Nigel Slater’s recipes for kimchi prawn cakes, yuzu polenta cakes, grilled sprouts and comfort rice

There are tiny golden cakes cooling on the wire rack that smell of butter and Japanese citrus. On the hob, a casserole of long-stemmed broccoli with ginger and tamarind. Yesterday morning’s breakfast was sticky rice accompanied by a sour, salty preserved plum. My parents would barely recognise anything I eat. To them, cakes were victoria sponge or battenburg; a casserole was a neck of lamb and potatoes left in the Aga till the meat fell from its bones. Salad was lettuce, tomato and cucumber, and salad cream from a bottle. Delicious all, but a world away from what is in my kitchen in 2022.I am not one for rushing out to buy the latest ingredient – no one needs that many varieties of dried chilli in their kitchen cupboard – and yet I never want my cooking to stand still. I hope I am pottering in my kitchen, curiously, hungrily, till the day I die.Flicking back through the tissue paper pages of my diaries, the changes in what I eat and cook are easy to spot. Less meat, less sugar and more...