I have been inspired today by Delia Smith.…..and her photographers!

When we loaded up the car for our Christmas in Cornwall, something made me grab a handful of recipe books from the cabinet in my kitchen in Sandhurst and bring them with me. They’ve been largely ignored since we’ve been here because I have only cooked a couple of ‘new’ recipes while here and they were both from a book of West Country recipes that was already here.

Today though, I’ve been in a bit of a daze - partly lack of sleep and partly too much wine last night so I sat at our table and idly flicked through ‘Delia’s Vegetarian Collection’, a Christmas pressie from two years ago, looking for a specific recipe that I thought I’d seen in there that used cauliflower and broccoli, both of which I’d got a surfeit of in the fridge. I found the recipe, cooked the dish (delicious) but what really caught my eye was the photography in the book.

It’s been a few months since I last used this book and in the meantime, I’ve shot the photos for my calendar so today, when I picked up the book, I was poring over the photos and realising my calendar shots are completely pants by comparison. I know I’m being really hard on myself as the book was obviously photographed by pros (in fact nineteen of them) and of course that brings a number of benefits over me - firstly the fact that the photographers were almost certainly full-time photographers and so they would have had much more time than I have to compose shots and get the best from them, secondly the luxury of a full-on studio would make life much easier and finally, the most important one, the undoubted skill of the photographers in getting the best out of the shot.

I was feeling a bit crest-fallen and so DM came to look at the photos and pushed me to think about what I liked about them. In all cases, it was the superb lighting. We spent quite a long time analysing what had made each of the photos so good - where the light source was placed relative to the subject, how strongly lit, whether there were reflectors or other forms of secondary lighting used and basically pulling the shots to pieces in the nicest possible way to understand how they had become so good.

So, this photo is a tribute shot to those photographers, as well as the great ‘Saint Delia’ whose cauliflower and broccoli gratin with blue cheese was fabulous. The image contains a few of the ingredients from the dish - nutmeg, brown rice and blue cheese. For anyone who doesn’t know Delia, people either love or hate her style but there is one thing that is indisputable - her recipes work. All you have to do is follow them. Me? Today I deviated from the recipe by using Cornish Blue, rather than the roquefort, gorgonzola or dolcelatte she suggested. For anyone interested who doesn’t know her (I suspect only outside of the UK could you be in that situation), try going to Deliaonline.com - it’s a fab site and she generously publishes a huge proportion of her recipes free on this site.

One of David’searliest ever PotD shots was taken of me poring over this very book two years ago and I have certainly mentioned her before.

Delia also shares another of my passions - she’s a huge footie fan and is Chairman of Norwich City. Recently a clairvoyant predicted that Norwich’s fortunes would improve if all their supporters wore red knickers to their games.….I wonder if Delia has been persuaded to try that!!!

31st December 2004 shot here!

We were looking forward to a summer in the lurker on this day last year.