Dinner party

It’s no secret I love cooking any kind of meat over an open fire. An Asado Grill is a great piece of kit and loads of fun to experiment with. Marinated, smokey, tender lamb served up family style with your choice of condiments - we’ve used Dahl for this dish but you could replace with Baba Ghanoush or similar for a Middle Eastern spin. - Al Brown

I’ve always been a big fan of eating octopus and tend to order it whenever I see it on a menu. We’ve been playing around with this dish for a while and the result looks a picture, and more to the point - eats like a dream! While we’ve given you the steps to tackle the octopus prep, it can be a bit daunting so you can always ask your fishmonger to do this part for you. - Al Brown

This salad is full of flavour. Bitter greens cut through richness of the confit duck, the pear adds sweetness and the walnuts texture. While pinot noir tends to be a typical wine match for many duck dishes, we found a rose worked better with the bitter greens - perfect for a lighter summer meal. - Al Brown

Food to me is all about simplicity and generosity. A simply roasted whole fish is a pretty good example of this. Serving this dish with Huntley & Palmers Flatbread is great for added texture and mopping up all the delicious juice and flavour. Turbot can sometimes be a bit difficult to find, so any large flat fish (flounder, brill) or even the belly of a large species like kingfish or hapuka will do. - Al Brown

The size of these Raspberry & Coconut and Marmalade & Lime petite lamingtons means the ratio of sponge to delicious flavoured coating is stepped up a notch

This dish of dark puy lentils with glistening strings of roasted red tomatoes will make your summer plates picture perfect. Photography by Jani Shepherd/Gatherum Collectif.

Lightly baked fish and zingy aioli is quite possibly the perfect summer dish. The large fillets make for easy cooking and it’s also really good the next day eaten cold. Photography by Jani Shepherd/Gatherum Collectif.