The season of ‘big cooking’ means taking your time in the kitchen over mushroom bourguignon, braised tomatoes, and other gentle simmers

The changing season brings with it a need for more robust cooking. In come the bags of golden-skinned onions, the woody-stemmed herbs and the root vegetables. The fat carrots and mushrooms, the beans and sticky rice and full-bodied soups. The season turned rather quickly this year: one minute it was all melons and tomatoes, the next I was rummaging for the cast-iron casserole.

Big cooking, by which I mean those recipes that take a little longer to cook and tend to come to the table with a ladle, has been the order of the day in this kitchen for a few weeks now. The season kicked off with a tray of late tomatoes, baked with shallots until their skins had blackened here and there, then served with a thick tahini sauce. By the time the autumn rains got stuck in I was simmering mushrooms with thyme, onions and red wine, and serving broccoli with a pungent sauce and sticky rice.