Dear Florence,
I was thinking today about how cooking has the potential to be such a generator of joy. In particular, I was thinking about how it can feel when you are cooking one of your favourite things to cook, as I was doing earlier. There is something about going through a process step by step, which you know will have an outcome that makes you happy. There is comfort in the familiarity, and a quiet excitement in the doing of a task that is a pleasure in and of itself, but is equally worth doing for the final outcome.

I was making a salad from the book Community. Sometimes when I flip through the book while thinking about what to cook, I get so overwhelmed with excitement that I stop actually taking in what the recipes are. There is something about the recipes (they are all salads, and all vegetarian) that taps into my ideas about being generous and lavish and nourishing yet relaxed when entertaining.

If you are anything like me I assume you will want to know what salad got me so excited about the transcendental properties of cooking and food. It is a pasta salad. I think that perhaps my mum wasn't cool enough to make pasta salad in the 80s when all my friend's mums were doing it, so there is a tinge of wistfulness for me when it comes to something that most people would regard as the height of dagsville. It's the same with pasta bake. As it happens, I have my eye on a Karen Martini pasta bake recipe to tackle soon... but I digress. This one has a lovely fresh yoghurt sauce, broccoli and peas. It is supposed to have basil too, but I like to make it with mint, which adds to the zingy freshness of the whole thing. I adore it. As soon as Tallboy gets homeI am firing up the stove, cooking some steak, and then we are EATING.

GB