I grew up in Kenya, where my mother together with her mother and mother-in-law, conjured up fantastic feasts for high days and holy days and our cook made me and my brother the most delicious meals for when we got home from school. We had an enormous extended family - it seemed that everyone was an aunty or an uncle - who were equally adept at turning out fabulous food. We had the most amazing resources - milk from the farm (quite literally from udder to table), creamy butter, beef, chicken and goat that were truly organic. Fruit and vegetables that came straight from our gardens or the vegetable growers' allotments. Fish and seafood brought in the day they were caught off the coast.Though it wasn't always bountiful - I do also remember the power outages and food shortages; the surreptitious whisperings about where flour or sugar could still be found at a price; the sometimes comical lengths my mother would go to procure something in short supply...I look back now - through rose tinted glasses no doubt - and feel truly privileged to have experienced such abundance.

We moved to Canada when I was thirteen. I realise now how difficult that must have been for my mother, a socialite who now had no help in the kitchen or around the house and no extended family around to visit or support her. Leaving the tropics behind for six months of cold and snow every year...My mother is Arabian and my father was Indian; both Muslim and before long, they had gathered together a circle of close friends who have stayed in our lives, through thick and thin, ever since. It didn't take long for Mum to get used to the convenience of the vast supermarkets and the lack of exotic ingredients - and start throwing dinner parties. This is when I started to get involved in the kitchen - washing up to begin with. And then baking. In Nairobi, it was all about fruit and ice-cream based puddings. In Canada, the magazines had picture after mouth watering picture of the most glorious cakes, pies and biscuits. Measuring ingredients was not in my mother's repertoire so I became baker. I turned out cakes and cookies, hesitantly at first and then with more and more confidence as I got to understand the terms and the feel of textures. I learned from those magazines and the food packaging labels. But I rarely cooked anything savoury. That was my mother's domain - completely.

I married and moved to England when I was 24. I couldn't boil and egg but I could make a mean apple pie