QV & Friends: Olia Hercules & Joe Woodhouse

18th March

March, that most hopeful of months, and we find ourselves in the rather enviable position of cooking alongside a most splendid husband-and-wife partnership. Not just any partnership, but two of the most quietly brilliant figures in the food world – the incomparable Olia Hercules and the inimitable Joe Woodhouse. Together, they have devised a feast as warm and soulful as they are.

Olia, born in southern Ukraine and shaped by Cyprus, Italy and the UK, is a cook, teacher, activist and storyteller of the highest order. Her cookbooks, including the award-winning Mamushka and the Andre Simon-shortlisted Summer Kitchens, have introduced a generation of readers to the soulful, ferment-rich and deeply rooted cooking of Eastern Europe and beyond. Her latest, Strong Roots, is a family memoir that also happens to contain some rather wonderful recipes. From her London home, she teaches ancestral fermentation techniques – which sounds to us like a very fine way to spend an afternoon.

Joe, meanwhile, has been a vegetarian since the age of ten and has spent the intervening decades exploring the great breadth and possibility of the vegetable kingdom. Author of Your Daily Veg, More Daily Veg and Weeknight Vegetarian, and much admired by Nigella Lawson and Anna Jones, he is a cook who understands that vegetables, treated with care and a healthy disregard for blandness, can be the most thrilling thing on any table.

Together, in the kitchen as in life, they bring spirit and generosity in equal measure.

We cannot think of a lovelier way to spend a Wednesday in March.