It's that time of year again: time for the Knysna Oyster Festival. Thousands of people swarm to the seaside town in mid-July. Lots of them don't even eat oysters. But what's the point of that? If you're there, you may as well try one. I still remember my first oyster. It was disgusting, but I was 12 – far too young to appreciate something like that (although just about ready to start liking olives). Now, I love the very thing I hated back then: the fact that they taste like the sea. I don't even put Tabasco on them anymore, just a tiny squeeze of lemon to cut through the brininess.

One of the things I've been busy with lately is our cosy homewares show at Curious, Whetstone & Frankley called Nest. I couldn't resist and bought this bowl by Jesse Breytenbach (sharing shelf space with bronze bunnies by Janine de Waal and a ceramic rabbit by Homebakes). The cool thing about the bowls is that we've been selling them filled with hot soup. I made roast tomato and aubergine for the opening on 2 July. It's the simplest thing:

This is the first “fancy” meal I've cooked in a long time: fennel, blue cheese and pecan tartlets by good ol' Phillippa Cheifitz in the latest issue of Taste magazine. Hectically rich, but good. I had to add some water to the pastry (not called for in the recipe) to make it bind, but maybe that's not Phil's fault. I have been out of the cooking game for a while.

June was a hellish month. No, nothing awful happened – I just completely overcommitted to work; a typical newbie freelancer mistake. June was also the month I realised that without cooking, life's not much fun for me. Cooking is the way I get my mind out of work mode after a challenging day. It allows me to indulge all my senses, while doing soothing things like mindless chopping, or kneading of dough, or stirring of risotto. It's something I do well – I'm almost always proud of the results – so it makes me feel good. And I love eating something new and exciting (and homecooked) every night.

So, hopefully what that means is that this blog is back. I'm not sure how many people out there missed it. But I did.