Onion Seeds, A Revelation

(roasted pumpkin, beans, pesto, breadcrumbs)

There is no greater joy than cooking for your friends and seeing their noses wrinkle in excitement, their lips start to form a sentence that hails you the goddess of the kitchen, the collective ‘mmm’ exhale from everyone’s mouths, or the universal sign of a great plate of food: the emphatic finger point. I tend not to cook in friends’ kitchens, but when the promise of a candle-lit bath is on offer, and when a good friend is in need of healing, heart-healthy food, I cannot resist. And so I trudge in the pouring rain to a brand new kitchen in Dalston, where I brought half a Crown Prince pumpkin that I had pre-chopped at home, just to emphasise my controlling neuroses. What usually scares me about cooking in someone else’s kitchen (not having access to my own ingredients), is actually what often makes a meal. The inclusion of something I’d not thought to buy. In this case, it was onion seeds. Deep onyx black, a perfectly fragranced, almost like tiny little morsels of charcoal adorning the soft orange flesh. This is, to me, one of the easiest weekday meals to make, thanks to (no surprises) a jar of beans and store-bought pesto (look, you can make your own on a Sunday, ok).