I've been growing potatoes for the last forty years or more. I gave up on maincrop ones because I've always had blight every year, nearly always in late July or August, and the maincrops haven't reached a decent size by then. Besides, the slugs become a menace after the end of July.

For many years I've grown only Sutton's Foremost as my first early. We've been eating them now for a couple of weeks. They have a wonderful flavour, they bulk up well (given enough water), they keep their flavour and texture for a long time and they generally crop early enough to beat the blight (as soon as I see it I cut off all tops straight away, which means I'll get all the tubers in good condition).

The second early I've settled on for years is Nicola. It's waxy and dense with a great flavour, better than Charlotte in m'humble. It stores well and it makes superb oven chips (made with groundnut oil) or Mediterranean potatoes (made with extra virgin olive oil, a big sprig of rosemary and a big scattering of unpeeled garlic cloves) and fantastic jacket potatoes (they are not good for mash, but it's summer, dammit). I do get blight on it but not before the tubers are a decent, but not massive, size. Some shop potatoes aren't too bad and I rely on them through the winter as I can't grow anywhere near enough of my own to keep us going. But home-grown are incomparable when it comes to texture and flavour. I'm strictly organic with my spuds, by the way.

I have filleted red mullet (my all-time favourite fish) in the freezer and we'll be having that with my thinly-sliced Nicola at the weekend, the slices brushed with extra virgin olive oil, seasoned and baked in the hot oven in a single layer on greaseproof paper for fifteen minutes while I fry the fish in butter. The fish, with its skin well crisped, goes on top of a little mound of the potatoes skin side up, and we have that with a little scattering of black olive tapenade round the edges. That's easy to make but it's just as easy and just as cheap to buy a decent jar of it, enough for two, from M&S. We got the idea from a Rick Stein episode.

Tonight we had some Alaskan sockeye salmon (fried in butter) with some green beans and my Foremost potatoes, simply boiled. Plenty of butter, salt and pepper on that lot and it's food fit for the gods. And it was!