I baked a beautiful cheesecake today, the traditional New York dense kind, not my recently acquired favourite, the fluffy Basque cheesecake. (Fabulous flavour but keeps wanting to separate, GROAN.) I even smashed up chocolate wafers to make a chocolate crumb crust as the Christie cookie company has discontinued its bags of crumpled up Oreos.

As I worked on it, swirling the melted chocolate into the cheesecake batter before popping it into the oven, in my mind were all the nears and dears who would be eating it in short order. I imagined presenting it to them in individual little containers, feeling the warmth of their pleasure and appreciation, and my satisfaction in the whole thing. For me, food is love, or more correctly, feeding people is love.

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Some years ago I fell into a soup swoon, simmering giant pots of leek and potato or curried coconut pumpkin, and would take great pleasure in pouring it into glass jars and delivering it to my neighbours. One particular day, after a soup delivery, I received a message from my neighbour, Dianne. She said she’d had a tough day, got home to find an empty house, but also a jar of soup on the doorstep and it was still warm. She told me that was exactly what she needed to remember that people cared about her and the family would be home soon.

Baking is only a recent passion, but cooking…. oh my, yes!

It's partly about choosing the foods according to the ones consuming them, what they like, what they look forward to from me, then assembling the ingredients and putting it all together, with love. The ultimate step is parcelling and labelling for those who live away from me, and delivering it to the door.

I’m thrilled to say that my children have inherited this mass prep for others gene. My daughter just prepped 5 different one-pot dinner ingredients in labelled freezer bags, to deliver to a friend who could toss the whole frozen thing into an insta-pot and have dinner in a hot minute.

In many cultures, offering food is an automatic part of welcoming someone into your home. Although it sounds like a joke question, "did you eat?" is almost universal. It is not unusual for a family to share food with guests, even if they don't have any to spare.

During the second world war, my parents, as children, often went hungry because normal life was so disrupted that there was precious little food to be had. People would scavenge horses which had fallen in the street and cut them up to sell for meat, something that would have been unthinkable a few years before. If you got an orange as a Christmas present, you were over the moon.

In some people, the postwar relationship with food became one of hoarding to ensure there would never be another time of privation, but we never ascribed to that. Instead, my parents shopped once a week, and it was the height of excitement when they pulled into the garage and we helped carry and then, joy of joys, unpack the bags to see what wonders were in store. Menus for myself and my friends were much simpler in those days. If you had asked me, age 12, what my favourite desert island last meal would be, I would have said roasted chicken, white rice and an iceberg lettuce salad with cucumber and tomato, dressed with Thousand Island. The food may change, but the impetus to share food, prepare and serve food, and feed those we love is as strong as ever.

In many of my best memories over time, food looms large. Ski weekends that featured oatmeal for breakfast, vats of spaghetti and sauce for dinner, and smoked oysters and pickled herring shots for New Year's Eve parties. Sorry, absolutely no video included!!!!

Traditional Polish Christmas Eve is built around a set number of courses, always an odd number and often 13. In her memoir, my mother recounts the interminable dinners before the war:

So back to the cheesecake and ensuing dinner prep. I had the chicken in the air fryer, the potatoes simmering in their pot and the vegetables partially prepped when my sweetheart called me out on the deck to observe someone else's dinner.

And this happy tippler:

For almost an hour this black bear ransacked the neighbour's tree until he'd had enough and climbed down.

Meanwhile, the potatoes boiled dry, leaving the pot suspiciously compromised, the chicken was done long ago and semi cold, and the prep work was an hour late. Sometimes you just have to sit back and watch others enjoy their food.

Today’s special is the ultimate combination of thing and place: the eternal cheeseburger in Paradise.

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