From Jamie's jam jar and Hugh's potato ricer to Rick's much-loved old cook's knife and Nigella's bin (yes, really), Britain's top chefs, food writers and restaurateurs pick their kitchen gadget essentials

Jamie Oliver:"An empty jam jar: super-cheap and super-useful, for anything from salad dressings and salsas to storing pulses and spices."

Yotam Ottolenghi Weekend columnist,Ottolenghi and Nopi, London:"For years I struggled with all sorts of mashers, then I found the Masterclass potato ricer. It fits in a drawer, it's easy to handle and clean, and creates a mega-smooth mash. I now use it for mashing all my root veg."

Thomasina MiersWahaca chain, London: "Not at all hi-tech but utterly brilliant: my old Braun hand blender is so neat it can be stashed in a drawer, yet it can help you cook a thousand dishes. It's a lifesaver."
Braun MultiQuick hand blender, £85.25, amazon.co.uk

Mark Hix Hix Oyster & Chop House and Hix, both London, Hix Oyster & Fish House, Lyme Regis, Dorset: "I wouldn't be without my Kitchen Aid Artisan mixer. I have one in Dorset and one in London, and use them weekly for my sourdough."
From £377.10, johnlewis.com

Simon Hopkinson author and TV presenter – his latest book is The Good Cook (BBC Books, £20): "The wooden-handled scraper that's been in my sweaty hands for nearly 27 years. Occasionally I use it to scrape up pastry debris (for which it was designed), but mainly I use it for collecting up all manner of chopped ingredients to add to a cooking pot: herbs; crushed garlic; grated stuff; hand-chopped chicken liver pâtés; even bits of fish for the cats."
Ateco make something similar, £22.98, langtoninfo.co.uk

Nigella Lawson:"My kitchen life is littered with highly specialised and seductive gadgets to which I've succumbed over the years, only to abandon, but the one thing I couldn't be without at this time of year is a plastic bin, which I use as a brining bucket for my turkey. Once you've tried it, there is just no turning back."

Clare Smyth head chef, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, London SW3:"My Big Green Egg barbecue. You can put whatever you like on it, pull down the lid and leave it for hours without having to do anything at all. Good food made with ease and no stress."
From £450, biggreenegg.co.uk

Stuart Gillies The Savoy Grill, London WC2, Bread Street Kitchen, London E4: "Easy: our popcorn maker at home. Salt and vinegar for my wife and me, butterscotch for our boys."
American originals popcorn maker, £15.99, amazon.co.uk

Laura Santtini author, Flash Cooking (Quadrille, £20):"My Wet-N-Dry spice grinder. It is a great little gadget for making 'flavour bombs' because it blends anything from tough spices to smooth pastes and delicate finishing salts. Unlike a traditional coffee grinder, the bowl is dishwasher-safe, so there are no lingering flavours."
£36.99, lakeland.co.uk

Michel Roux JrLe Gavroche, Roux at Parliament Square, Roux at The Landau, all London:"A mahogany truffle box made by one of my old maitre'd's. It's the most beautiful way to present fresh truffles to customers during the season."

Tom KerridgeThe Hand & Flowers, Marlow, Buckinghamshire: "My Homer Simpson bottle-opener, a present from my PA, Zabrina. Each time I open a bottle, it goes, 'Mmmmmm, beer.'"
£5.95, gadgets.co.uk

Bruno Loubet Bistrot Bruno Loubet, London EC1:"I love my electric mincer – it's great for making terrines, sausages, stuffings, even burgers. I never buy mince, because I'm often unsure what's actually in it. We have a professional one at the restaurant, but Moulinex and Kitchen Aid make good ones for the home – you can get them on Amazon for about £80."

Fergus Henderson St John, St John Bread & Wine and St John Hotel, all London:"A wooden spoon: you can stir food, spank those who need spanking, conduct… A wonderful tool, ergonomical, and a beautiful object when lying dormant."

Angela Hartnett Murano, London W1: "My ridged Le Creuset griddle pan– it's great for giving meat, especially steak, that special smoky flavour."
Around £65, lecreuset.co.uk

Felicity Cloake G2 columnist, author, Perfect (Penguin, £18.99): "My silicone tongs (9) – they're incredibly handy for turning bacon, tossing pasta and generally fiddling with hot food in a professional sort of way. I even take them on holiday with me."
£10.95, divertimenti.co.uk

Ashley Palmer-Wattshead chef, Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, London SW1:"I haven't got one yet, but I've got my eye on a Hotmix Pro, a mixer that heats to 190C and down to -24C."
£1,570, metcalfecatering.com

Syke GyngellPetersham Nurseries, Richmond:"My most invaluable utensil is my ice-cream maker – I make ice-cream or sorbet every day. Mine's a professional brand, a Robocoupe, which is very pricey, so go for one you can afford. It's a lovely way to showcase fruit in season, and you can play around with combinations and tastes."
Kenwood IM200 ice-cream maker, £35.99, amazon.co.uk

Pierre Gagnaire Sketch, London W1; Pierre Gagnaire, Paris:"A cast-iron casserole, such as a Le Creuset. Great for low-heat cooking, and the thickness is good for slow cooking."

Rick Stein The Seafood Restaurant, Padstow, Cornwall:"I hate to be a bore, but it's the cook's knife I've used for most of my professional life. It has a nick about halfway up the blade where I stupidly once cracked a lobster. Every time I sharpen it, the blemish gets minutely shallower. One day, it'll be perfect again."

Nathan Outlaw Restaurant Nathan Outlaw, Rock, Cornwall:"My antique butter churner. It makes me think about the days when things were done properly but not necessarily quickly. The rest of the team thought I'd gone mad when I turned up with what they saw as a piece of junk, but they've changed their tune now."

José Pizarro Pizarro and José, both London SE1: "A wooden pestle and mortar – my mum and grandma always used one, so it reminds me of them."
Olive wood pestle and mortar, from £14.99, naturallymed.com

Mitch TonksThe Seahorse and Rockfish, both Dartmouth; Rockfish Grill, Bristol:"A wooden flour sifter I bought in Spain. It's just two trays, with a smaller one with a mesh bottom that slides over the top of a larger one. You pop in your squid, prawns, small fish or veg, heap on some flour, jiggle the top box back and forth, and you end up with the lightest of coatings, all ready for the deep-fryer. Simple and bloody ace."

Sam and Sam Clark Moro and Morito, both London EC1:"An electric bean and pea sheller. We first found one in a hardware store in Spain (where they're a lot cheaper), and it's ideal for peas, broad beans, borlotti, anything like that. Saves time like you wouldn't believe."
Electric pea sheller, £147.46, from UK Equipment Direct, 08000 821123

Stephen Harris The Sportsman, Seasalter, Kent:"I'm a bit cynical about chefs who love the latest kit – all the gear, no idea – so I'm going for a ceramic Kyocera knife."
From £28.65, cooks-knives.co.uk

Sat Bains Restaurant Sat Bains, Nottingham: "A Thermomix. As well as being a solid, all-round blender, it's so versatile – it can puree and heat at the same time, which is great for soups and sauces, even stews."

Claude Bosi Hibiscus, London W1:"My favourite bit of kitchen kit is my kitchen porter, because I hate washing up and a good KP can turn their hand to anything."

Henry Dimbleby Leon chain, London and the south-east: "It has to be my mouli, for making mashed potato. Nothing else comes close."
£59, richmondcookshop.co.uk

Russell Norman co-owner, Polpo, Polpetto, Spuntino, Da Polpo, Mishkin's, all London: "Without a doubt it's my Presso manual espresso maker. As well as being elegantly designed, it simply requires freshly boiled water, coffee and elbow grease to make pretty passable espresso without the need for an expensive, George Clooney-endorsed machine."
£69.96, coffeecavern.co.uk

Maria EliaJoe's, London SW3: "My favourite kitchen tool is one I haven't even got. When I lived in Italy, we had these little wood-chip smoking boxes that were just perfect for smoking small portions of fish and meat. Maybe Father Christmas will bring me one this year…"
£11.99, forfoodsmokers.co.uk

Mary Berryfood writer – her latest book is The Great British Bake-Off (BBC Books, £20):"I adore my Magimix processor– it is wonderful for pâté, soups, pastry and so much more. I also use it for slicing potatoes for dauphinoise; and if I've made a lumpy sauce, I just pop it in the Magimix to get rid of the lumps."
From £199, johnlewis.com

Tom Aikens: "The Microplane grater is, for me, the best and simplest piece of kitchen gadgetry. You can now get them with all sorts of blades and graters, and they're great for everything from cheese and veg to truffles and frozen flavoured ice."
From £13.45, hartsofstur.com

Tom Kitchin The Kitchin, Leith, Edinburgh: "A good set of knives. There are a huge number of gadgets out there, but ask any chef and nothing is as important."

David Thompson Nahm, London and Bangkok: "A granite pestle and mortar – Thai, primitive, almost unbreakable and versatile. Great for pastes, spices, sauces and a workout."
From £15.99, thai-food-online.co.uk

Raymond Blanc Le Manoir Aux Quat'Saisons, Great Milton, Oxford:"My Gaggenau baking stone: it heats up to 300C and is especially good for bread. Perfect for one of my favourites, Maman Blanc's tarte tartin."
From £448.99, gaggenau-eshop.com

Richard Bertinet Bertinet Kitchen & Bakery, Bath:"I can't live without my scraper – for working the dough, taking it out of bowls after it's proved, dividing for loaves and rolls… and for cleaning the car windscreen in winter."
From £2.39, bakerybits.co.uk

Giorgio Locatelli Locanda Locatelli, London W1: "Our Crustastun– it ensures we kill our lobsters humanely."
From £2,500, crustastun.com

Alexis Gauthier Gauthier Soho, London W1: "I have quite a few gadgets that I use both at work and at home, and none costs more than £5 from any half-decent Chinese supermarket: my favourites include a negi cutter (leek shredder) – no risk of cutting fingers when slicing into perfect thin widths – and a ravioli maker that makes the most beautiful ravioli with just one touch."

Anna Hansen The Modern Pantry, London EC1:"I was in Sri Lanka recently and bought a coconut grater. It's genius: a rotating dome of formidable blades that grate fresh coconut into fluffy, supplicant perfection."
£14.99, coconutty.co.uk

Gizzi Erskine:"My mum gave me her old enamel pans when I left home at 19. They're bright yellow, 60s, with a thick enamel, so they regulate heat as well as any pan. They've cooked many a mean stew and spag bol, and while I may not use them as much as my other pans now, I know they'll be with me for life."

Jane Baxter Riverford Field Kitchen, Buckfastleigh, Devon:"No contest – my red Victorinox tomato knife. It's great for general veg prep, especially for dealing with tough squash skins and other root veg. In fact, it's good for most jobs. It has to be the one with the red handle, because there's less chance of it being chucked in the bin along with all the peelings."
£2.69, Nisbets

Bill GrangerGranger & Co, London W11: "My favourite gadget would have to be the humble mandoline. It's a very simple tool, but a versatile one, and I don't know where I'd be without it. It not only saves time, but requires much less effort than agonisingly trying to create uniform slices with a knife. It also gives your dishes that polished, cheffy appearance. Just mind your fingers."
Oxo Good Grips hand-held mandoline, £12.69

Shaun Hill The Walnut Tree, Llanddewi Skirrid, Abergavenny:"My favourite and most used gadget is a liquidiser. Unlike a food processor, which merely chops stuff up, this centrifuges liquids along with oil or butter into silky sauces and soups – it's almost miraculous. I always buy the cheapest and crappiest, usually a Kenwood or Moulinex, and rarely pay more than £20 or £30, because there is no discernible difference in the results between these and glossier, more elegant and expensive models."
Kenwood liquidiser, £29.99, amazon.co.uk

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall Weekend columnist: "My potato ricer. It's a like a giant garlic crush – you put in cooked spuds, bring the handles together and squiggly worms of mash wriggle out of the holes. Aside from the childish glee I get from it, it makes the best mash ever."

Jason Atherton Pollen Street Social, London W1:"All my appliances at home are Kitchen Aid, because they're the best, most durable and deliver professional results. I use my large mixer to make instant ice-cream with dry ice – that sends my daughter crazy with delight– and the blender to mix spices or to make brilliant alcohol smoothies."
kitchenaid.co.uk

Theo Randall Theo Randall at the Intercontinental, London W1:"My Imperia pasta machine: it's the most useful – and probably most used – piece of equipment I have."
£43.19, amazon.co.uk

Anissa Heloufood writer:"I have collected a few ceramic knives over the years, but my favourite is a precious one I got from Lorenzi in Milan. It has an incredibly sharp, grey blade. which makes it look like a regular knife, and a beautiful, Italian-crafted rosewood handle. It's too fine to use every day, but I  use it to slice bottarga or foie gras, or simply to show off."

Trish Deseine:"My favourite kitchen utensil – and this is great for chocolate – is a silicone spatula. I adore its smooth, velvety, supple feel around a baking bowl and how cleverly it picks up every trace of chocolate or cake batter, or whipped cream. There are so many brands to choose from – just pick one to suit your taste and wallet."
Silicone spatula, £7.50, debenhams.co.uk

Eddie Hart co-owner Fino, Barrafina and Quo Vadis, all London:"My garlic peeler: it's genius as some garlic cloves are very fiddly to peel."
From £1.50, pedlars.co.uk

Dan LepardWeekend columnist:"Electronic 1g kitchen scales – they're as essential for me as your iPhone is for you."
Salter digital kitchen scales, £14.99, argos.co.uk

A quick, easy winter's dish that we've embraced as one of our own – and no wonder

Macaroni cheese

If you don't have any cheddar, use up any odds and ends of cheese you have in the fridge, even blue cheese.

400g dried macaroni
25g butter, plus 1 tbsp extra
25g flour
500ml milk
Salt and black pepper
200g Montgomery cheddar, grated
2 leeks, washed, halved and sliced
100g pancetta, chopped
1 tbsp chopped flat-leaf parsley
100g parmesan, grated

Bring a large pan of salted water to a boil, add the pasta, stir and cook until al dente. Heat the oven to 200C/400F/gas mark 6. Meanwhile, melt 25g butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour and cook for a minute. Slowly whisk in the milk until you have a smooth, white sauce. Season, and whisk in the cheddar. Melt the tablespoon of butter in a sauté pan, and fry the leeks and pancetta until the leeks are soft and the pancetta is cooked. Drain the pasta, tip it back into the pot, then mix in the sauce, leeks, pancetta and parsley. Pour into an ovenproof dish and top with parmesan. Bake for 15 minutes until golden brown and starting to colour.

• This recipe is extracted from A Taste Of Home: 200 Quick And Easy Recipes, by Angela Hartnett, is published by Ebury at £25. To order a copy for £20, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop

In this season of detoxs and diets here's a salad that's both healthy and tasty

We've hit the season of diets, detox and guilt. But in my opinion, the same old adages apply: less is more, and eat everything but in moderation. However, salads are way past the days of lettuce, tomato, sliced cucumber and salad cream. So if you're after a healthy option, but still want to eat tasty food, this week's recipe should hit the spot. If you want to go fat-free, ditch the vinaigrette, and season with cumin and a touch of lemon juice instead.

Serves 2

20ml red wine vinegar
½ tsp dijon mustard
100ml olive oil
1 small red onion, peeled and thinly sliced
1 cauliflower
3 large oranges
1 pomegranate
50g raisins
1 tbsp chopped mint
Salt and pepper

Mix the red wine vinegar, mustard and olive oil in a large bowl, season and mix well and leave to one side. Add the red onion to the vinaigrette – this will allow the vinegar to slightly "cook" the red onion.

Put a pan of salted water on to boil, and prepare the cauliflower by removing the stalk and root, and cutting into florets. Add the florets to the boiling water and simmer until just cooked. When ready, drain well and immediately, while still warm, add it to the vinaigrette. Mix well.

Using a sharp knife, cut away the peel of the orange and slice into segments (or if easier, peel and segment by hand). If the oranges are lovely and ripe, don't worry too much about removing any of the pith. Prepare the pomegranate (it's not the easiest but it's well worth the hassle). Cut the fruit in half, then carefully scoop out the seeds. Add the orange and pomegranate to the cauliflower, mix well, and add the raisins and mint. Check the seasoning and serve.

If making for later, leave in the fridge but remember to remove 15 minutes before serving so that it reaches room temperature.

• Angela Hartnett is chef patron at Murano restaurant and consults at the Whitechapel Gallery and Dining Room, London

Twitter.com/angelahartnett

Enter now for your chance to sample the menus of world-beating women chefs, including Angela Hartnett, Margot Janse and Helena Rizzo

This competition is now closed

Girls' Night Out celebrates women in the restaurant industry. Over three nights in March, six leading chefs from London and abroad will be cooking specially devised menus at 1 Lombard Street, London EC3. You can win a five-course dinner for two worth £200 per head, including champagne and wine, on one of these nights.

On March 11, Gabrielle Hamilton, chef-owner of Prune in New York, will cook with Angela Hartnett of London's Murano.

On March 12, Helena Rizzo of Mani in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and Clare Smyth, triple-Michelin-starred head chef of London's Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, will take over the kitchen.

On March 13, it's the turn of Margot Janse, executive chef of Le Quartier Français in South Africa's Western Cape, and Anna Hansen, chef-owner of The Modern Pantry in London.

The evenings will begin with champagne and canapes, followed by a meal with wines chosen by Selfridges buyer Dawn Davies, who has sourced wine from female producers. The chefs will talk about their menus and answer your questions.

To win a place at this exclusive event – organised by Guardian chef Angela Hartnett and writer Fiona Sims, and sponsored by American Express – email g2.competition@guardian.co.uk with your name and phone number, and preferred date. The competition closes at 11.59pm on Sunday 19 February 2012. Full terms and conditions below. Good luck!

Full terms and conditions

1. To enter, email g2.competition@guardian.co.uk with your contact details (name, email address and phone number) and preferred date to attend the event. 2. Competition open to UK residents aged 18 and over. 3. Employees and agencies of Guardian News & Media Limited ("GNM"), its group companies, family members and anyone connected to the competition may not enter. 4. Competition closes 11.59pm on 19 February 2012. 5. One entry per person. 6. Three winners will be selected at random and will be notified by email or phone on or before 27 February 2012. Winners must reply within 6 days or will forfeit the prize. 7. Each prize is pair of tickets for one Girls Night Out dinner on 11, 12 or 13 March 2012. Winners' preferred choice of date is not guaranteed. 8. No cash alternative. Prize is non-transferable and non-exchangeable. 9. By entering you accept GNM's full terms and conditions. 10. Name of winners available on written request to G2. 11. Winners may be required for promotional activity.

Restaurant kitchens have punishing hours and a macho culture, so is it any wonder that only 20% of British chefs are women? Angela Hartnett, one of the UK's greatest talents, has cooked up a way to celebrate the genius of her female peers

When Gabrielle Hamilton was heavily pregnant with her second son, Leone, her to-do list read roughly like this: tell brunch crew vinaigrette too acidic; pick up white platters; have baby; figure out pomegranate syrup. As chef-owner of the highly lauded New York restaurant Prune, Hamilton had planned to let the birth take its natural course. Then two of her small team of cooks quit abruptly. The birth would have to be scheduled and induced. As she writes in her bestselling memoir, Blood, Bones and Butter, she felt "in the moment, like the only thing I could control was the birth of my second son ... With nothing more than Pitocin in your IV drip, you can sooner control the date and time of the birth of a human being – the gushing entry into the great blue world of a whole new person – than you can the scheduling of a few line cooks in your operation."

Hamilton's memoir charts her chef's progress, from the smell of lamb roasting over apple-wood coals at her childhood home in rural Pennsylvania, her desire as a nine-year-old to get in among the tongue-lolling carcasses in the butcher's cooler, her teen years as a snot-nosed, coke-snorting waitress charged briefly with grand larceny (the charges were dropped), then a staunch Marxist feminist college dropout. Her path winds through temporary, 20-hour-a-day jobs in catering, a diversion through a fiction-writing degree, and on to the moment she opened Prune. It is a tale filled with indignities – she once had to clear human shit and a maggot-filled rat from the outside stairs of the restaurant – as well as triumphs. Last year she was named Best Chef in New York City at the James Beard awards.

Hamilton also describes the particular circumstance of being a woman chef. On her way to a panel discussion about the paucity of women in the restaurant industry, she wonders why they're still having this "draining, polarising conversation". After all, as she says to me, as salty and straightforward to speak to as she is in her memoir, "the kitchen is pretty merit-based. There's nothing in a kitchen that either gender can't do. It's not like sumo wrestling. You don't actually have to be physically larger." Yet, as that panel gets underway, she finds herself thinking about the "second job" she has been holding down while working in male-dominated kitchens, "that of constantly, vigilantly figuring out and calibrating my place in that kitchen with those guys to make a space for myself that was bearable and viable", she writes. "Should I wear pink clogs or black steel-toe work shoes? Lipstick or chapstick? Work double hard, double fast, double strong, or keep pace with the average Joe? Swear like a line cook or giggle like a girl? Meanwhile, the parsley needs to be chopped, and the veal chops seared off. There is, still, the work itself to do."

While home cooking is still associated primarily with women, the restaurant industry remains heavily male-dominated. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that of the UK's 187,000 chefs, 37,000 are women, making up just under 20% of the total. And at the very top, in the ranks of executive and head chefs, women seem even more anomalous. The Best New Chef lists created by US magazine Food & Wine have featured 92 men and 11 women in the last 10 years (89.3% male, 10.7% female); and while there were celebrations when a record-breaking 11 women won Michelin stars in the UK at the start of 2011, that was out of 143 Michelin-starred restaurants altogether.

It was partly this lack of women that led Angela Hartnett, chef and owner of the Michelin-starred restaurant Murano– and arguably the best-known woman chef in the UK – to set up Girls' Night Out, a celebration next month of those rare women at the very top of the industry. She and her fellow organiser, food and wine writer Fiona Sims, decided to stage an event where three British-based chefs would cook with three from restaurants overseas, two a night, for three consecutive nights, starting with Hartnett and Hamilton on 11 March. They are followed by Clare Smyth, head chef at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay– the first and only woman in the UK to run a restaurant with three Michelin stars – cooking with Helena Rizzo, one of the best chefs in South America, at the forefront of Brazil's burgeoning food scene with her restaurant Mani.

The third night features Anna Hansen, chef-owner of the highly lauded London restaurant The Modern Pantry, cooking with Margot Janse, executive chef of Le Quartier Français, which is among South Africa's best restaurants, and specialises in food firmly rooted in that country's natural ingredients. The £200-per-head, five-course menus include Hamilton's buttered brown rice with rock shrimp, roasted mushrooms and duck crackling; Janse's loin of springbok, African grains, fermented garlic nougatine and celeriac puree; and Rizzo's ice-cream of egg yolks with coconut foam and crispy coconut.

Speaking to these women, the reasons for their success emerge quickly. They are all direct, down to earth and driven by their love of food. Hansen describes how, as a trainee, she would go into work even on days off, lured by the rabbits that were being brought in to be gutted and skinned. Smyth realised she wanted to be a chef in her mid-teens, and immediately started reading about grand chefs, learning classical sauce bases, saving money from her school holiday restaurant job, before packing up and moving from her parents' farm in Northern Ireland to take up an apprenticeship in England straight after her GCSEs. Her parents weren't especially pleased.

The reasons there are so few women at the top also become clear: a sticky mix of kitchen machismo, punitively long hours, benevolent sexism and a culture that still sees women as cooks, men as chefs; women in the home, men in the professional kitchen. When I go to meet Hansen at The Modern Pantry, her staff gliding gracefully through the final hour of lunch service, I ask whether she thinks women in the industry get enough recognition. "No, I don't, overall, frankly," she says. "People are fascinated with male chefs, not female chefs, because female chefs are doing what females are supposed to do: cook. But males are seen as doing something extraordinary … When you think about food, it's often seen as a female domain, but as soon as it becomes something where you can win a crown then the boys move in, right?"

Hansen grew up in Auckland, New Zealand, and started her career unexpectedly in her early 20s, when she came to the UK and took up a dishwasher position at The French House Dining Room in Soho, London. It was a tiny kitchen, and she was soon promoted to trainee, working with the two chefs, married couple Margot and Fergus Henderson. They were friendly, encouraging, and she loved it. Hansen has only ever worked in one fairly macho kitchen "and I've never hated going to work so much in my life", she says. Had she started out there, she adds, she doesn't think she would have become a chef.

Some professional kitchens are legendarily tense. The turning point in Hartnett's career came when she went to work for Gordon Ramsay at his restaurant Aubergine in the mid-1990s – when the kitchen there was referred to as "Vietnam" and she was the only woman. There were bets she wouldn't last much more than a week, but she persisted. "At the time you felt like you were in a war zone," she says, "because you were being screamed at, but when you relaxed you could laugh. There was one Easter I think, when every single person seemed to do something wrong, to the point where we were all wondering who would be next to screw up. Another time, I'd gone into the fridge, and the pastry chef had put all these souffle moulds on a tray, and as I turned around I clipped it, and of course you could just hear Gordon going: 'What the fuck's she done now? What's Dizzy' – he used to call me Dizzy Lizzy – 'done now?'"

It was suggested that Smyth wouldn't last long in Ramsay's kitchen either, but within three years, aged just 29, she was appointed head chef. Smyth has taken only half a day off for sickness in 17 years, and says when she was younger she always felt she had to prove herself. "If I was tired, or I cut myself, or I wasn't strong enough to do something, I used to think people would be saying: 'Oh, it's because she's a woman.' I would be the first one in, the last one out. But I don't think anyone else put that pressure on me but me."

On one occasion in her 20s, when a less established chef was about to be promoted above her to the sauce section, she threatened to quit on the spot. The tactic worked. "It wasn't that the chef was sexist – he wasn't – but the sauce section in this restaurant, and in many restaurants, is the most difficult. It's dirty, not very pleasant, and it wasn't the fact he thought I couldn't do it, but no woman had ever done that here before. He just didn't want to see me doing it really. And obviously I wanted to do everything."

Being a chef is "not a very feminine job", says Smyth. "Especially when you're coming up through the kitchen. It's hard work, you get cuts, you get burnt, you're working on the sauce, and you're working day and night." She made a decision early on that she would have to succeed young, so she could have a family later. "Women haven't got a choice," she says. "If you want to have it all, you need to achieve it young, because I couldn't do this and have a family. When I do have a family I want to do that well also. I don't want to drop them off and be working 90 hours a week. I remember years ago, when I wanted to go and train in France with Alain Ducasse, and Gordon took me out for dinner with Marcus Wareing, and they said: 'OK, where do you want to work, what do you want to do?' And I was a senior sous chef, I was 25, and I was saying to Gordon: 'I want to go here, I want to go there, and I need to do it now.' They said: 'Why are you in such a hurry?' And I said: 'Because I am. I'm a woman, Gordon. I need to do this now.' And they were like: 'Calm down.' And I said: 'No. I don't have time.'"

None of the women I speak to has ever had a problem presiding over a male-dominated kitchen. I ask if the Prune kitchen is as macho as some of those Hamilton has worked in, and she says she doesn't "scream and shout, but I do groan. And I think I make more sexual jokes than anyone — we like good, healthy, dirty banter going on in the kitchen. That keeps us all going".

In 2002, when Hartnett became head chef at the Connaught, and some customers reacted with horror at the idea of a woman running a professional kitchen (one used to ring up to ask, malevolently, if she was still there), the atmosphere was more macho than it is at Murano, she says. "There were a lot more chefs, and they'd always be mucking around and joking. There was a butcher who they said was so rude, and I'd say: 'Oh no, not George, he's very polite,' and they said: 'Oh yeah, when you're around. As soon as your back's turned it's disgusting the things he comes out with.'"

Janse's approach to managing her kitchen isn't at all punishing; rather than pushing her staff to their physical limits, she tries to encourage them to relax a little. "You have to be strict," she says, "but I don't want people to shudder when I walk in, because I don't think you're going to cook nice food if that's how you feel ... I don't have a starting time for my team. They tend to come too early, and then I have to say, no, you can't come at this time every day. It's not good. You get too tired. It's not healthy. I don't think it's right to start at nine in the morning and go home at midnight, without a proper break or split shift. I think you need to work smart, and I expect you to work hard, but I really am over the feeling that you need to kill yourself in this job."

Hartnett says that being one of the few top female chefs has helped her career, rather than hindered it, made her more likely to receive publicity, more likely to be asked to appear in magazines and on TV, just generally more prominent. And while some chefs would guard that exceptional status, she's using it to draw attention to her equally brilliant female peers. Ramsay once suggested women couldn't cook to save their lives. What does Hartnett think of that? She laughs, as she has in the past at so many macho kitchen shenanigans. "I think he said it," she hoots, "but I don't think he meant it."

• Girls' Night Out, sponsored by American Express, is on 11, 12 and 13 March at 1 Lombard Street, London EC2. To book, email el@jessen.co.uk with the subject line Girls' Night Out or call 020 7929 9511

When MasterChef put Mauritius on the foodie map, Michelin-starred chef Angela Hartnett decided to investigate. Lucy Cavendish went along for a taster

Angela Hartnett and I are sitting under the canopy of a small restaurant called Resto Sept in the depths of the Mauritian countryside. It consists of nothing more than a few tables, some plastic chairs and a bar.

We have ventured out from the grand but lovely enclave of the Belle Mare Plage hotel in search of… well, something more Mauritian. Back in the UK, Hartnett's Italian-style food has garnered her praise and a Michelin star at her restaurant, Murano. But here, away from the hotels that line the shores of the Mauritian coastline, she is looking for something more natural, more native.

This is why we are in the tiny town of Trou d'eau Douce. The 2012 MasterChef winner Shelina Permalloo, whose fusion cooking is rooted in her Mauritian culture, has sent us here. Permalloo wowed the judges with her aubergine spicy fritters with wild garlic and tomato salsa and papaya. Since her win earlier this year, she has wanted to do more for Mauritian food. "It's an interesting mix," she says. "It's really delicious."

Angela, myself and Angela's friend, the chef Neil Borthwick who works at London's two-star Michelin restaurant The Square, are the only people here. This is mainly because it is pouring with rain. "No one goes out in this type of rain," the proprietor of the restaurant says as water pours down from the roof.

But we trust Shelina, who has told us to make sure we are served traditional Creole food. "Some places water it down for the tourists," she says. "You need to ask for the real thing. It's hot and spicy."

And we certainly get it. The starters – a selection of Indian dosas – come with a stunning array of fresh pickles, a chilli dip that takes the roof off my mouth and a shockingly tangy sauce that resembles horseradish. Angela looks delighted as she ladles it on to her dosa. The main course is a thali – butterbean stew, fish curry, octopus – accompanied by the ever-present tomato-based Creole sauce of the island. "It's called rougaille," says the girl serving us (it's a family-run business; she's an elder daughter). She ladles the rougaille over my plate of fish curry – a chilli-flavoured yet sweet sauce with a hint of paprika. Angela and I agree that it's delicious.

In the daylight the following morning when, for about five minutes, the rain stops, I see that Trou d'eau Douce is beautiful. A man at a local café where we stop for a soda tells me the town's name means "sweet water", and there is water flowing everywhere. It's a small place tucked away among banana plantations with barely a tourist to be seen.

Many tourists never encounter local places to eat in Mauritius and given that Michelin-starred food is a rare luxury – the multi-Michelin-starred Alain Ducasse's Spoon at the Saint Géran hotel closed recently – it's worth venturing away from your hotel. The Deer Hunter restaurant at the Constance Belle Mare Plage resort focuses entirely on local food.

Gastro-tourism, in terms of people looking for a more "island" experience, is booming here. It only takes one trip to the Port Louis market in the Mauritian capital, to find out why. It's quite an experience. It's hot, sweaty, noisy and smelly, and the stalls are heaving with unusual fruits, vegetables and spices. Angela walks around smelling everything. Huge bunches of thyme scent the air. Sacks of rice, split peas and lentils bulge over. Every stall seems to sell a wide variety of squashes in every hue – purple, green and yellow.

Shelina has suggested trying the street food. "Gateaux piments [chilli cakes], dal poori: you should get all the toppings, usually butterbean curry, coriander sauce and chilli sauce – the combination is brilliant." I try a chilli-infused tropical fruit bag, and my eyebrows nearly blow off.

Salted fish and gajaks (the equivalent of tapas) are sold on every corner, as are dosas, Indian sweets and drinks, some of which look delicious (the juices) and some of which look disgusting (the milk-based ones).

Angela is here for the Festival Culinaire Bernard Loiseau, which involves her cooking with an island chef as part of a culinary competition established by Dominique Loiseau, the widow of Bernard. The idea is for the Michelin-starred European chefs to combine their style of cooking with the emerging style of the island chefs. Thus she spends half her time trying out dishes in the kitchen of the Belle Mare Plage and the rest adapting local recipes to suit her style. She and her island chef, Kamlesh Doorjean from the Constance Le Prince Maurice hotel, cook up breadfruit, patole (a bit like marrow), pipengaille, christophina, baton mouroum.

Angela's feeling about Mauritian food is that "it is a very diverse way of cooking – lots of spices, herbs and a different way of using sauces".

Much of the diversity comes from the island's history. It has been ruled by the Dutch, the British and the French. Most chefs have been trained to cook in the French style with a twist.

At the Deer Hunter we eat chilli cakes, saffron-infused rice and lobster with coriander. Lime and mango feature prominently in the menu, as does the spicy rougaille sauce. Doorjean tells us that everything cooked in his family home is served with this Creole sauce. "We like our food very spicy," he says.

"It's incredible the range you find," says Angela, sitting down to tuck in to noodles, vegetables and garlic-infused water, a break from the rich Michelin-starred food she has been eating all week. She sighs and closes her eyes. "I think I might actually be able to relax now," she says.

Just then, the sun comes out.

Shelina Permalloo's top tips

TROU D'EAU DOUCE
Chez Tino: The seafood is lovely, along with typical plates such as Creole rougaille sauce
Le Café des Arts: Worth trying, but you need to book
Le Touessrok: Best restaurant, and a beautiful place
Resto Sept: Hot and spicy home-cooking

UNION FLACQ
Chez Manuel: A great example of the Chinese influence. Try the mine frit – delicious with garlic water

PORT LOUIS
Le Capitaine: Pricey, but great seafood and very elaborate cocktails

For details of the Deer Hunter, Constance Belle Mare Plage or Prince Maurice hotels, go to constancehotels.com. For the annual Festival Culinaire Bernard Loiseau, go to bernard-loiseau.com.

• Lucy Cavendish flew from London with Air Mauritius (airmauritius.com). Returns from £650

Angela Hartnett's barbecue chicken and Ashley Palmer-Watts' lamb chops will ensure your jubilee party is fit for the Queen

Angela Hartnett'sbarbecue chicken with watercress mayonnaise

I think the royal family are generally a good thing. The Queen gave me my MBE and I've met Prince Charles a couple of times at events and through working with Slow Food I was lucky enough to tour the gardens at Highgrove. Although I actually met him when I was younger and in the Brownies. We were on a trip to Canterbury Cathedral and he happened to be there, and being a good sport he did a little walkabout. And we've been fortunate enough to have a couple of the royals come to the restaurant, although I can't say who.

When you were younger you used to have pretty bad chicken dishes at parties, like the chicken drumsticks people always seemed to eat in the 70s. This is a more modern, updated take on party food, and still very British.

We're having a street party near where I live in east London. My sister's on the organising committee with the local vicar. I'm just helping out with the food, so I'll do as I'm told.

Serves 8
spatchcock chicken 4

For the marinade
thyme 2 tbsp, chopped
rosemary 2 tbsp, chopped
garlic 4 cloves, crushed
honey 4 tbsp
white wine vinegar 75ml
olive oil 50ml
tomato ketchup 2 tbsp
Dijon mustard 1 tsp
lime 1, rind and juice
sea salt and pepper to taste

For the mayonnaise
readymade mayonnaise 500g
watercress 1 bunch, finely chopped

Mix all the marinade ingredients in a bowl and season to taste. Cut the spatchcocks in half, season well and rub the marinade over the skin. On a barbecue, start to cook and crisp the chicken skin-side down, turn over and move further away from the direct heat until cooked – around 40 minutes.

Remove from the heat and rest. To finish, mix the watercress with the mayo and check seasoning. Serve with crisp green herb salad and watercress mayo.

Angela Hartnett is chef patron of Murano, London W1; muranolondon.com

Ashley Palmer-Watts' lamb chops, cooked over charcoal with broad beansand mint

This recipe is spring on a plate. British produce is incredible in the springtime, and each ingredient in this dish really makes the most of that by being cooked over charcoal. I use the barbecue at home as much as I do my frying pans – and here the delicious spring lamb and the cucumber are chargrilled.

I encourage people to use cucumber. Cooking with cucumber is something not many people would think of doing, but it's a very old thing. When we go through old recipe books for inspiration at the restaurant, it always crops up. The flavour of it hot – particularly barbecued – is something else, and the texture is firm but moist. You won't look back once you've tried it. With the cucumber juice and the chardonnay vinegar it creates a kind of cucumber ketchup that's very similar to one we have at Dinner. It's beautiful, and very elegant – perfect for a jubilee party.

The royal family are very connected to Dinner, actually, because when we're standing in the kitchen we can see the Royal Horse Guards go by each day. I have to pinch myself sometimes.

Serves 4

For the sauce
lamb stock 1 litre
lamb fat (reserved from making the stock) 1 tbsp
sprig of rosemary 1
sprig of mint 1

For the chops
spring lamb chops 8
clove of garlic 1
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper

For the garnish
cucumber 1 large
olive oil
shallot 3 tbsp, finely chopped
chardonnay vinegar 2½ tbsp
broad beans 250g, podded, blanched and peeled
dill 2 tbsp, chopped
flat leaf parsley 2 tbsp, chopped

To make the sauce, place the lamb stock into a saucepan and reduce to 100ml. Remove from the heat and whisk in the lamb fat and rosemary sprig. Set aside.

My preferred method of cooking the lamb chops would be over charcoal on a barbecue, but roasted in a pan over a high heat would also be great.

Cut the garlic clove in half and rub each of the chops with the garlic, then season with sea salt and coarsely ground black pepper – lightly press the seasoning on to the flesh so it sticks and drizzle over a little olive oil. Grill the lamb chops on a barbecue each side for 2–3 minutes until medium rare, and then wrap in foil to rest while cooking the garnish.

Juice a third of the cucumber and reserve the juice. Peel the remaining cucumber and cut in half, then cut the four sides off the cucumber to leave you with just the rectangular heart. Cut the cucumber sides into 5mm pieces and set aside.

Season the cucumber hearts and drizzle with olive oil, place on the barbecue and cook for 2 minutes per side until lightly coloured and soft. Set aside and keep warm.

Pour a thin layer of olive oil into a hot pan and add the cut cucumber pieces. Leave to colour, then gently turn to colour further. Reduce the heat and add the shallot and cook for 2 minutes. Deglaze the pan with the chardonnay vinegar and reduce until almost all gone.

Add 4 tbsp of the cucumber juice and peeled broad beans and heat gently to ensure the mixture remains moist, season with salt and pepper. Stir in the chopped herbs and serve.

Heat the sauce, add the remaining 2 tbsp of cucumber juice and add the sprig of mint.

Cut the cucumber hearts in half diagonally, place on the centre of large plate, spoon the broad bean and cucumber mix around and place the two chops on top of the garnish. Remove the mint from the sauce and pour a little of the sauce over the lamb chops.

Ashley Palmer-Watts is head chef at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, London SW1; dinnerbyheston.com

Observer Food Monthly asked four Michelin-starred chefs to pick their 'ones to watch'. Here, Angela Hartnett of Murano chooses Suzanna Kean, sous chef at Maze

"All right, Suze?" says Angela Hartnett as she greets Suzanna Kean with an affectionate, matey hello. The 25-year-old, now sous chef at London's Maze, worked with Hartnett on the opening of her Mayfair restaurant Murano. She stayed two-and-a-half years, starting as chef de partie before quickly progressing. "I had implicit trust in Suzanna," declares Hartnett. Having cut her teeth under the Ramsay regime, it's safe to assume such trust would not be easy to gain. "She naturally understood about consistency, which is so important."

Kean has always been reliable, even as a teenager, when she would peel "mountains" of vegetables for her mother, who worked in a care home. "I actually really enjoyed it," she confesses. She studied catering at Glenrothes college before coming to London six-and-a-half years ago, landing a job at Scott's before joining Hartnett at Murano. In Scotland, Kean was the only girl in the kitchen "nine times out of 10" but says that there are "far more" in London. Not that it bothers her. "You get no special treatment being a woman. Graft is part of the job, but you know that from the first day at college."

She does, however, feel like some men of a certain generation in the industry don't take younger female chefs seriously. "Sometimes those men don't listen to women," she says. "So you have to just be that little bit stronger, really believe in yourself." Hartnett believes "the male-female thing" is the same in any industry. "It's just about whether you can hack it or not," she says. "Plenty of blokes can't. Women who succeed in our industry are women who want to do well for themselves, full stop. If you want to do well, and have the passion, you just get on with it, nothing stands in your way."

It must be nice having other girls around, though? "It is," says Kean. "The guys don't swear as much but I'm worse than them to be honest."

Hartnett says she can "talk shite" and "have a gossip" with Kean, and you can definitely imagine seeing the two of them together. But would she trust a woman more than a man? "I don't know, is the honest answer. But I know I'd want to go out for a drink with her after work."

Are Nigella's days spent scoffing chocolate cake? Does Heston blow-torch his dinner every night? And what does the Guardian's restaurant critic eat when off-duty? We asked six foodies to share their week in meals, with illuminating results

Heston Blumenthal

It can be quite difficult to control what you eat when your schedule is all over the place. I tend to make small allowances when I can – for instance, cutting down on carbs by taking one layer of bread off a sandwich. I also exercise every day, even if it's just a short run. I'm tasting and developing dishes all the time – we can have around 500 dishes in development at any one time between the Fat Duck, Dinner, Waitrose and the twopubs, and that's not including the food for the TV work, so when I'm not filming, I'm kind of constantly eating/tasting. This has been an interesting exercise, though – I've never really analysed what I eat or drink. I guess I need to organise breakfast better, and I'm quite famous for drinking my body weight in Earl Grey tea, but the rest is just madness.

Sunday

Breakfast Filming this morning, so just had a quick Earl Grey tea.

Lunch Tuna sandwich… from a shop somewhere.

Dinner Sunday lunch – well, kind of lunch/dinner by the time I got home. I think it was about 8.30pm, so that makes it officially Sunday dinner. A roast, of course! Dorset lamb this week. I always try to have a Sunday joint with all the trimmings – it's one of my favourite meals of the week.

Monday

Breakfast Early morning phone interview with Australia and a cup of tea (Earl Grey with skimmed milk).

Lunch Lunch? Not today… : (

Dinner Filming at the BBC studios for Jimmy Carr's Channel 4 show 8 Out Of 10 Cats– great night, hilarious, but was up early, then straight off to filming and hadn't eaten all day. Arrived at the BBC starving – big mistake (dried-out meatballs) washed down with a few glasses (slightly warm pinot grigio). Delicious!?

Tuesday

Breakfast My new TV series is out mid-November and we're still filming – cutting it neat! Had bacon butties to start the day off, cooked in the engine of a steam train – why not?

Lunch Lunch was a bigger affair, but at least had packed my lunchbox. Grabbed some veg from the catering van, too.

Dinner Popped into the amazing Zuma with my youngest, Joy, for her birthday. We were too full for dessert, so they just sent a little something.

Wednesday

Breakfast Waitrose tasting for new hot cross buns for next Easter – Earl Grey jasmine tea and orange-flower water versus ginger and acacia honey. May sound nice, but had to taste brussels sprout leaves cooked in different ways at the same time.

Lunch Lunch at the lab: yoghurt and tampons. We were testing the effect of certain foods and how they coat the palate for an interactive presentation. The tampon dries the saliva out between spoonfuls, so you can identify how the tongue perceives flavour. It did work, but I wonder how it will go down. 

Snack Everything is getting bigger for the new programme. We supersize everything, and cook and eat it with different communities throughout the UK. Things like afternoon tea and old sweets. Not sure where the huge whisky gum came from, but I think I know someone at the lab who knows.

Tea We have a lab grade centrifuge, a distillator, a rotary evaporator, vacuum centrifuge, vac packs, water baths… But no bloody kettle. A very complex cup of tea.

Dinner After a full day in Bray and a brainstorm meeting that overran, ended up in the garden of the Crown for fish and chips – took the opportunity as a rare warm evening.

Thursday

Breakfast Book signing back in office – finally a decent cup of tea, ahhh, found teapot.

Lunch Spent most of the day at Dinner. Meeting with Ash to discuss a new project – a historic British food book – and trying to get a modern "meat fruit" shot to contrast with the historic image. Lunch was a tasting of new dishes: new terrine, autumn tart and sambonade – a goat's cheese cheesecake with elderflower and a secret centre.

Dinner Stayed and had dinner with a couple of friends – obviously had a meat fruit. We're serving around 1,000 of them a week now!

Friday

Breakfast None at home because I was running late, but I had tea and breakfast canapés at the launch of a new Vision Express shop on Oxford Street – loads of bites, so breakfast in stages.

Lunch Vision Express sushi before cutting the ribbon for the official store opening. I met another great spectacle-wearing geek, Jason Bradbury, there from The Gadget Show, so had a lot to talk about.

Dinner Roast chicken at a friend's – it's the biggest joy when someone asks you to their home and cooks for you, but my mates always joke that it's such a stress. I think it's the other way round when they come to mine – it's not as if I can just cook up a steak. People are expecting to eat the cutlery at the very least.

Saturday

Breakfast A quick tea and pastry on the way to the lab – more Earl Grey.

Lunch Tasting two new dishes for the Duck. Nowhere near finished, but one will end up on the menu for Christmas as a kind of "partridge in a pear tree" – partridge cooked in butter at a low temperature to relax the meat, served on the breastbone with brandy butter, and chestnut and pine and mandarin (basically all the aromas and flavours we associate with Christmas). We're also looking at the leathering process from the 1800s for a turbot dish – tanning agents in early 1800s Britain were sumac, oak and mimosa bark, so we use all three. The drainage from the tanneries heated up the land, and we grew pineapples and melons on it, so we serve the fish with savoury melon and purple carrot. Oh, and frankincense and crystalised sea veg – we make our own leather from the fish skin, which you don't eat, but which will be part of the cutlery for the texture and smell. Easy, really, to balance all that?!

Dinner Working late in Bray after tasting, so had a beer and some of head chef Jonny Lake's nachos with the boys after service.

• Heston's Fantastical Food starts on 6 November at 9pm on Channel 4.

Nigella Lawson

Monday

Breakfast Egg on toast, wolfed down too fast for a picture, but this is the deal (and it's often repeated): wholegrain rye toast, with a soft boiled egg schmooshed on top, with lots of Maldon salt and coarsely ground white pepper. Straight after breakfast, made batch of coffee ice-cream and chocolate nougat cookies to take to curry favour with various radio and TV interviews that I have lined up for day.

Lunch I am not good when I miss meals; being hungry makes me both murderous and suicidal. So didn't feel good that I didn't manage to get back for lunch until about 4.30pm and had to leave house for the next thingy at 5pm, so all I had time for was some rye toast with hummus and coriander on top, and a far too small portion at that.

Supper Roast chicken – I have all the bits with cartilage and skin, by choice, while pretending to make great sacrifices so that the children can eat the white meat – on escarole (my favourite lettuce) dressed just with Maldon, Mellow Yellow cold-pressed rapeseed oil, lemon and lots of English mustard.

Tuesday

Breakfast Made an egg and bacon sandwich for one of the children, but then ran too late to have breakfast myself. Not a good start to the day, made worse by the fact that I was going to a photographic shoot, which always makes me nervy.

Lunch Made up for lack of breakfast by eating huge amounts of rotisserie chicken, char-grilled corn and crinkly chips from Chicken Shop in Kentish Town. Don't blame them for the poor display: I had a takeaway and didn't present the food (such was my quaking hunger) to its best advantage. From this point onwards, my life started looking up.

Supper By special request, made risi e bisi, a Venetian recipe (think a soupy pea risotto) that's a favourite in my home. I am always grateful when this is what I'm asked to cook, because it's quick and easy, and as comforting for the cook as the eater.

Wednesday

Breakfast Rye toast with Mellow Yellow cold-pressed rapeseed oil and Vegemite. I feel a real traitor to my country choosing Vegemite over Marmite, but there it is.

Lunch Since this is a day of interviews, and the meagre toast with Vegemite is wearing off to the point of panic, I order a steak and chips. True, there are only four chips on the plate (though I must tell you they were much bigger and hunkier than they look), but they've been generous with the béarnaise sauce, and I also have a tube of Colman's in my bag, so I manage to get through the afternoon.

Supper By request, again, I make another of my children's favourites – penne with ham, peas and cream.

Thursday

Breakfast The usual rye toast and egg – and an awful lot of tea. In fact, I can never actually eat breakfast before I've had my two mugs of tea.

Lunch Have a meeting at home over lunch, so roast a butterflied leg of lamb, along with a tin of sliced pink fir apple potatoes, yellow courgettes, cherry tomatoes, leeks and black olives. There is no particular design to this vegetable mixture: I was just giving my fridge a bit of a going through, and bunged everything that needed to be used up into a roasting tin.

Supper Although I complied with children's wishes, making them burgers (not homemade, I must own up, but Heston's from Waitrose) with plastic cheese, potatoes cut somewhere between wedges and chips, roasted with garlic cloves and pancetta cubes, and a rather 1970s-looking salad, I needed the simple salve of an avocado, eaten with nothing more than a spritz of lemon and a snowy throw of salt.

I did succumb to some Booja-Booja champagne truffles later, but I never feel bad about that.

Friday

Breakfast Smoked salmon, coarsely ground white pepper, lemon juice and lots of dill – for me, the best way to eat it. I am very fussy about the smoked salmon, though; it must be London-cure, which is so lusciously mild that it's more like eating wafer-thin sashimi than anything else. I get mine, as my grandmother did before me, from Panzer's in St John's Wood, despite the schlepp.

Lunch A frantic day, and much as I like having proper meals and not grabbed snacks, lunch today is a toasted sandwich. Still, it's a very good toastie, buttery-crisp on the outside, lined with ham as thin and tender and pink as a kitten's tongue, and gooey with jarlsberg.

Supper Going to see Michael McIntyre at the O2, so supper has to be a picnic on the way there. I have an old picnic box I bought on eBay, and make a few batches of rice noodle and prawn salad, with beansprouts, sugar snaps and a lot of ginger, chilli and soy to go inside it. Friends we're going with a supply of champagne and, given that I can get drunk on one glass, I am reeling by the time I get home. Fantastic night, though, topped off by a buttered, toasted bagel on my return, followed by crisps and chocolate.

Saturday

Breakfast Get up too late for breakfast, but manage a good lunch-after-the-night-before (and pre-opening snoop) at Colbert of fried eggs with black pudding and crêpes with lemon and sugar.

Supper I live very near the Chelsea Fishmonger and generally throw myself at Rex, the fishmonger, and get myself comfortingly overstocked for the weekend. Tonight's supper is part of this catch: halibut, juicily roasted and plonked on top of some treviso leaves, with broccoli cooked with garlic oil, anchovies, chilli and dry white vermouth. This is what I use whenever I want white wine taste, but without having to open a bottle. I know it sounds odd, but unless we're having friends over, it never occurs to me to open a bottle of wine.

Sunday

Breakfast Up too late for breakfast, but I do manage a supersized cappuccino in bed with the papers.

Lunch Tuna tartare with capers, lemon zest, spring onions and rocket: this takes about three minutes to make and is a virtuous reward for the lazy and greedy.

Supper Ever since the children have been teenagers, the ritual of Sunday lunch has been shunted on to Sunday supper. Tonight, we're having pork belly slices – think melting meat and triumphant, bronze crackling – with soy and cumin gravy, mashed potato and broccoli. I've been experimenting with some mini versions of my cappuccino pavlova and have some bases left, as well as some coffee ice-cream from Monday, so do a housekeeping job of getting rid of the two together (that's my excuse), anointed with a sticky, gleaming drizzle of Golden Syrup which, along with Maldon and Colman's, constitute the holy trinity of Great British Foodstuffs.

• Nigella Lawson's new book, Nigellissima: Instant Italian Inspiration, is published by Chatto & Windus at £26. To order a copy for £20.80, plus free UK mainland p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop, or call 0330 333 6846.

Marina O'Loughlin

A lunatic mishmash of fayn daynin', boozing and comfort eating with the odd, breakfast-based attempt at healthiness. When not working, I'll cheerfully eat the same things over and over. I was on holiday for much of the week, so I'm amazed there's no Indian or a Thai: I usually pine for them after monoculturalist Italy. No apologies for the datterini surfeit – I'd happily live on them. And toast.

Saturday

Breakfast Tomatoes with chilli: I can't get enough of the local datterini tomatoes of joy.

Lunch Risotto at Trattoria Carmello– I practically live in this restaurant in Marina di Ragusa whenever I'm in Sicily. Simple but wonderful.

Dinner Satro in Scicli – new and still finding its feet. Toast, anchovy, sliver of lemon – tangy! Maccheroni with swordfish. The inevitable almondy, custardy cakes to finish.

Sunday

Breakfast More datterini.

Lunch Tuna and green peppers – usually hate green peppers, but these almost melted down into the tuna.

Dinner Lobster paella – bizarre to be eating paella in Sicily, but that's what our hosts cooked for us.

Monday

Breakfast Berocca and banana (and one or two datterini) – healthy!

Lunch A horrid little salad with tinned corn in a Modica cafe – you can get bad food in Italy.

Dinner Anchovy toasts. Bread with red tuna and its roe. Roast pancetta at the local bar: magnificently fatty, piggy porchetta. More almond cakes.

Tuesday

Breakfast Unidentified Sicilian object stuffed with cheese and sausage. Almost Glaswegian in its loveliness.

Lunch More Don Carmello – no apologies for going back. Antipasto di mare included fish-laced caponata.

Dinner Negroni and cicchetti at Grand Café Tabbacco, Catania. Then airline food worse even than it had been on way over. "Beef rendang" looked like Pedigree Chum, so I ate cheese and oatcakes and BA nuts.

Wednesday

Breakfast Bagel and tea – am a sucker for a bagel, one side marmalade, the other Marmite.

Lunch Homemade lemon cake and tea. I meant not to eat because I knew what was coming later…

Dinner Kitchen Table on Charlotte Street, for a review – though you'll have to wait until 10 November to read it. Fourteen courses. Several highlights, chief among them a giddily brilliant liquoricey pear cake.

Thursday

Breakfast Tea and a Crunchie – not proud of this: I'm calling it elevenses.

Lunch Garufin in Holborn. Pulled pork, chorizo, beans, squash – earthy and wonderful. Quail cooked in an escabeche – the presentation made me hoot. Presa Ibérico on quinoa flavoured with smoked oil – could almost convert me to quinoa.

Afternoon Pal who owns Belvidere Place B&B in Broadstairs has just got a licence, so I'm "helping" her with a bloody mary tasting. (Big Tom wins.)

Dinner Thai sticky rice with a little lime and fish sauce. Sometimes you just need something, well, soothing.

Friday

Breakfast Espresso, pomegranate, banana – almost healthy.

Lunch The last of the (possibly illegally imported) datterini, evoo, smoked Maldon, bread, Berocca.

Snack Percy Pigs – I buy them "for the children".

Dinner Risotto with tagliata hacked from a mammoth T-bone from the Butcher of Brogdale. Husband made it: bloody gorgeous in every sense.

Allegra McEvedy

Breakfast is important in our house – it's the one meal of the day that I'm guaranteed to have with my daughter. Lunch is a big variable – weekdays, if I'm writing, I'll just grab a bowl of soup or knock up a salad, but more often than not I'll be recipe testing or out tasting for the businesses I consult for, so don't want a proper lunch. Suppers, too, have no real pattern – I'm generally out no more than twice a week, and at home it's usually based around what's about to go off in the fridge.

Saturday

Breakfast Bacon and pineapple butties – must be a Saturday!

Lunch Friends over. Stunning bit of plaice, and probably the last time I do peas and lettuce this year – definitely a sunshine dish. And an emergency pud – vanilla sponge stolen from a friend with a quick plum compote and pistachios.

Dinner My sister and her kids came round for supper, so we had the first big beefy braise of the winter.

Sunday

Breakfast Some days I have eggs, others muesli. On big days, eggs are the way to go. Homemade River Cottage green tomato chutney put some zoom in today's oeuf.

Lunch Cafe Anglais: the compulsory umami-laden starter that is Rowley's parmesan custard, then more beef.

Supper A rioja-based meal with friends. Ended up making canapés a bit pissed: hummus and mung beans, potatoes and pesto... Basically any leftovers I had in the fridge.

Monday

Breakfast Had the plaice bones from Saturday in the fridge, so put on a fish stock while eating my muesli.

Lunch A cheese straw Parthenon set the tone on the first day of cooking for the new book. Didn't have a sit-down lunch because of that: shared a PPP – potato pesto pizza – with the girls for lunch, then more baking with raspberry jam tarts. Had a proper madeleine moment when I ate one later – hadn't had a jam tart for years and I came over a bit emotional. Love that food can do that to you.

Supper Easy supper with my daughter – my favourite Turkish veggie pilaff.

Tuesday

Breakfast Quick and yum hot breakfast on a cold day: lemon and sugar pancakes. Lunch More baking. Limbering up for Bonfire night with spicy sausage rolls. Munched a lot of sponge today, plus peppermint cream hearts. A great day in the McEvedy kitchen.

Dinner One of the girl's boyfriends had been shooting at the weekend, and she brought round pheasants as a present. Because I don't have enough food in my life...

Wednesday

Breakfast Marmite crumpet.

Lunch A typing-in-the-recipes day, so had salad with poached egg and homemade chorizo.

Supper Went to a Peruvian place called Ceviche. Had a fantastic dish called pisco – so good.

Thursday

Breakfast Muesli.

Lunch Tasting, so didn't really eat lunch. On the menu were 14 organic Irish seaweeds.

Supper Mussels were on day three, so needed cooking: never-fail marinière.

Friday

Breakfast A white peach compote that I made in August – I'd taken it out of the freezer for an end-of-work bellini yesterday, so we had the rest as a smoothie this morning.

Lunch Was left with an empty tart shell after testing a shortcrust recipe, so rummaged around in the fridge for ingredients to fill it with: last of my homemade chorizo, four old ends of various cheeses and peas from the freezer. With a bit of lettuce and the last of the toms, it made pretty much my perfect lunch (just add a glass of sauvignon blanc).

Supper The Queen Adelaide on Uxbridge Road. Scotch eggs make the best pub supper – the kedgeree ones were awesome, closely followed by the pickled egg one.

Tom Parker Bowles

"The primary requisite for writing well about food," mused the great AJ Liebling, "is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate… enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down. Each day brings only two opportunities for field work, and they are not to be wasted minimising the intake of cholesterol. They are indispensable, like a prizefighter's hours upon the road." Far be it from me to contradict AJ, but with training that "field work" can be stretched to at least five instances a day. The first bit of this week was fairly normal, the second more gruelling, as I was in the US to flog my new book– and to miss out on a raft of New York newbies and old favourites would be remiss. Well, that's my excuse.

Monday

Breakfast Nothing at all, but that's pretty much normal for me.

Lunch Tom yum goong soup at Tawana on Westbourne Grove, followed by larb gai and miang kum – hot as buggery.

Dinner Couscous with pickled chillies and harissa, a bowl of lentils and a Drumstick for pudding.

Tuesday

Breakfast A rare occurrence: fruit and carrots.

Lunch Haddock and potato soup, and then plaice at Hereford Road (a rather more regular occurrence).

Dinner Boiled egg and soldiers.

Wednesday

Breakfast and lunch Typical last-minute rush to get ready to go to Philadelphia for filming, so didn't get round to eating a thing all day, until I sat down to fish pie on the 5pm BA flight from Heathrow T5 – just about OK.

Dinner Landed in NYC around 8.30pm and went straight to dinner at Smith & Wollensky– a brutally monolithic onion and tomato salad, then a gargantuan New York strip that was not as good as it thought it was.

Thursday

Mid-morning A day in Philly. Cheese steak sandwich at Jim's– a touch bland; should have added onions. Then a hot dog. Good bun and topping, but the sausage lacked snap and smoke. Good local fizzy drink.

Dinner Oysters, clams and lobster roll at Sansom Street Oyster House.

Friday

Didn't eat all day because was in and out of QVC's studio. Ended up in some bar in the evening for a much-needed drink. They did a good burger, too.

Saturday

Mid-morning snack Still in New York – gobstoppers to keep me going.

Lunch To Tomoe Sushi – one of the best in town for spicy tuna tartare and eel otoro among other things.

Dinner Blue Smoke's Memphis ribs – not enough smoke, but the pulled pork was pretty damned good.

Sunday

Breakfast Are you kidding?

Lunch Sunday lunch at Má Pêche: to start, a broth of glorious, beefy, greasy depth – the sort you want to dive into – filled with chunks of wobbling tendon. And then, of course, David Chang's pork buns – world-famous, still world-class.

DinnerIl Buco Alimentari e Vineria in the East Village. Good food. Noisy, though. Home-cured salumi were damned good. And then spaghetti con bottarga – sweetly saline.

• Tom Parker Bowles's new book, Let's Eat: Recipes From My Kitchen Notebook, is published by Pavilion at £25. To order a copy for £20 including free UK mainland p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.

Angela Hartnett

Few chefs get three square meals a day – sometimes I'm lucky to get one – but I pick at stuff through service, so don't go hungry. Looking back, I should eat breakfast more, but that would mean being organised first thing, which is not a strong point.Monday

Breakfast Black coffee, like every day.

Lunch A day off, so went to see my mother. We had a nice minestrone.

Dinner Nuts, beans, salad leaves and beetroot, all bought at Aldeburgh food festival at the weekend.

Tuesday

Breakfast Coffee, then to Murano for service – that keeps you going, as you pick and taste right through.

Dinner Late supper at the Green Man & French Horn on St Martin's Lane. I joined friends after service, so hoovered up the remains of what they'd been eating – zander, partridge, leeks, eggs – and rounded things off with an ace jam tart.

Wednesday

Breakfast I actually had some time today, so grapefruit with the usual coffee – more treat than habit.

Lunch Staff lunch is always at 10.45am – today it was leftover veg turned into a stew or pasta.

Thursday

Breakfast Coffee first, as always.

Then testing for a private party – couscous salad with hot smoked salmon. Stayed on for lunch service, and picked my way through to lunch.

Dinner Spent afternoon on admin and errands, so headed to Murano: pasta with bread, high in carbs!

Friday

Dinner Pretty much what I ate on Wednesday, except I came home to a slice of spinach tart. It's a thing of beauty when made well, but I have to admit this was not the best – still, the spinach came from Mum's garden.

Saturday

Breakfast Late breakfast coffee and toasted St John bread – it's so handy to have the bakery round the corner.

Lunch Running late (again) and had to get to work, so just a quick salad.

Dinner Good job I had something light earlier, because tonight I had a huge Action Against Hunger meal: Claude Bosi's buckwheat soup, Tom Kerridge's slow-cooked hake, carrot purée and lardo, Phil Howard's roast guinea fowl with semolina gnocchi and Andrew Fairlie's chocolate hedgehog.

Sunday

Breakfast To Nordic Bakery with my nephew, who loves the place – egg and herrings on rye bread while the kids ate their way through cinnamon buns and rye muffins. Numerous coffees, too, obviously.

Lunch Had family over – made some salads, sardines on tomato and fennel, and linguine with vongole, chilli and garlic. No dessert, because I didn't get to St John in time to pick up some of their doughnuts – they always sell out so early

• Angela Hartnett is chef/patron at Murano, London W1.

With the Christmas season nearly upon us, Master of Wine Antony Moss pairs wines for a three-course Christmas menu with the chef of Murano, Angela Hartnett

The Kitchen Cabinet was a happy antidote to the waffle served up by George Osborne

The Kitchen Cabinet (R4) | iPlayer

The Autumn Statement (5 Live) | iPlayer

Inside the Academy School Revolution (R4) | iPlayer

Breakfast (5 Live) | iPlayer

The Atkinson People (R4 Extra) | iPlayer

You know how, with TV, you can have millions of channels and not find anything you want to watch? Radio is never like that. If, over breakfast, you can't face an old feller grumblathon, you can turn from Radio 4 to 5 Live. If that starts harshing your am vibes (a radio joke), there's always Grimmy, or Shaun Keaveny, or Danny Wallace, or Christian O'Connell, or any number of witty morning types to giggle your kids into their uniforms and out of the door. There's even classical music on tap at all hours, on Radio 3 or Classic FM, if you fancy weeping into the washing up.

But, I dunno, last week I couldn't find anything that felt right. I wanted jokes, thoughts, stimulation, anything to turn the pre-Xmas fear into festive. Nothing did it. I tuned into The Kitchen Cabinet, Radio 4's food panel show, hosted by the always entertaining Jay Rayner of this parish. It was the first of the new series. And it was… very good, if I'm honest, with both panel and audience kept nice and frothy by Jay's daft asides. I enjoyed Angela Hartnett's contributions the most. She has that flat southern accent you rarely hear on Radio 4, plus she was a bit rude. All of which I like. In fact, the show is a great listen and I recommend it to you, if you know your way around a stuffed aubergine. I don't.

Instead, because I reckon I know my way around a stuffed wallet (ho), I listened to TheAutumn Statement on 5 Live. Early on, the Speaker tried to restore order, as the House rolled around with mirth at the chancellor's opening statement: "The British economy is healing." "Each side should be heard with courtesy," squeaked Mr Bercow, though I have a feeling that he was talking merely so everyone remembered who he was. Anyhow, there followed, from Osborne, a cascade of percentages, a blizzard of figures, words such as debt and deficit chucked around like so many snowballs. He also went on about "the transfer of the coupons", as if the budget was actually a ceremonial handing over of Green Shield Stamp books. As you can guess, my fear was not dispelled.

Ah well. The evening before, I'd settled down with Guardian columnist Zoe Williams as she took a tour around academy schools in Insidethe Academy School Revolution. Williams is a feisty type and I'd hoped for some fireworks. But it seemed as though the only academies she could access were the successful ones. No surprise really – you're not going to welcome a journalist when your school is failing – but it made for a tame programme. (And, perhaps, a premature one: surely we'll only know whether academies really work in a few years' time?)

Williams was good, despite her natural punchiness being played down. At one point she gave an audible "pscha!", when an American financier talked some rubbish about wanting his firm to be both a business and a charitable institution. Some more of that cynicism would have made a sparkier listen.

No fear-chaser as yet… and then, suddenly, I found a couple. On Thursday's 5 Live Breakfast, Nicky Campbell interviewed George Osborne and then Rachel Burden tackled Ed Balls. Not that Osborne or Balls gave any reason to do anything other than panic; just that both Campbell and Burden were excellent. Campbell began with Osborne's characterisation of benefit claimants as staying in bed. "Doesn't the language you're using stigmatise those who, through no fault of their own, are in that position? Does it not encourage scapegoating and resentment?" he said with infinite politeness. "Why don't you sneer at tax avoiders like Philip Green and Amazon?"

He handled Osborne beautifully, without rancour, in a short interview that managed to get the chancellor spluttering while also answering his questions. Similarly, Rachel Burden managed to make all her points to Balls – "You seemed a little bit muddled yesterday" – while never appearing rude. Oh, I do love gracious interviewing.

And then – hooray! – I discovered Rowan Atkinson's only ever radio series on 4 Extra. Originally broadcast in 1979, on Radio 3, The Atkinson People is a series of spoof interviews, written by Atkinson and Richard Curtis, with Atkinson playing all the parts. First up, Sir Corin Basin, actor, raconteur and crashing bore. There's no point in me retelling the jokes, as it's Atkinson's delivery – his vowels twanging and pinging, his intonation on a bungee jump – that really makes them funny. Just listen, it's a joy. Someone crack open the advocaat.

'Boy, can this pair write a menu. Every dish is something you'd like to eat, all peppered with contemporary foodie button-pushers'

Our drive to this Arcadian idyll takes us past several wild ponies. We townies go all gooey-eyed: aww. "Those?" our taxi driver dampens our spirits. "About 600 of 'em get knocked down a year."

We've driven though Lyndhurst, a typical New Forest small town with its tea rooms and half-timbering and Maserati dealership, and then on to this ravishing hotel, which does a glamorous, understated job of not looking like it's just had about 30 million quid's worth of renovations. A posh youth dressed head to toe in tweed ushers us into a chic urbanista's fantasy of the perfect country house, the sort of place where captains of industry don self-conscious denim and owners of Soho production companies pine for a plus-four.

Lime Wood is firmly in the Babington House model: not so much gin'n'jag as Sipsmiths'n'Bentley. Previously, its restaurant was dedicated to "fine dining", but boss Robin Huston (ex Hotel du Vin) insists this new incarnation, featuring existing chef Luke Holder with new recruit, celeb chef Angela Hartnett, is all about "fun dining". And if you want fun, you could do worse than employ Martin Brudniski (Dean Street Townhouse, Hix) as designer. He's never done a dud, and this is no exception. From the Regency windows to the glossy-berry leathers, dark marbles and Missoni-style fabrics (not forgetting those hip-restaurant-du-jour signifiers, a couple of Tracey Emins and a scarlet meat-slicer), it's a room you want to sink into with several bottles of posh booze and never leave.

And, boy, can the titular duo write a menu. Every dish is something you'd like to eat, all peppered with contemporary foodie button-pushers: oyster mayonnaise, braised treviso, apple slaw, chicken skins, Jurassic rose veal chop and, sexiest of all, smokehouse. One of which squats in the extensive grounds, rammed with gently bronzing pig and salmon. Their own-cured sausages and hams decorate the handsome central bar and turn up in a plate of charcuterie: coppa, bresaola, chorizo. I admire the initiative, but they're not a patch on their Continental counterparts: too salty and pungent, chewy and oily. Gammon broth, too, poured over a bendy little cheese on toast, is wildly oversalted and cough-making with pepper.

Hartnett's pasta is legendary, and the hero dish here is agnolotti, the egg-yolk-yellow pasta super-thin but tensile, the parcels partitioned into two, one half filled with guinea fowl, the other a squelch of milky burrata. A slick of reduced game juice beefed up with butter and Madeira, and a hail of Parmesan: wow. Reports vary as to the amount of time Hartnett is spending here, but her influence is unmistakable. Same with gnocchi, their wild rabbit ragù lubricated with own-made lardo, the dumplings made with almost too light a hand. Slow-cooked, spoonable pigs' cheeks are another Hartnett keynote. But there are irritating conceits: lots of copper dishes; calling a classic – and excellent – tarte tatin a "torta", doubtless a nod to her oft-quoted Italian nonna. Never has a relative been put to such comprehensive use since a Rolling Stone allegedly snorted the ashes of his departed pa.

Perfection? Perhaps not. But an improvement on the prevailing stuffy country house aesthetic? Hell, yes. Even if the frequently condescending staff could do with a sharp boot up the jacksie: we don't ask, but are lectured on what burrata is, and treviso. We're not booked into the hugely expensive hotel, so need a cab again. Our handsome waiter smiles pityingly: "Are you staying at a little B&B?"

It's the same taxi driver. We marvel at the car park's luxury motors and he tells us with his gallows cheer, "Ah, they like to drink and drive round here." Which might account for the aforementioned roadkill. The actual number, concerned animal lovers, is actually more like 60-odd; I suspect he enjoys hamming it up for a bunch of entitled visitors. A bit like Hartnett Holder & Co.

• Hartnett Holder & Co Lime Wood Hotel, Beaulieu Road, Lyndhurst, Hampshire 023-8028 7177. Open all week, noon-11pm. Three courses with drinks and service, £50-plus a head.

Food 6/10
Atmosphere 8/10
Value for money 7/10

Follow Marina on Twitter.

Opening a restaurant is hard enough without complications. But when you are in a couple, and one of you nearly dies … Angela Hartnett and Neil Borthwick talk about love, life, good food and broken bones

Angela Hartnett and Neil Borthwick first met in the kitchens at the Connaught hotel in London in 2002 where she was head chef and he was there as a willing junior. He was only meant to be there for a couple of weeks. In the end, he stayed for the best part of four years.

"She fancied me," Borthwick says by way of explanation.

Hartnett rolls her eyes. "I'm saying nothing," she replies. "I was professional to the end."

Hartnett, 44, went on to open the Michelin-starred Murano in Mayfair and start a mini-empire in the mould of her one-time mentor, Gordon Ramsay. More recently, she launched the restaurant at the Lime Wood hotel in Hampshire, and is planning a new restaurant on the site of the old Petrus in St James Street, but on 1 October will open the Merchant's Tavern in a former Victorian warehouse in Shoreditch. The head chef? None other than her 32-year-old boyfriend.

"Essentially, it's Neil's restaurant," Hartnett explains when we meet in Murano. The interior is exquisitely decorated in shades of muted grey and green. Today, they are seated on the sort of padded leather banquette one imagines was made from the skin of ostriches bathed in champagne. Both are wearing chef's whites – but only Hartnett's are embroidered with her name in blue cursive.

"It's the same as what Gordon did with me and Jason [Atherton] and Marcus [Wareing]," she continues. "They will write the menus and I will influence them because my name's attached to it … but it's Neil's name above the door."

Borthwick has his own impressive pedigree. He was born and raised in Falkirk and started working in the bar of a local hotel at the age of 14. He went to catering college in Glasgow, got his first job in Gordon Ramsay's Amaryllis and, after his stint at the Connaught, took off to France for three years to work for Michel Bras in Laguiole where he was taught the precise, inventive cuisine that has made Restaurant Bras into one of the top gastronomic destinations in the world.

Borthwick worked his way up to sous chef. He says he loved the work-life balance in France and became fluent in the language: Hartnett used to visit him as a friend for long weekends to sample the local restaurants, taking advantage of his French to order the best things off the menu.

Bras wanted him to move to Japan to be head chef at his restaurant there but Borthwick felt "it would just be doing his food again and I thought it would be a long way away." By this stage, he and Hartnett were a couple. He returned to the UK and got a job at the Square, under Philip Howard, just down the road from Murano. Soon, the two of them were living together in Hartnett's house in Spitalfields.

Despite the hours and brutal pace of life as a top chef, they make an affectionate couple who seem to like nothing more than teasing each other. When I ask Borthwick to say something romantic, he looks mildly taken aback.

"Angela makes a lovely bowl of pasta," he says. "Is that romantic?"

Their interests are complementary – she's an Arsenal fan, he supports Spurs – and they have the same taste in food.

The modern European menu at the Merchant's Tavern will reflect this unfussy approach. "As much as I've worked in three-Michelin starred places where things have to be exact, I'm not going to shout about something if it doesn't look perfect," says Borthwick, "because it doesn't taste any better."

But what if he does something wrong? Isn't it going to be hard for Hartnett to tell off her boyfriend?

"The chances of that are minimal," jokes Borthwick. "Very minimal, obviously," Hartnett says drily. "You have to have ways of doing things ... [but] I'd pull Neil aside and say, 'By the way, this isn't quite right.'"

She cracks her fingers menacingly. Borthwick doesn't seem remotely perturbed. "It's like Alan Sugar on The Apprentice," he says. "The entrepreneurs would be mad not to take the constructive advice."

They both laugh.

The most extraordinary thing about their story is that it almost had a very different ending. One night last November, Hartnett was woken by two policemen knocking on her door at 1.30am. They told her Borthwick had been in a cycling accident and was now at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. The police had his phone and her number was the last one called.

The police were able to tell Hartnett that her boyfriend was alive but, other than that, they had no further details. In the grip of shock, she remembers making small talk about the policemen's shoes, "because you do, don't you?"

When Hartnett got to the hospital, she found Borthwick in an induced coma and a team of neurosurgeons trying to ascertain what damage had been done to his brain. "They couldn't answer any questions," she says now. Those first few days of uncertainty were, she admits, "horrible".

"The first feeling is shock," she says. "I've never experienced anything like this. My father died when I was young [Hartnett was eight], my grandmother died but I've never had someone physically ill like that in front of you."

"My brother said: 'You're very calm,' and I said: 'This is the easy bit. The hard bit will be when he comes out and can't move his legs or taste anything.'"

Borthwick can't remember the specifics of what happened. He recalls the day leading up to it – he had been out for a lunch with friends, then went home to pick up his bike to meet another mate in the evening. He was only going a short distance and for some reason he didn't wear his helmet or his cycling kit. It was on City Road, a few minutes from their house, that the accident happened. Witnesses said they saw the bike "wobble". Borthwick thinks his feet might have slipped on the pedals. He fell awkwardly.

Borthwick suffered what the doctors described as "a severe knock to the head" which doesn't quite seem to do justice to the seriousness of the injury. Hartnett talks about it like an internal bruise: "When you bruise yourself, the bruise expands. But if it's in your head, the bruise has nowhere to go."

At one point, a female surgeon described Borthwick's brain to her as "like a crème brûlée". It was only later that her colleagues pointed out she'd been talking to a Michelin-starred chef.

"People slag off the NHS but you can't imagine how faultless they were," Hartnett says. "If a restaurant could run like a high impact unit it would be staggering. Neil had 24-hour care."

Borthwick was kept in a coma for five days, "basically," he explains, "on the same drugs that Michael Jackson had paid his doctor to give him."

He had weird dreams, involving a bet he'd failed to place on the outcome of the Ryder Cup, but even when he was unconscious, he retained his fine-dining palate. Borthwick kept trying to remove his intravenous drip so the nurses ended up covering his hands in what looked like a giant pair of oven gloves.

During that time, Hartnett set up a blog to keep friends and family updated on his progress. It was easier, she says, than answering the hundreds of texts individually and it meant that Borthwick's friends could post things, too – among them Michel Bras.

When Borthwick finally came round, doctors were astonished at his rapid recovery. From the neck down, he had sustained no other injuries. He immediately recognised people. Within 15 days, he was speaking fluent French and craving grilled cauliflower and turbot. The hospital food was supplemented by deliveries from London's finest restaurants: a chef friend sent him a plate of roast goose; his boss Phil Howard came with a plate of broccoli and vegetables.

"Neil was lucky," says Hartnett. "He was young and fit and had no other injuries, which was incredible."

Also, because he landed on the left side of his head, he found he could still perform tasks with his right hand without too much bother. He was home by Christmas.

But it wasn't all plain sailing. Borthwick had an operation to drill a hole in his skull in order to release the pressure. Six weeks ago, he had a second procedure: major cranioplastic surgery to put a plate in his skull. The plate was constructed of methacrylic resin moulded to the shape of his head and was fitted with titanium screws.

"It was made in Italy," Borthwick says with pride. "It's actually quite a nice shape. I'm going to make the spare one into a bowl for Twiglets in Charlotte Road." He's joking. I think.

In the aftermath of the accident, he was relieved to find that his palate wasn't affected but the motor skills in his left hand were still weak. For a while, Borthwick was worried he wouldn't be able to cook with his customary precision and delicacy. When he returned to work at the Square in the new year, he was "nervous" and found himself "in tears in Phil Howard's office about it… He's been a great friend."

In retrospect, Borthwick admits that he went back to work too early because he so desperately wanted things to be normal again. He started to suffer seizures and was forced to rest. "You slowly have to build up your stamina," he says. "That will come in time."

To look at Borthwick, you would struggle to know what he has been through. But he still hasn't been able to face getting back on his bicycle. Understandably, then, the prospect of opening a restaurant in under a month is enough to make him feel anxious.

And yet, when he makes me lunch, it's clear that he has lost none of his touch. The plates of food that come to the table are unfussy and delicious – tangy artichokes with a zesty pesto; glistening cod; the best lamb I've ever tasted and a honey tart with roasted apricots that takes me straight back to childhood (in a good way). When I tell him how much I enjoyed the food, Borthwick seems genuinely pleased. "My confidence is coming back but it's not quite where it was," he admits.

The Merchant's Tavern deserves to be a raging success, not just for its food but for the extraordinary achievement it represents in terms of Borthwick's recovery. He's come a long way – and he's got the Twiglets served in a skull-shaped bowl to prove it.

Got a crowd coming round for Christmas drinks? You don't have to spend hours in the kitchen, slaving over fancy canapés

Each of these snacks is designed to serve four, so if you need to make a larger batch, just multiply the quantities. And if you've a big crowd, why not make them all? There's very little work in any of them.

Pumpkin frittata with gorgonzola

Creamy blue cheese, sweet pumpkin and rich eggs combine to make a mouthful with real oomph. Serves four.

Olive oil
1 small onion, peeled and sliced
300g roasted pumpkin, peeled and diced
1 handful parsley leaves, chopped
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 eggs
200g gorgonzola, broken into chunks

Heat a touch of olive oil in a large frying pan, and gently sweat the onion until soft; you don't want it to take on any colour. Once soft, stir in the cooked diced pumpkin and parsley, season to taste and mix well.

Whisk the eggs, pour them over the contents of the pan and stir gently, to combine. Cook over a low heat, until it's almost cooked through from the bottom up – about 15 minutes – then place the pan under a hot grill, to flash the top.

Turn out the frittata on to a board, cut into neat squares and top each with a small chunk of gorgonzola. Serve while still warm.

Potato skins with crème fraîche and smoked salmon

Who can resist a bit of smoked salmon in a creamy sauce, especially at Christmas; even more so when it comes on crisp potato skins? Serves four.

12 charlotte potatoes
1 small bunch chives, chopped fine
100g crème fraîche
Rock salt and freshly ground black pepper
200g smoked salmon, cut into short, thin strips

In a hot oven (200C/390F/gas mark 6), bake the potatoes until soft. Once done, remove the spuds from the oven (leave it on: you'll be using it again later), cut in half lengthways and scoop the flesh into a bowl, leaving the skin intact.

Mash the potato flesh, stir in the chives and crème fraîche, and season. Spoon the mixture back into the potato skins and return to the oven for 10 minutes, until crisp on top. Remove, top each potato half with a strip or two of smoked salmon, sprinkle with rock salt and serve hot.

Glazed chicken wings

These are finger-lickin' good, even if I do say so myself. Serves four.

16 chicken wings
1 heaped tbsp honey
1 heaped tbsp course-grain mustard
2 tsp HP Sauce (or other brown sauce, if you must)
Juice of 1 lemon
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
Salt and pepper
1 handful coriander leaves, chopped, to serve

In an oven tray, use your hands to mix together all the ingredients bar the coriander, making sure the chicken wings are well coated, then set aside to marinade at room temperature for 30 minutes.

Heat the oven to 200C/390F/gas mark 6, then pop in the tray and roast for 30 minutes, turning the wings every now and then, so they colour and cook evenly. Remove from the oven, arrange on a warmed platter, sprinkle over the chopped coriander and serve hot.

Chicory with spicy crab and almonds

This really is as simple as they come, with no cooking involved at all: it's just an assembly job that won't take more than a few minutes. It's also incredibly tasty and fresh – just what the tastebuds need at a party. Serves four.

2 small heads chicory
250-300g cooked white crab meat
½ tsp finely chopped red chilli
½ tsp finely chopped fresh ginger
1 tsp chopped basil leaves
30g chopped salted almonds
Zest and juice of 1 lime
Olive oil, to serve

Cut the root off each chicory, then separate them into individual leaves.

Mix the crab with the chilli, ginger, basil and nuts, then stir in the lime zest and juice. Spoon a little crab mix on to the wide end of each chicory leaf, leaving the root end free: this acts as a handy handle with which to pick them up. Dribble a dash of olive oil over each one, and serve.

Angela Hartnett is chef-patron of Murano, Cafe Murano and Merchants Tavern, all in London, and Hartnett Holder & Co at Lyme Wood in Hampshire.

Fuss-free dishes, from mozzarella salad to wild mushrooms on toast

The thing I love about the Italian approach to cooking is that, at heart, it's so damned simple: take a few decent ingredients, don't faff about with them, whack them on a plate and tuck in. This week's recipes for first courses or light meals are a good case in point: though not, strictly speaking, 100% Italian, there's nothing superfluous to requirements on any plate. The cheese and pepper salad and the mushroom dish couldn't be easier, and the quail dish, though a bit more involved, really isn't that much work.

Mozzarella and grilled romano pepper salad

Sweet roast peppers, soft, milky cheese, a few leaves and a good, sharp dressing: have I got your tastebuds going yet? Serves two as a light meal with good bread, or as a first course.

2 romano peppers
1 clove garlic, peeled and crushed
2 tsp picked fresh thyme leaves (or rosemary, in which case chop it up)
2 spring onions, trimmed and sliced very thin
2 tbsp good balsamic vinegar
2 tbsp good sherry vinegar
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 buffalo mozzarella
50g rocket leaves
10 fresh basil leaves

Roast each pepper in turn over an open flame until it blisters and turns black – hold the pepper with tongs, for obvious reasons (alternatively, you can get much the same effect by popping them on an oven tray and roasting in a very hot oven for 10 minutes or so, though do keep an eye on them, just in case). Once the peppers are blackened all over, drop them into a bowl and add the garlic, thyme, spring onions, both vinegars and a good pinch of salt. Cover with clingfilm, and toss gently – if you're too forceful, bits of the charred skin will break off into the marinade and make it go bitter. Set aside to cool.

Once the peppers are cold enough to handle, lift them carefully from the bowl, and peel off and discard the burned skin. Cut each pepper in half, remove and discard all the seeds and pith inside, then cut the flesh into long, thin strips. Put these in a large shallow bowl, and strain the marinade over the top.

To finish the salad, tear the mozzarella into chunks and add to the peppers. Add the rocket and basil (roughly tear the basil first), season to taste and toss gently. Scatter over a few toasted pine nuts and serve at room temperature.

Roast quail, radicchio chutney and hazelnut pesto

This is my kind of starter: a crisp-skinned roast bird set off by sweet-sour relish and earthy sauce. Serves two as a light meal or first course.

2 quails
1 tbsp olive oil
50g butter
2 tbsp picked fresh thyme leaves
1 clove garlic
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

For the hazelnut pesto
100g hazelnuts, shelled
30g grated parmesan
20ml hazelnut oil
60ml grapeseed oil

For the radicchio chutney
1 small red onion, peeled and diced
1 tbsp olive oil
50g soft brown sugar
2 tbsp cabernet sauvignon vinegar
2 tbsp port
200g golden raisins
2 heads radicchio, trimmed and roughly chopped

For the pesto, toast the hazelnuts in a dry, heavy-based frying pan, or in a medium oven, until golden all over, then tip out on to a tea-towel. Wrap up the nuts in the towel and rub vigorously – this will peel off the papery skins. Roughly chop the nuts, and put them in a bowl with the parmesan and the two oils. Stir, season to taste and set aside.

For the chutney, in a large, heavy-based saute pan, sweat the onion in the oil until soft but not coloured. Stir in the sugar, vinegar, port and raisins, then add the radicchio. Stir and cook down until the leaves wilt a little, then set aside.

Heat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4. In another heavy-based frying pan – an ovenproof one, this time – brown the quail all over in a touch of oil. Add the butter, thyme and whole garlic clove, transfer to the oven and roast for eight to 10 minutes, until cooked through (push the tip of a knife into the thick part of the thigh: if the juices run clear, the quails are done). Remove from the oven, and leave to rest in a warm place for 10 or so minutes.

Put a quail on each plate, put a spoon or so each of the chutney and pesto alongside, and serve at once.

Wild mushrooms on toast with lardo

Yes, it's just mushrooms on toast, but the crème fraîche and, especially, the lardo lift it to new heights. Lardo is pork back fat cured with spices and herbs, usually rosemary. It's cut wafer-thin, and melts gorgeously when you drape it over anything hot. Any Italian deli worth its salt should have some. Serves two to four as a first course, depending on how hungry or greedy you are.

4 slices white sourdough
2 cloves garlic, peeled and cut in half
2 tbsp olive oil
30g butter
500g wild mushrooms, brushed or wiped clean; don't wash in water
200ml crème fraîche
2-3 tbsp chopped flat-leaf parsley
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 slices lardo
½ lemon, to finish

Grill the bread on both sides, until lightly golden, then rub one side of each slice with half a clove of garlic – the toasted bread will act like a grater, and little bits of garlic and its oils will infiltrate the bread.

In a pan, heat the butter and oil, then fry the mushrooms for three or four minutes over a high flame, until they start releasing their moisture. Cook for just a minute more, quickly stir in the crème fraîche and parsley, season to taste and take off the heat.

Put two pieces of bread on each plate, cover with the hot mushrooms, finish with a squeeze of lemon and top with a slice of lardo.

• Angela Hartnett is chef/patron of Murano, Cafe Murano and Merchants Tavern, all in London, and Hartnett Holder & Co at Lyme Wood in Hampshire.

There isn't always time to make a pasta sauce that needs to bubble away for hours

I don't know about you, but when I get home after a hard day's work, the first thing I do – after putting on the kettle, obviously – is look in the fridge to see what there is to eat. Problem is, there's often very little in my fridge at all; and even if there is, it's usually in such a state that it would be better off in the compost bin than in the cooking pot.

It's at times such as these that the store cupboard comes into its own, especially when you're looking for something tasty but quick. I don't mean beans-on-toast quick (though they have their place); I mean pasta. Well, of course I do: I'm half Italian.

The first two recipes this week are two of my go-to quick pasta mainstays, and neither requires a sauce that's had to bubble away on the stove-top for hours. The first uses ingredients I've almost always got at home; the second involves a little pre-planning, because it stars that great bitter veg cime di rapa (the dish also works with sprouting broccoli or kale instead, by the way) – even so, it, too, takes very little time to cook, and the other ingredients are store cupboard staples (well, they are in my house, anyway). This week's final recipe, meanwhile, is the sort of easy fish supper I'd make on those rare evenings when I do remember to stop off at the shops on the way home.

Tagliatelle with walnut pesto

Serves two hungry mouths as a main meal. As a general rule, I serve 75-100g of dried pasta per person for a first course and 150-190g for a main. But then, I'm greedy – if the amount of pasta here seems too much to you, just reduce it to suit your appetite.

Salt and pepper
370g dried tagliatelle
2 cloves garlic, peeled
100g shelled walnuts
25g pine nuts
200g grated parmesan
Olive oil
6 picked mint leaves
1 handful picked flat-leaf parsley
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil, add the tagliatelle and cook as per the instructions on the packet. This could be anywhere from six to nine minutes, but err on the side of caution: there is nothing worse than soggy, overcooked pasta.

While the pasta is cooking, put the garlic, walnuts and pine nuts in a food processor and pulse until blended, but not too much – you want the sauce to have a nutty bite to it. Tip the nut mix into a large serving bowl, then stir in the parmesan and enough olive oil to bring it all together into a paste. Season to taste – you won't need much salt, because the cheese is pretty salty – and set aside.

When the pasta is cooked, drain, tip into the bowl and toss to coat with the sauce. Chop the herbs (don't do this any earlier, or the mint will go a nasty shade of black), scatter on the top, and serve immediately, with a dusting of parmesan, if you like that kind of thing.

Penne with cime di rapa

Serves two (again, if need be, reduce the amount of pasta to suit your appetite). If you can't get cime di rapa, kale and sprouting broccoli make good substitutes, though the kale leaves will need to be torn off their tough stalks and a longer blanching time.

Salt and pepper
300g cime di rapa
370g dried penne
Olive oil
3 cloves garlic, peeled and very finely chopped
1 pinch dried chilli flakes
2 tbsp creme fraiche
Pecorino, grated, to serve

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Drop in the cime di rapa, blanch for 30 seconds, then use tongs to transfer from the pot to a sieve, to drain. Keep the boiling water, because you're going to use it to cook the pasta.

Add the penne to the boiling water and cook as per the instructions on the packet – about 10-13 minutes, usually, though again err on the side of caution.

In a large, heavy-based saute pan or similar, heat two tablespoons of olive oil over a medium flame. When hot, add the garlic and chilli, and fry gently until the garlic has softened but not taken on any colour. Stir in the cime di rapa, saute for a minute more, then remove from the heat.

When the pasta is ready, drain and add to the pan with the cime di rapa. Stir in the creme fraiche, add a little grated pecorino and toss to coat the pasta. Serve at once with a bowl of grated pecorino alongside, to add to taste.

Bream with sprouting broccoli and anchovy

The broccoli here acts as a kind of warm side salad. Serves two.

Olive oil
2 sea bream, descaled and cleaned
2 lemons, cut into slices
1 whole head of garlic, cloves separated and slightly bashed
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 small sprigs fresh thyme
4 small sprigs fresh rosemary
600g sprouting broccoli
1 tin salted anchovies, rinsed

Heat the oven to 200C/390F/gas mark 6. Pour a glug of olive oil into a large ovenproof dish. Cut three or four deep diagonal slashes in both sides of each fish, and stuff the cavities with all but two slices of lemon, a few garlic cloves and a couple of sprigs each of thyme and rosemary. Lay the fish in the prepared dish and drizzle all over with olive oil. Season and roast for about 15 minutes, until cooked through – it's worth checking if the fish is done after about 12 minutes, just to be on the safe side.

A few minutes before the fish is done, blanch the broccoli in a pot of salted boiling water for a minute or so, then drain and toss in a bowl with the chopped anchovies. Squeeze over the lemon and set aside while you plate up.

Remove the fish from the oven, transfer to plates and serve with the sprouting broccoli and some crusty country bread.

• Angela Hartnett is chef/patron of Murano, Cafe Murano and Merchants Tavern, all in London, and Hartnett Holder & Co at Lime Wood in Hampshire.

A twist on the classic lemon tart, a blood orange panna cotta with biscotti and a steamed ginger pudding

I can't think of a better way to end my stay on these pages than with something sweet. Well, three somethings, actually, and none of them that hard to make: a sort-of Italian take on the French tarte au citron; a panna cotta that takes full advantage of the joys of blood oranges; and a ginger pudding because who doesn't love a steamed pudding on a crisp spring day?

Lemon and ricotta tart

The ricotta adds a lovely richness to this not-so-traditional version of the classic lemon tart. Serves eight.

4 medium eggs
200g caster sugar
175ml double cream
130ml lemon juice, plus the grated zest of 2 lemons
350g ricotta
200g raspberry
Icing sugar, for dusting

For the sweet pastry
330g plain flour
A pinch of salt
100g icing sugar
200g cold butter, cut into chunks
3 eggs

First make the pastry. Sift the flour and salt into a bowl, add the icing sugar, then rub in the butter with your fingertips until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. In a small bowl, beat together two of the eggs, then add these to the flour mix and work with your hands until it comes together into a dough. Take care not to overwork it, otherwise it will become too hard and lose its crumbly texture. Wrap in clingfilm and leave to rest for at least an hour.

Meanwhile, get to work on the filling. Whisk the eggs and sugar until the sugar dissolves, then fold in the cream, lemon juice and grated zest, and set aside.

Heat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4. On a floured work surface, roll out the pastry to about 3mm thick – take care, because it's quite delicate – then use it to line a 24cm flan tin (fluted, if possible) with a loose base. Cover the pastry with parchment and fill with baking beans, then bake for 20 minutes, until just starting to turn golden brown. Remove the beans and parchment, cook for five minutes more, then remove from the oven.

Beat the remaining egg from the pastry ingredients, use this to paint the inside of the pastry case, then return to the oven for two minutes more. Remove and set aside to cool. Turn down the oven to 120C/250F/gas mark ¼.

Once the tart case is cool, break the ricotta into small pieces and scatter all over the bottom of the tart case. Pour the lemony custard on top and bake again for 35-45 minutes at 140C/285F/gas mark 1, until the filling is set but still slightly wobbly in the centre.

Remove from the oven, leave to cool in the tin, then remove. To serve, cover the top with raspberries and dust with icing sugar.

Panna cotta, blood orange and cantucci

Blood orange season will be over before we know it, so make the most of them while you can. These biscotti can be made well ahead of time – they'll keep in an airtight container for a good few days. I find it easiest to make the panna cotta a day ahead, then pop it in the fridge and forget all about it until it's time to serve; failing that, it needs at least four hours in the fridge to set. Serves eight.

For the cantucci
180g softened butter
275g caster sugar
4 eggs, beaten
10g baking powder
½ tsp salt
500g '00' flour
½ tsp ground aniseed
175g almonds, roughly chopped

For the panna cotta
3½ gelatine leaves
700g double cream
475ml full-fat milk
140g caster sugar
1 vanilla pod, cut in half lengthways
4 blood oranges, peeled and cut into segments

Start with the biscuits. Heat the oven to 150C/300F/gas mark 2. Line two baking sheets with baking parchment.

With an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar until fluffy and pale, then add the eggs one by one, beating well after each addition. Fold in all the remaining biscuit ingredients. Spoon the mixture into a piping bag fitted with a large plain nozzle and pipe it out on to the lined baking sheets in 5cm-wide logs, leaving a 3cm gap between them. Bake for 25–30 minutes, until slightly risen and golden brown. Transfer to a wire rack and leave until just cool enough to handle (they need to be still warm so they're easy to slice). Turn down the oven to 130C/260F/gas mark ½. Cut the cantucci diagonally into 1cm slices, spread out on the baking sheets and return to the oven for 20 minutes, turning halfway through. Remove and set aside to cool.

Now for the panna cotta. Put the gelatine in a bowl, add cold water to cover and a handful or two of ice cubes. Put the cream, 350ml of the milk and the sugar in a saucepan. Scrape the vanilla seeds into the cream, then drop in the empty pod, too. Bring just to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar, then remove from the heat immediately and lift out and discard the vanilla pod.

Squeeze out the gelatine to remove as much excess water as possible, then add to the hot milk mixture. Whisk well, to dissolve the gelatine, then strain through a fine sieve into a bowl. Add the remaining cold milk, set the bowl over one of iced water and leave to cool, whisking occasionally to prevent a skin from forming.

When the mixture is semi-set, pour into individual ramekins or timbales and refrigerate for at least four hours, preferably overnight.

To serve, lightly warm the base and sides of the ramekins in hot water, turn out the panna cotta on to plates and serve with a few slices of fresh blood orange and the biscuits.

Steamed ginger pudding

To finish off, a dessert that's much closer to home. This is an updated version of a recipe from my 2011 book Angela's Kitchen. Serves eight.

180g softened butter, plus extra for greasing
180g flour
6 tbsp golden syrup
3 tsp baking powder
180g caster sugar
60g stem ginger, plus 3 tbsp of the syrup from the jar
3 eggs

Grease a one-litre pudding basin with a little butter, then pour in the syrup.

Put all the remaining ingredients into a bowl and mix with an electric whisk until smooth. Pour into the prepared basin and cover with a circle of greaseproof paper. Take a large piece of foil, fold a pleat down the centre, then lay it over the pudding and tie in place with string.

Put the pudding in a steamer and steam for two hours: make sure the water is always at a slow simmer and top up with boiling water as necessary. To check the pudding is cooked, carefully lift off the foil and greaseproof paper, and insert a skewer into the centre: if it comes out clean, it's ready; if not, cover again with greaseproof and foil, and cook for 15 minutes longer.

Serve with cream or custard.

• Angela Hartnett is chef/patron of Murano, Cafe Murano and Merchants Tavern, all in London, and Hartnett Holder & Co at Lime Wood in Hampshire.

July's Observer Food Monthly is a vegetarian special, guest edited by Paul, Mary and Stella McCartney. As part of this very special event, OFM sourced a selection of vegetarian recipes from top chefs and celebrities, with everyone from Jamie Oliver to Gwyneth Paltrow contributing their favourites.

For more information on Meat Free Monday visit supportMFM.org; for more on Linda McCartney Foods: lindamccartneyfoods.co.uk

It's great that a record number of women have been awarded Michelin stars this year, but if you look at the list and compare it to the men, we're not breaking down barriers. There are a lot more women coming in and the industry is changing, for the better. It's just that more needs to be done.

Some people have suggested that the increase is due to the fact that Derek Bulmer, the previous editor in chief of Michelin UK & Ireland, has been replaced by a woman Rebecca Burr. That's just ridiculous. The Michelin inspectors judge on food, not whether or not the chef is a man or not. There are more women cooking, therefore, there are more women being judged, and by the law of probability, more women getting stars. Admittedly, there are just 11 women receiving stars at the moment, but I don't think we should be given preferential treatment in order to try to even things out. You should be judged on how you cook that alone.

Angela Hartnett does not do precious. It's not what she is, not how she could ever be. "People get far too precious about far too much where food is concerned," she says. "A lot of it comes from the very male brigade of cooks. They are just too dogmatic." You will not get dogma from Hartnett, either in person or in the recipes she is going to be writing for G2 from next week. Yes, she says, she will be focusing on seasonal ingredients, but out of no greater principle than that when something is in season there's more of it about, and when there's more of it about, it's cheaper.

Hartnett Ange to her friends resists stuffiness like toddlers resist bedtime. We are talking in the drawing room of the fabulous Georgian house in Spitalfields, east London, that she has co-owned for the last seven years with her brother Michael (a financial whizz who lives in New York), and there is a glorious sense of lightly controlled chaos about the place. There are piles of magazines that need to be shifted off the squishy sofas before she can sit down. Her mad little terrier Alfie is bouncing around the room, barking at everything. Downstairs, Diego, the head chef at her Mayfair restaurant Murano, is working on some dishes that need to be photographed. She has a book project she must complete, though she can't quite recall the title (A Taste of Home, out in July), plus she must think about the menus at the nearby Whitechapel gallery restaurant, where she has just become a consultant. And, of course, there are her recipes for G2 to plan.