Alfresco meals to remember

“A family holiday in Barbados. We bought flying fish, which we washed in the seawater before barbecuing and eating it right there on the beach, barefoot in the sand. Beautiful views, beautiful vibe, exceptional company.”

“Having barbecues in the garden with my family – it’s the highlight of every summer. I love nothing more than a bustling table and the kids running around outside playing while we eat (invariably they get too distracted by games and never end up staying seated at the table!).”

“My stepdad had such a sense of humour, and my favourite memory of him, my mum and me all together was a picnic at a Kent beauty spot that went slightly awry when it began unexpectedly snowing. Instead of giving up and going home, we braved it out, eating sandwiches and sausage rolls, even as snowflakes fell on them. He tied a napkin around his head, bandana-style, as though we were at the beach on a blistering hot day. The harder it snowed, the more we laughed (all the while, people in cars glancing at us oddly as they passed). The laughter amidst flurries of snow and pale sunshine, then warming up with a thermos of coffee, will live with me forever.”

“It was a pavement café on a warm night in Paris. The food was cheap as frites (but utterly scrumptious), and the person sat opposite me was making me laugh so much that by the time we’d scraped up the last crumbs of tarte citron, I knew I was going to marry him. We’d only been together a few weeks, but history has proved me right. We went back to that café three years later, and he proposed.”

“My husband’s 50th birthday dinner, when I threw a long tablecloth over some borrowed trestle tables, and we had a family-and-friends barbecue feast in our back garden. Heaven.”

“I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy many around the world, from Australia, where we had a ‘barbie’ after the sun set over Uluru, to Thailand, where we joined a local family to pick vegetables and herbs from their garden, then cooked outside with them before we sat amid the greenery as night fell. But perhaps the best picnic was in the south of France, where we stocked up on pâté, cheese and baguettes, and chilled our bottle of white in the nearby stream. Bliss.”

“This is a hard one for me to answer as fresh air is my favourite ingredient in almost any social occasion. Having said that, our late-summer ‘lazy dinner parties’ where we order north London’s finest sourdough pizzas, put the champagne on ice and feast with a few friends on our little roof terrace, are hard to beat. I love watching the swifts fly high in the sky and then just as dusk falls, there is a ballet of bats swooping overhead.”

“It’s not the fanciest, but it is the most life-changing. My now-husband and I hadn’t been together very long when we sat one afternoon on a bench by the river in his home town in Malaysia eating nasi lemak – coconut rice with spicy sambal, anchovies and peanuts, wrapped in pandan leaves. He told me that one day he wanted to marry me. He never did the full down-on-one-knee thing, so I cherish this as the moment when we both knew we were in this for the long haul.”