Here we go, a really self-indulgent post, MY BOOK LAUNCH last night. I have to admit to the pre-party nerves, gluey mouth and a general desire to hide under a table before anyone arrived but then I had a fabulous time.

Peter and Max, and the entire team at the Riverstation were wonderfully accommodating. We obviously had to nibble at recipes from the book and so I spent a couple of hours in the restaurant kitchen yesterday morning helping prep the food. It was quite an experience, working in a busy kitchen where you don’t even know where to find a spoon.

We served smoked aubergine and Puy lentil crostini, broad bean and chorizo crostini, cannellini and parmesan frittelle with salsa verde, falafel with sweet chilli sauce, spiced tomato and red lentil soup and then, last but not least, melt-in-your-mouth black bean brownies. I may just part with one of the recipes in due course but in the meantime you may just have to buy the book!

Emily Preece Morrison (Pavilion Books) + Moi

Chrissie & Livvy (Radio Bristol)

Just a few words.

Signing books

Charlotte Cross

Rosemary Barron, Me, Richard Bertinet, Valentina Harris

Mr Bertinet, Hannah Cameron, Catherine Farinha

Larking around with Mark Carwardine

The big toast to the book.

Chris Wicks, Clare Hargreaves & ?

Paul Taylor and Leti Valverdes

Linda Owen LLoyd, Emily Knight and Emily P-M

Yvonne Lilley, Jill Rolt & LIbby Lawrence

Me again with Kalpna Woolf

Libby, Harvey Lilley and Peter Rolt

The parents and sis’ Libby

Ailish and Nigel Heneberry

Papadeli Simon + afraid so

I won’t bore you with a list of all the lovely guests, you can get a glimpse of them above (with far too many pictures of me, sorry!)  suffice to say that I was chuffed to bits with such wonderful support.

The event gave me a chance to thank, and I shall say thank again, all the truly inspirational people who helped along the way with PULSE, in particular, Emily Preece Morrison my unbelievably supportive editor at Pavilion. Georgina Hewitt, Wei Tang, Maud Eden and the truly gifted photographer Clare Winfield have made the book look stunning. So thank you, thank you, thank you. It’s often easy to forget that there’s a copy editor (the very patient and rigorous Maggie Ramsey) an indexer (Ruth Ellis- I just can’t imagine where you begin), recipe testers (with Hannah Cameron playing the starring role) and guinea pig diners involved too.

So in a couple of days when I’ve had time to gather some images together I’ll give you a bit of a sneak preview of PULSE (just go to the previous post if you’d like to hear a bit of chat).