Places at this special North African cookery class are limited, so email me now if you're interested.  Cost is £80 per person, which will include a full day of hands-on cooking class and a delicious Moroccan lunch.  The venue is a beautiful kitchen in north London.

"But what's warka?" I hear you ask. 

It's North Africa's version of Greek filo pastry, or Turkish yufka.  But rather than being rolled, these paper-thin leaves of dough are made in the most unusual way.  Basically, you smear daubs of sticky dough over a super-hot metal plate, while trying not to burn your fingers.  We learnt all about it in Morocco - see a video clip of Khadija demonstrating her craft here.  (The video takes a few minutes to load, but have patience, it's worth it.)

Warka is wonderfully versatile.  It can be used to wrap, roll and layer all kinds of sweet and savoury dishes, from little fried pastries ('briwat'), to large baked pigeon and almond pies (Morocco's famous 'pastilla'/'bstila'), and honey-drenched nut-filled tea-time treats. 

I have been lucky enough to meet a fantastic French chef called Sylvain Jamois.  Sylvain is the only person I know outside Morocco who can make warka.  Even in Morocco it's a dying skill.  Sylvain learnt how to make warka while working at Moro restaurant in London and remembers his Moroccan uncle using it to make delicious tuna and egg parcels. 

During the class Sylvain and I will teach you how to make warka from scratch and how to use it in several different North African recipes, including Moro's delicious crab brik - Tunisian spicy fried parcels.  We'll even show you how to cook live crabs and pick out the meat. 

This class will be a rare opportunity to try making warka, and bound to be an experience you'll remember, if never repeat!  Don't come in your best shoes...

And if you don't see yourself ever slaving over the warka hotplate again, don't worry.  Filo pastry works in all the recipes too, and we'll tell you where to buy ready-made warka in London. 

The class will end with a quick lesson in making Moroccan mint tea the traditional way, and of course sampling all your freshly made warka dishes.  There will be lots of recipes to take home.

For more information and to book your place, please email Anna.    

Do you get a weekly organic vegetable box but rarely use it all up?  Are there wrinkly beetroots, swedes and turnips lurking at the back of your fridge, making you feel guilty? 

Well, you're not alone.  Surveys have found that the majority of veg box customers have trouble getting through their box, mainly due to limited cooking time, low culinary confidence, and lack of recipe inspiration.

I've recently joined a brand new scheme, run by veg box kings, Riverford Organic, to help more people make more use of their beautiful vegetables.  I'll be offering small cooking classes in London for Riverford customers and their friends, and getting involved with other exciting Riverford events. 

You can read more about it here, and no doubt more from Riverford and myself in due course.  Should be fun!

If you possess a quince tree, or know someone who does, you are a lucky person.  This year I joined that group of blessed souls when I discovered a man with a large fruit-laden specimen, or maybe he discovered me. 

My wooden crate of beautiful yellow, fuzzy fruit, looking a bit like misshapen fat pears, is rapidly emptying as I work my way through the quince wish list I’ve been compiling for several years...

Reaching Turkey last April, after two months of meandering through France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria to get there, was cause for celebration.  So we scoured guide books to find a suitably smart restaurant in the old quarter of İstanbul, where we had just managed to navigate our chunky Land Rover through minuscule cobbled streets packed with pedestrians. 

Balıkçı Sabahattin, a fish restaurant frequented by wealthy locals, proved perfect.  The fish börek, marinated bass and scorpion fish soup were delicious, but the highlight came after - ayva tatlısı - half a quince, candied to a translucent deep crimson, topped with the thickest, lushest cream imaginable and ground walnuts, and surrounded by a moat of spicy syrup.  It was divine, and thankfully cropped up again several times on our journey through Turkey.  The cream turned out to be kaymak - clotted cream made from buffalo milk.

  Many people poach the quince in a syrup on the hob.  But this slow-roasted method comes from Őzge Samancı, a food historian in İstanbul we were lucky enough to meet.  If you roast them for an hour they will be perfectly tender and delicious, but still yellow.  If you continue another couple, they will turn a beautiful pink.  And I’ve found that if you continue another three or so after that, they will almost candy themselves and reach the desired depth of colour.  If you can’t get buffalo clotted cream, cow’s will of course do, as will any thick cream or yoghurt.

Of course, you could use whole quinces for this, but it works just fine with skins and cores left over from other quince recipes, a tip I picked up from our jam-making friend Eduard Dumitrescu in Romania.  (After all, that’s where all the pectin is.)  In fact, our jam and jelly discussions with Eduard and his wife Anca lasted long into the night, as we traced the etymology of Romanian’s many words for ‘jam’…

This is a standard jelly recipe, so you could use cooking or crab apples instead, or half apples and half hedgerow berries - rowans, rosehips, sloes, blackberries, elderberries and haws all work well.  It helps to squish the simmering fruit with a potato masher once or twice, to ensure all the flavour comes out.  You can also flavour such jellies with a little spice or herb, by adding these to the simmering fruit at the first stage.

The secret to a good quince jelly, I think, is to simmer the fruit a long time so it reaches a beautiful pink colour.  Like crab apples, quinces turn pink as they cook, but they take a lot longer to do so.  Your jelly will be delicious with roast pork, lamb or duck, or just on toast or rice pudding.