‘It’s like squeezing a baby’s bottom,’ says Gizzi Erskine talking about how a well-risen, knocked back piece of dough should feel. I’m thinking of something else entirely but as the majority of people at this demonstration are women I decide to keep that to myself.

Giancarlo Caldesi has been at the beer. ‘We’ve gone through boxes and boxes,’ he tells me as his wife Katie looks on approvingly. It’s all been in the aid of science though, using Birra Moretti beer as an ingredient of some dishes that we are about to eat.

In aid of survivors of January’s earthquake in Haiti – the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere – Foodepedia’s Sabrina Ghayour masterminded a fundraising banquet at Le Bouchon Breton restaurant, Spitalfields Market. She talks to Douglas Blyde.

That I can do a mean keema myself made Kumud Gandhi’s Indian spice trail course all the more inviting. The trail began at Paddington, a train through winter snow to the former high-flying banker’s large Hertfordshire home.

We travel to restaurant, Vivat Bacchus to taste award-winning South African liquid sunshine from vines sewn beside the Breede River.

Having blagged a load of free tea samples, we would have preferred samples of champagne obviously, however we’re not The Telegraph here, we put the kettle on and lined up an impressive array of chipped teapots, brown ringed mugs, cups with the hotels’ names still on them and a small bowl the dog once used. Not very scientific, perhaps, but certainly real world.

Oh Pitcher! Oh Piano! O tempora! O mores! Where now the pissed PAs staggering gamely about on stiletto heels? Where the young swordsmen from the suburbs gathered to hunt in packs? And where the office leaving parties swirling out of focus in a haze of cheap white wine? All gone, all gone. The Pitcher & Piano is now the Dean Street Townhouse in a transformation more fascinating than ‘From Ladette to Lady.’

Douglas Blyde finds the offer of a ringside seat at the tabletop butchery of a Gloucester Old Spot pig at Trinity, Clapham Common, too hard to refuse…

Douglas Blyde escapes hostile weather for exotic connations – the launch of ‘Malaysia Kitchen’, a campaign to celebrate London’s 41 eateries…

Conscripted into a long afternoon of critical dining, Douglas Blyde reveals what it was like to eat at the F-Word’s restaurant…