much energy is required, including the mental bandwidth. Once you’ve got this clearly in mind, find whatever routine you have for working peacefully and systematically. Hum a tune. This is your very best self-defence in the kitchen.

But get a good kitchen timer, so you don’t lose track and burn the rice. This is another most important early buy. I have a clock with two alarms, I can set one for the beans and the other for the rice. Again, establish good habits, don’t ever leave the stove unattended without an alarm set. When I am busy editing or writing, I can get lost for hours. You don’t want to remember that you’re boiling some potatoes when you smell them burning.

Get into the flow with cooking, be in that state where you’re working smoothly and in rhythm with events both inside your kitchen and out there in the wider world.

I realized one day while stirring a huge pot of steaming pasta that I was pulling a scrunched-up face. I thought, this is going to leave no-good lines on my handsome visage, and then I remembered a piece of Buddhist advice on meditating — while you sit, make sure you smile an inner smile to yourself, the Buddha smile. And I do this when I cook now. If you see me stirring a pot with a slightly manic grin on my face, don’t worry, I’m just practising the inner smile. If you are doing a really grim job in the kitchen and find yourself grimacing, just change your mindset and smile your way through it. It’s the counter-trick to Miyagi’s menacing act with the knife, if you have visitors watching you cook.

By the way, I do have a hand-made carbon steel knife, created by a young apprentice knifemaker who lives in my valley, Gabriel. I don’t dare use it, it’s far too beautiful. But I’m commissioning a proper to-be-used Chinese chef’s cleaver from him. He wanted a basic design, I found the one at the top of this article, apparently this is the blade that sets the current standard in the Middle Kingdom.

This all sent my mind back to 1978/79, when I was studying physics teaching in London. We often ate at the Chinese restaurants in Soho, they were legendary and surprisingly cheap.

At the time, though, there was some huge feud running through the kitchens of this district. The bodies of at least two cooks were found in the streets of Soho late at night, hacked to death with kitchen cleavers. The police said openly, we have no chance of solving these murders, this is a totally opaque world for us. I can’t find a single word about these events online but it was quite a big issue at the time. Here you have a famous tourist site right in the middle of London, and open and very bloody gang warfare in the streets.

Every time we went through Chinatown after that, I wondered what really went on in those kitchens. Sometimes it’s better not to know.

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I live in a rural area of the Kingdom of Eswatini. We have a small forest on the property, full of birds and the occasional band of monkeys, and a custom-designed fishpond that we keep full, it generally overflows into a genuine little swamp. The pond has a constant inflow of water from a small wellhead up the hill. According to the legendary forester and water engineer Viktor Schauberger, water from such a natural wellhead is the very best, it has matured and been filtered in the coolth underground, in our case through a rock system that’s three billion years old.

The stream into which the wellhead flows is beautifully forested, the little river grows its own shade, it’s a perfect example of this principle.

If you really want “the” secret to cooking, it’s not the finest salt, it’s actually the finest water. We honestly have the world’s best water. People in the rural areas around here are known for basically living forever, they just don’t die, this is a deep cultural secret. Ask any old Swati warrior. If you take a look, you’ll find that the monarch with the longest proven reign of all time anywhere ever was our King Sobhuza II at 82 years and 254 days. I once watched a traditional dance performance where I sat on the grass about 20 metres away from him. He took the liveliest interest in the show. The earth literally shook from the line of huge drums.

Back to the wellhead. Tadpoles come down the pipe and we generally have lots of them in the pond. At night there’s a constant clicking and chirping from all the little frogs around our water feature, along with constant gurgling from the pipe. If the flow stops, I have to trek up the hill and clear the leaves away in the wellhead.

Some of my neighbours with ponds and water holes are driven insane by the hundreds of frogs croaking at night. They remove them in buckets and sacks and take them to the river. They say the frogs always seem to come back.

I was once called “crazier than a sack full of toads” during a social media spat. You might think a sackful of toads is a squirming, writhing mass, but actually, they all squash together and stay very still. I once sat right next to a sack of live frogs during a restaurant meal and only later found out what was in it.

I grew up on three farms in Swaziland, as it was then, and each had a pond with frogs, one had two big water holes with Muscovy ducks and a whole bass chorus of bullfrogs going all night in a call-and-answer routine. I loved falling asleep to this sound.

Here’s a couple of minutes of my amphibian percussion ensemble, when one little frog starts they all join in, this goes on and off all night:

There’s another reason, though, why I look after my tadpoles and frogs, apart from nostalgia. A much more serious one.

I mentioned in my previous story the dangers of radiation from cellphones and towers. I don’t want to go on about this subject but I suffer from extreme fatigue if I’m exposed to a cellphone tower, I can always tell when there’s one nearby. If I go to town, I start off in the morning feeling fine and within two hours I’m exhausted.

I sit in the car for 20 minutes and I always feel much better — the car is a Faraday cage, it blocks most of the radiation.

I basically have one item on my bucket list, it’s a proper spectrum analyser, one that will let me track 5G radiation and beyond. There are some quite cheap ones available, they used to cost a fortune. I just want to know what is going on in the airwaves around me, this is elementary self-defence for a radio man.

Until then, I have the tadpoles. Frogs are generally very good indicators of environmental health, existing as they do between land and water.

There was an interesting paper on tadpoles in 2010 by the Spanish researcher Alfonso Balmori, who had already done amazing work showing how cellphone towers affect birds. London has lost 70 percent of its sparrows in the last couple of decades, with boroughs like Kensington and Chelsea reporting declines of 90 percent. In 1925, there were 2,603 sparrows in Kensington Gardens. By 2005, not a single bird was counted. No one knows why. An avian malaria has been blamed, although it affects rural birds worse and yet their numbers have not declined nearly as much as urban sparrows.

Balmori then did an experiment with tadpoles, subtitled “the city turned into a laboratory”. He took tanks filled with tadpoles and located them 140 metres from a mobile phone tower. The radiation levels went up to 3.5 volts per metre, well below the FCC limit of around 60 V/m.

One tank was shielded with a Faraday cage; the other was exposed to the tower. The experiment lasted two months, from egg stage to an advanced phase prior to metamorphosis.

I regularly watch my tadpoles growing legs, they kick like mad when they first get them.

The results of Balmori’s experiment: 4 percent of the shielded tadpoles died. The mortality rate of the exposed tadpoles was 90 percent.

That’s a 2,150 percent increase in mortality.

“This research may have huge implications for the natural world, which is now exposed to high microwave radiation levels from a multitude of phone masts,” the paper concludes.

So in the absence of a spectrum analyser, I keep tadpoles. I love to see them growing and looking healthy. When they become frogs, I tell them, I knew you when you were just a tadpole. I do talk to the frogs, I can start them chirruping, I click at them with my tongue. I regularly used to trigger a chorus of whistling frogs when I was a kid, it was one of my party tricks for urban visitors.

I spent 14 years cooking every other night for our two dogs, who have sadly passed on. Right now I’m basically cooking for myself and around 100 tadpoles, although I do catering for Quality Control (that’s her title). I’ve been planning this story for years but was not expecting the tadpoles to be my only regular customers. They have taught me some very valuable lessons in cooking, however, so I’m happy finally to write this story about them.

Tadpoles start off as vegans, eating algae off rocks and decaying plant matter. As they get bigger they will eat insect larvae, water fleas and any dead matter they find, including deceased tadpoles. They’re not shy.

But right through their lives, tadpoles go crazy for steamed kale. We had an old kale plant in our garden which they polished off and we then bought spectacular frilly organic kale from a nearby farm. They liked steamed cabbage and spinach too, but they would demolish the kale leaves in a day, leaving them looking like skeletons stripped by piranhas.

We’ll see at the end that there’s one thing that drives tadpoles wilder than kale.

However, I can vouch for this fact. I’ve thrown in raw kale leaves and they show absolutely no interest until they’ve decayed for at least a week.

Cooking makes food available to the body. I have a neighbour who’s an expert raw chef. He makes pasta from thin strips of courgette that he dries in a dehydrator, things like that, absolutely delicious. For a while, I experimented with raw food. I very soon returned to cooking. They don’t call it comfort food for nothing; and ask any unemployed person, in this hard world you take whatever comfort you can find.

I’ve got some Sufi cookbooks, they’re very interesting. The Chishti book of healing. Coffee is good for concentration and digestion but use it sparingly.

As the final word on cooking, I’m going to paste in the whole of the Notice to Cooks at the Chisholme Institute in Scotland. This was written by the mystic Bulent Rauf, the cooks read it in the kitchen each time before they prepare food. If you have encountered the adventures of the British writer Reshad Feild, Bulent Rauf is his Sufi teacher Hamid, who pickles his own olives in a special way. My emphases:

I once attended a performance of the Whirling Dervishes of Rumi’s order in Johannesburg, I had a chat afterwards with the chief reed flute player, it was quite a gig. The conical felt hats the musicians wear represent the tombstone, they confront the threshold of death in each performance. I wore a green felt top hat not long ago, playing at a fairly wild St. Patrick’s day shindig with many songs of fallen comrades, and thought about the whirling dervishes. Same threshold, different hats.

Any reason a chef’s hat looks like a tombstone? The taller your hat, the higher your position in the kitchen and therefore the closer you are to God.

So I found the one thing that the tadpoles actually prefer to kale. We sometimes get very good organic red cabbage from the nearby farm, it’s quite special. You’ll know from my previous article that red cabbage is particularly high in antioxidants. I’m going to call my whole approach to cooking the DNA Repair Diet.

I steamed up the last few leaves of the red cabbage with the kale and tried it out. I’ll paste in a little video below. The red cabbage got quite blanched but that’s what they’re going nuts about. You can make a direct comparison with their enthusiasm for the kale.

Kale gets a bad rap but wait until I get my vegan caldo verde right, hot greens, traditional Portuguese soup with potato and generally about the only remotely vegetarian dish in a Portuguese restaurant, in Johannesburg at any rate. It’s saved me many a day.

Take a look at my happy tadpoles wagging their tails. Now these are customers I can handle. Normally I put cabbage ends aside for soup stock, but not red cabbage, like beetroot it’s best kept apart. So this is a very satisfying use for the tail end of a red cabbage. It proves that antioxidants really are the thing — if you can’t trust a tadpole, who can you trust. And it proves that cooking is good. Comfort food in an icy pond, we’re in dead midwinter this week.

Any takers for the feeding frenzy challenge?

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This is a vegan cookbook, which I am sure will make a lot of people sigh.

I am not trying to convert anybody to anything here. I’m just going to point out a couple of things. First, meat is comparatively easy to cook, there’s much less need for guidance. To show that I’m serious about not trying to convert people, I’m going to start by telling you the most basic principle of cooking meat. This comes from Len Deighton’s Action Cook Book (1965):

All meat contains moisture, and the retention of this moisture means the retention of flavour. When meat is heated it shrinks in bulk. This means that it can no longer hold the same moisture-content and the moisture escapes. The object of a cook must be to minimize this escape.

There are many techniques to minimize this escape. You can take it from there yourself.

The second thing about vegan cooking is that it is comparatively cheap. I know tomatoes are getting really expensive and “tomatoflation” has become a thing. For tofu, I pay the equivalent of $1.25 for a square. That’s expensive for me.

But generally, there’s no question that a basic vegan diet is cheaper than the alternatives. There are all kinds of extravagances these days, vegan cheeses and the like. We don’t have a lot of these on our shelves in the Kingdom of Eswatini but there’s an excellent vegan mayonnaise that I use all the time on salad rolls. Even the local restaurants use it because it’s so good.

On the whole, you are going to find very basic ingredients used here. The most exotic thing in my fridge right now is a caterer’s tub of Thai curry paste.

If you are really on the edge financially and want to save money on food, look at making at least a few vegan dishes every now and then. Compare the costs and be happy that there are cheaper alternatives available.

The real issue with vegan cooking that makes it worthwhile writing a cookbook is that it’s genuinely not so easy. It also takes time. I soak and pressure-cook a lot of beans and lentils, it’s a rhythm. I can keep an ear on the pressure cooker while I’m working but it still requires constant attention.

Many people would struggle to know where to begin preparing vegan meals. I want to show you easy and convenient techniques, workable and fail-proof. One of my most basic principles is to avoid waste as much as possible. I cannot afford any cooking experiments that go wrong.

Once you get in the rhythm of vegan cooking, it becomes a way of life. For me, it’s all about the rhythms of the kitchen.

For the first 30 years of my vegetarian cooking career, starting at age 19, I was mostly worried about getting enough protein. I initially followed Anna Thomas’s book The Vegetarian Epicure, which uses both dairy and eggs. Around 1995, I was very influenced by someone saying “An egg is not a vegetable” and gave up eggs, which was quite tricky, as eggs are contained in so many processed foods, not least just about every biscuit on the shelf (I’m a coffee-and-biscuit addict).

Then around 2004 I got another motivational kick and decided to go vegan. To be honest, having survived for so long on toasted cheese sandwiches in the outside world, I do not beat myself up for having one if it’s the only thing on the menu that isn’t meat. I regard it as comfort food in very harsh times. I refuse to be a fanatic.

However, at home, my cooking is all strictly vegan. I don’t even think about it any more. I work from home, I sometimes don’t leave the house for two weeks, so almost all my eating is done at home.

Just as I was turning vegan, a real health guru gave me some advice. When I told her I was worried about getting enough protein, she told me that excess protein was the main cause of prostate problems, and even as vegetarians, men should not overdo the protein.

I checked and found that she was absolutely correct. So my first 30 years as a vegetarian were concerned that I was getting too little protein and in my last 20 years I’ve been making sure I don’t get too much.

However: there is one other really critical factor motivating a vegan diet. Your health. If there’s one thing that can cost you fortunes, it’s ill health, both in the cost of treatment and in lost work opportunities.

Listen to Bill Clinton, who went vegan after quadruple bypass heart surgery.

So I did all this research and I saw that 82 percent of the people since 1986 who have gone on a plant-based, no dairy or meat of any kind, no chicken, turkey … if you can do it, 82 percent of the people who have done that have begun to heal themselves. Their arterial blockage cleans up, the calcium deposit around their heart breaks up.

He says he now weighs the same as when he left high school. To be honest, Clinton is showing his age and may not be the best poster person for the vegan diet. But he’d be looking a great deal worse if he was dead.

In my experience of humanity in general, I would say that food stress has become a common denominator for nearly all of us. People either eat too much or too little. There is a vast profusion of diets, with the keto fad being one of the latest. If you’re poor, you worry about buying bread. If you’re rich, you worry about supplementing with the most exclusive longevity peptides.

In all of this, I would offer one piece of advice. Trust your body. Your body will tell you what it needs — as long as you haven’t had all your instincts and natural appetites totally wrecked by advertising and the proliferation of super-processed foods. There’s a conventional piece of wisdom for people on a budget, don’t shop when you’re hungry. I would say the exact opposite. Watch your hunger develop, see what your body is craving, then go to the supermarket and see what’s available to meet it.

There’s an elementary Taoist principle: “When hungry, eat; when tired, sleep.” This is not so obvious. People eat for all kinds of reasons other than hunger. I try very, very hard only to eat when I’m hungry. At one stage, breakfast was being touted as the most important meal of the day and I tried not to miss it.

However, I realized eventually that I was actually forcing myself to eat early in the day. When I go with my natural rhythms, I often go the whole morning with nothing more than a cup of coffee. Sometimes when I’m deeply involved in editing or writing, I find the evening has arrived and I haven’t eaten a thing. It doesn’t worry me. When hungry, I eat, never fear.

We are absolutely bombarded with advertisements for food and images of food on everyone’s Instagram account. Processed foods are tweaked in all kinds of ways to make them as addictive as possible. You absolutely need to neutralize all of these influences if you want to get in touch with your real dietary needs. Become highly conscious of every persuasion to make you to eat this or that. There are so many competing and conflicting messages. You can internalize these messages very easily without even noticing it.

Apart from medical diets for particular conditions, I’m convinced that a rigid daily diet of any kind is not to be recommended. My health guru had a daily diet plan that seemed excellent and kept her in good shape for years. It was big on almonds, spinach and the like. To her horror, she found that her diet was heavy in oxalates and could cause kidney stones and other problems. She had not heard of oxalates before. She had to rework the whole programme.

Really and truly, listen to your body. If you eat too much of one thing, your body will start telling you. If you have an odd craving, look and see if it was inspired by a glossy commercial image. If not, let that craving develop and see where it leads you. If you start feeling you need some fruit, go see what’s available. You may be drawn to strawberries. Your body is telling you something. Listen to it.

There is now only one dietary principle I follow in my cooking. I don’t worry about carbs, protein, vitamins, fibre, any of that. I very rarely take any supplements, just magnesium for leg cramps.

However, I’ve been highly influenced by years of research into the effects of wireless technology on health, specifically cellphone radiation. Along with all the other pollutants in our environment, this radiation causes DNA damage.

Bear with me on this. Here is a very short appeal from the late Dr Martin Blank to the United Nations to look especially at the DNA damage done to our cells by cellphone radiation, along with the cancer risks this creates. Martin Blank was one of the most highly respected researchers in the world in this field. Much of his work was done within the US Navy.

I checked with Martin Blank, who told me that apart from courier delivery slips, he was unable to get any acknowledgement of receipt from the UN headquarters or the World Health Organization for this appeal, let alone a considered reply. I primed a journalist to ambush the WHO radiation chief at a conference and get her to state publicly that they were aware of this appeal, which she very reluctantly did. I was able to tell Martin Blank that they acknowledged receiving his documents. He died very shortly afterward, I think he knew this was his final chance to get this message across to the authorities. So take three minutes and listen to one of the most drastic and important warnings you will ever hear. I’ll then explain why this is important for your diet.

The only thing I want you to take away from this is “DNA damage”. This is damage at the very core of our being, our genome. And it is a known cause of cancer.

What can be done to heal the DNA damage done by radiation and all the other pollutants we are exposed to, from plastics to diesel fumes?

One of the most important things is to get good sleep. DNA repair is a core function of sleep, guided by melatonin production.

The other necessity for DNA repair is antioxidants in your diet. The process of metabolism is the same as burning up any fuel. There’s oxidation, the breaking of chemical bonds to release energy. This sees oxidants or free radicals proliferate in the bloodstream, made worse by air pollution, heavy metals, chemicals in processed food and the like.

Another name for free radicals is “reactive oxygen species”, because they are highly chemically active and in particular react with DNA to cause both single- and double-strand breaks in the double helix structure. This is what your body is busy repairing at night.

Oxidative species have an unpaired electron in their outer shell. This means that they strip off electrons from the DNA atoms, causing the breaks.

The most crucial issue is thus to maintain an electron balance in your body. And this requires the presence of antioxidants to neutralize the effects of the free radicals.

Below is a schematic from an important monograph called Birds, Bees and Mankind by the researcher Ulrich Warnke. He is the world authority on the electric fields generated by bees. This is the simplest picture you’ll find of your whole metabolic process.

If you look, you’ll see that there’s exactly one direct thing you can do for yourself to improve this electron balance. The vital substances you need are found only in food. Let your food be your medicine.

So to be honest, this is the only serious consideration I make now in my cooking. I’m always looking to boost the antioxidant content. What does this mean? Green leafy vegetables like kale and spinach; tomatoes; red and green peppers; carrots; berries; nuts and seeds; herbs and spices. The basis for a very colourful vegan diet. The different colours are very important. Red cabbage is much richer in antioxidants than regular cabbage, the pigments provide beta-carotene and vitamin A. It’s also very high in vitamin C.

So if you concentrate on antioxidants, you’ll find the vitamins and minerals you need are included.

Even if they didn’t know the biochemistry, people have known about the importance of antioxidants for centuries. Here’s a bit of history that proves this. In 1667, after a colonial war, England and Holland signed the Treaty of Breda. The Dutch swapped their settlement of New Amsterdam (now Manhattan) in America for a tiny speck in Indonesia called Run Island.

Manhattan at the time was an undeveloped swamp. But what made the Dutch want this little island so badly that they were prepared to swap what became the most valuable real estate in the world for an obscure and tiny territory that no one today has ever heard of?

The answer is that Run Island was the world’s exclusive source of nutmeg at the time. The spice islands of Indonesia were some of Holland’s most precious possessions and they wanted to complete their monopoly. People were prepared to pay almost anything for the cargoes of exotic herbs and spices that arrived in European ports, not least cloves and nutmeg.

Cloves are among the most powerful known antioxidants. Remember that the Great Plague had been raging in London until 1666. People knew that spices provided some protection against illness, quite apart from literally spicing up what had been a generally bland diet.

Nutmeg in particular was regarded as warding off the plague. It is a powerful antioxidant, known to help with cardiac and nervous conditions. It is also a useful food preservative. According to a history of nutmeg:

In medieval Europe, nutmeg was regarded as a miraculous substance. Long before its culinary applications were fully appreciated, nutmeg was used for its medicinal, aphrodisiac, and mystical properties. Physicians prescribed it for digestive issues, plague prevention, and even as a brain stimulant.

Nutmeg became a symbol of luxury, found only on the tables of the wealthy. In Elizabethan England, the spice was said to ward off the Black Death, causing its price to skyrocket. A single sack of nutmeg could buy a house in London. Such value made it a status symbol, driving monarchies and merchants into a frenzy to control its trade.

In the end, the French and the British smuggled nutmeg trees off Run Island and broke the monopoly on its trade.

I’ve been grinding my own curry spices for decades, I don’t use commercial curry powders. Cloves and nutmeg are always included. It always amazes me how cheap these spices are today.

Talking curries, another very powerful antioxidant combination is turmeric and black pepper. We grow fresh turmeric root in our garden, I’m about to harvest some. I will do spinach with just onions, turmeric and black pepper, with a little lemon to mitigate the oxalates in the spinach. Very simple and very rich in antioxidants.

Has this worked to keep me healthy? I touch wood as I write this. I’m turning 70 next year, so I should have retired already (joke). I regularly sign editing contracts with international agencies that often include a health questionnaire. This sometimes gives me trouble, because I have no regular doctor I can list, no specialists I consult, no health insurance of any kind, and no vaccination records (my last vaccination was a triple mumps/measles/rubella shot in 1976 when an elderly professor got mumps and I heard of the dangers of mumps in older men).

I also have no history of any medical problems. I don’t actually remember missing a day’s work since the 1980s. Touch wood.

I weigh exactly the same as I did when I was 19 years old, 65 kg. I can still sprint up the road being dragged by our very fast puppy, whose nickname is Relâmpago Branco, or White Lightning. We play the very strenuous Brazilian martial art capoeira, you always have a nom de guerra.

So — touch wood again — something is working to keep me going, despite my lack of focus on protein and the like. After one strong coffee in the morning, I run on green tea, another antioxidant of note. I’m sure that helps.

This, then, is the core of my dietary philosophy. Eat when hungry and eat what your body is telling you to eat. Sleep when tired and do your best to repair the damage of the day so you wake up every morning refreshed and ready to go. Don’t be obsessed with any particular diet but make sure you get variety and colour. Always seek rhythm and balance in your life and in your cooking.

My next story is about cooking for tadpoles. It’s really about cooking in general, because I’ve been educated in the importance of raw food by a neighbour here who is a brilliant raw chef and always frighteningly full of energy. For a while, I wondered if I should abandon cooking altogether. Then I started looking deeper and found all kinds of reasons to carry on slaving over the stove. My tadpoles provided some of those reasons, I did lots of experiments with them. They are really crazy for their antioxidants. I saw feeding frenzies over kale and thought I’d found their favourite food until I gave them some steamed red cabbage. They went nuts. But I am giving the game away.

The next course will be served on Monday June 15 2026, I am determined to do one substantial post per week. A very, very warm welcome to my first three subscribers. I hope we have a long and adventurous culinary journey together, full of delights. And with everyone in very good health.

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Today is the 50th anniversary of the day I became a vegetarian cook, June 1 1976. It was a Tuesday. I had just moved out of the campus dorm at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. I was in my senior year of a degree in physics and applied mathematics. We don’t make a thing of naming classes around here, but I am technically “Class of 1976”.

Getting into the residence was quite a privilege. I was a foreign student from the neighbouring country of Swaziland, so I was accepted into res. In first year, you shared a room. By third year, I was in a quiet corridor with senior students you hardly ever saw, medics on 48-hour shifts.

I really liked that quiet corridor and would have had no intention of leaving, if it weren’t for certain other residents of Men’s Res, as we were called. We were the preferred dorm of the Rhodesians, a large clan of whom were encamped at every level in the residence.

You either know about Rhodesians or you don’t. All my life, Rhodesians have just spelled trouble. I remember on November 11 1965 when the white Rhodesian settlers made their Unilateral Declaration of Independence, triggering a war that lasted 15 years and caused untold damage. I just remember my father exploding at the news on the shortwave radio, disbelieving the idiocy. I gathered two things from what he was saying: (1) there were Rhodesians; and (2) they were extremely stupid people who were going to cause a lot of trouble.

He wasn’t wrong.

In case you think I’m joking, check out the Rhodes scholars. Check out Bill Clinton, Rachel Maddow and Pete Buttigieg. They are all trouble-makers in my book.

A couple of years later, we managed to get British citizenship in Swaziland. A Rhodesian in a pub started making disparaging comments about the riff-raff they were now allowing to get British passports. His name was Whitehead. This guy was about six foot seven. My father was six foot, usually quite big, but not against this hulk, who took a swing at my old man.

My father used to box at school — he had a friend with whom he used to go to township boxing matches, Nelson Mandela, who was also a boxing fanatic. They spotted a rising young talent, they were convinced they could train him up to be a world champ until he got knifed in the head in a street fight.

My father’s reactions were still very good, he ducked under the punch and hit the big guy straight in the jaw. Down he went, with my father pummelling him until he was pulled off.

We were banned from the Mantenga bar for about a year after that, but my father was very proud. “Now you’ve seen your old man in a pub fight,” he said.

So my gut reaction with Rhodesians was never good. They were trouble; and they were special trouble in the residences.

When I was in first and second year, I was next to the Rhodesian corner. They would gather for the RBC news on the shortwaves every evening. The number of “terrorists” or “terrs” that had been killed in the bush war that day was always announced.

The Rhodesians in res would drink a beer for every terr, every night. If 12 terrs were killed, they all drank 12 beers. I wish I was joking. I have no idea how they metabolized so much alcohol. If I drank 17 beers in a row, I would be extremely ill.

They were all quite huge hulking characters, this was a fact, often pointed out to me by my girlfriend from Women’s Res, who happened to be … Rhodesian. She always noted that her compatriots were all six foot seven. I thought — I know.

The fact that I had a Rhodesian girlfriend with a particularly ferocious intellect gave me a little immunity from the Rhodesians, but it was extremely fragile. There were rumours about my family’s Communist past and the fact that both my parents were banned. I had some serious aggro from right-wing South Africans but that was more just drunken oafs who had lost a rugby match and wanted doors to kick down.

There was a little tea room in the senior corridor in res, there was a rack with a couple of newspapers, including the Rand Daily Mail, which was going through a golden era as a lone liberal voice on a very bleak media landscape.

It was probably May 1976 that I saw a report in the RDM about black students overturning a police vehicle in the townships and setting it on fire. It was a true signal for me. I can even remember where on the page that story was. A bell rang in my head, saying — the kids have never done this before. Trouble is brewing, big trouble.

The very first thing I thought, when I thought trouble, was — Rhodesians. I just knew that if real political turmoil came, they would take the opportunity to have a go at me, Rhodesian girlfriend or not. My Rhodesian girlfriend concurred fully, she was also feeling a lot of tension in the residence, mostly because of her association with me.

By this stage, all I wanted to do was study in peace, we were incredibly heavily loaded in final year.

I think term must have ended — you payed term by the term and had to clear everything out for the vacation, so it was easy to move out.

I moved into a very idiosyncratic block called Highway Mansions just across the road from the university. It went up three floors, but the lift shaft went up five, they overreached.

On my first afternoon, I went to the main supermarket across the road from Highway Mans, as we called it. The OK Bazaar, the “Ock Bazz” according to the statistics students, imitating their head of department. We all had our cliques. Physics was one of the smallest classes on campus, there were five of us in final year.

I had seriously thought of going vegetarian. I was really tired of the stodge they served at the res. But I really wasn’t sure where to begin.

I took a look at the meat counter. I had cooked meat in the past, it’s not hard.

In writing this whole story, this is the bit I’m not sure whether I should write, just because it’s gross.

On the other hand, the whole point is that it was gross and that’s how I ended up a vegetarian on June 1 1976.

So this is it. The trays of meat were all tilted, so blood flowed to the front of the tray. Right in your face was a big puddle of blood. Something just said no inside me and I probably ended up getting a cauliflower. At that stage, cauliflower cheese was just about the only vegetarian dish anyone knew. Mac and cheese and cauli and cheese. I had those a lot over the next few years.

Anyway — that was me, setting up a new home.

Fifteen days later, South Africa exploded, very particularly Soweto, which for us was a distant smudge on the horizon from all the coal stoves. The riots were led by students throwing stones. Exactly what I had foreseen.

I took part in the demonstrations and protest marches that followed, including an infamous march onto the Queen Elizabeth Bridge over the railway and into the city. We were baton-charged by the police, several students were badly beaten. We managed to stroll out of it unscathed by simply not running.

However, one of my friends from the senior corridor was not so lucky, Mike Spowart, a very smart politics student, Marxist of tendency but very quiet and studious. I saw him in our building, he was visiting a friend. I hardly recognized him, he’d been beaten to a pulp, two huge black eyes, his whole face cut and bruised. The right wing students followed him and got him after a demonstration.

Oddly enough, I have just picked up a book from our local library, Student Comrade Prisoner Spy by Bridget Hilton-Barber, a former ANC activist. She was at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. (You see, Rhodes?) This was her first year in 1982:

Later that year, I’ll be chased out of one of the male residences by a group of angry Rhodies hurling beer bottles at the back of my head, pamphlets scattering like frightened chickens. “Fuck off you kaffir-loving bitch. Just you wait, your munts are going to take your country too … fuck off",”

The legendary South African security service was caught completely by surprise by the Soweto riots. They were convinced that they must have been instigated by agitators, either Communist or else Black Consciousness. I met Dr Kgalushi Koka, one of the Soweto headmasters who was later charged with starting the riots and found innocent. Koka was an associate of Steve Biko and a major proponent of BC. Koka was adamant that it was largely a spontaneous uprising on the part of the kids.

This is a very long story to explain how it was that I found myself learning vegetarian cooking that day 50 years ago. I’m the only person I know who concretely anticipated the Soweto riots. The decisions I took then shaped my life. Going vegetarian in South Africa was a pretty unusual thing to do, it was and remains a very heavily carnivorous society. It was definitely a statement, as big a break as I could make with the mentality of Men’s Res.

I then made quite a fateful mistake, the subject of a forthcoming essay. I bought perhaps the most impractical beginner’s vegetarian cookbook ever written, The Vegetarian Epicure, by Anna Thomas, a Penguin edition. This was very ubiquitous at the time, a lot of people had it.

The philosophy of the book was that vegetarian food didn’t have to be bland and boring — it could be as extravagant as any cuisine. And accordingly, many of the recipes were indeed pretty exotic, with ingredients I had never heard of.

But I was very eager to show that vegetarian cooking could be classy, so I tried my hand at some of these epic dishes.

Some of them worked pretty well, it has to be said. To this day, I follow her method of making soup stocks.

However, I discovered one thing that has held pretty consistently through my cooking career. The only real disasters that I’ve had have all occurred when I followed a recipe to the letter.

This has always stuck with me. You are going to find very few actual recipes in this cookbook. I’ve hardly followed a recipe for decades. I assemble the best ingredients I can find and then cook to those ingredients.

What you’ll find are techniques, perspectives on balancing ingredients, on texture density and chopping, on colour and variety, on good combinations, on spices and herbs. Above all, you’ll find perspectives on the time and energy required to make a dish. This for me is crucial. Each meal requires a quantum of time and energy. You need to estimate it accurately, you need to have a purview of the whole process. There’s nothing worse than finding yourself frazzled in the kitchen, out of time and with everything out of control.

This is called The Unemployed Cookbook. It was conceived as a joke in 1995, when I experienced a bout of joblessness. I was improvising very basic meals out of nothing. One day I had only a single onion in the house and a little oil. So I made One-Onion Soup, with a stock made from boiling the skin and ends of the onion. One third of the onion was chopped very fine, one third medium, one third quite coarse, for texture density.

It was pretty good. So I joked to a journalist, I should write The Unemployed Cookbook — meaning, you really hope you don’t have to employ these recipes.

Over the years, though, the idea has grown on me. A cookbook for people who for one reason or another are stranded at home with time on their hands and very little money.

I don’t want to go into this in depth, but for me, unemployment is simply the greatest calamity that can befall one in this society. Getting old, getting sick and dying are very natural processes. Being unemployed is not a natural state for a human being, it’s deeply existentially damaging.

So this is a survival manual as much as anything. In the same way that you need to estimate a quantum of energy to cook a meal, you need to estimate a quantum of energy to survive the whole day.

I feel a lot of people are finding themselves suddenly in transition in their lives right now, changing careers, trying to find new careers. It’s not easy.

But every day, you need to eat. It’s not actually true, it’s good for you to fast a day every now and then. But I’ve done enough involuntary fasts not to be too excited at the prospect.

You need to eat, it’s a fact. And if you’re unemployed or otherwise on the edge, you can’t afford to get ill. So it’s really worth trying to eat well. After breathing, eating is the key to health, a good diet is a real blessing.

So whatever your circumstances, never fear. You will get through this and hopefully in some style. One thing about unemployed cooking: you actually have the most precious commodity of all, you have TIME on your hands. You can have a soup stock simmering for a couple of hours. You can leave potatoes marinating in curry paste to put in a biryani the next day. You can clean and chop fresh herbs, the single most time-consuming thing I do in the kitchen and the single most rewarding.

To have a soup with piles of fresh herbs as main ingredients is very special.

There’s only one more reminiscence from those days that stands out in my mind. It just so happened that shortly after we moved in (my girlfriend joined me quite soon after, she was very keen also to get out of res) an absolutely fabulous vegetarian restaurant started right in our building, the ground floor. It was called the Green Rabbit and was run by an extremely vivacious and energetic woman called Natasha. She told me that she had been crippled with arthritis and cured herself with a grape diet; and now wanted to bring a healthy diet to everyone.

Natasha made just the best salads I’ve ever had in my life, to this day I remember them.

They were very strange days. I just see turmoil on the streets and a little oasis called the Green Rabbit. It all feels very, very far away and amazingly close.

Thank you for letting me get this out. I needed to remember this whole story.

I wonder how many thousands of onions I’ve chopped in the last 50 years.

Enough is as good as a feast.

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