What a truly beautiful day - not a cloud in the sky,. Time to take up smoking again…. I’m not talking about the evils of tobacco, instead I refer to the primeval joys of having the tang of wood-smoke flavouring my food. 

It really is that time of the lockdown when you’ve tried everything and anything to liven up the freshness and vibrancy of your food offerings, only to be frustrated by meals which turn out to be just that little bit more dull than perhaps they should be. 

A while ago my friend Alyson Murray, of the specialist barbecue equipment firm Hot Smoked (based in Wellington), sent me one the starter kits after which her company is named. The hot smoked kit introduces non-smokers to the art of adding woody fragrances to food.

Basically, it consists of a small steel box and a number of bags of different wood chips. You select a handful of, say, oak or beech chips and place them in the box (which has ventilation slots), lay this in a hot barbecue and close its lid. Hey-presto, you’ve got a hot-smoker.

As I write, the Hot Smoked wood-chip box is now sitting on a bed of glowing charcoal and smoking like the Flying Scotsman climbing a steep main-line incline.

What this cave-man style of cooking does is give even the blandest of food an opportunity to shine. Even a cast iron pot full of vegetables can gently smoke its way into a different league. After a while the chunks of potato, carrot, parsnip and capsicum begin to soften and caramelise - just like they’d do in a conventional oven. But there’s something about the waft of woodsmoke that takes the vegetables into another realm, especially if they are slow-cooked over many hours.

Some people say there’s a umami hit which comes from the smoke. But I think it goes deeper than that. My theory is that humans have been cooking over open fires for the best part of a quarter of a million years - so we’ve become hard-wired when it comes to enjoying the flavours which woodsmoke can impart. 

We’ve only had clean-burning electric or gas ovens for a tiny fraction of that time - so it would make sense if the pleasure-receptors in our brains had become attuned to the taste of wood-smoke escorting the foodstuffs we love to eat. 

If you were to simply boil chunks of potato, carrot and parsnip along with a few other vegetable bits and pieces and put them on a plate, you probably would not be deafened by the round of applause, even from your most hungry guests. But you try slow-roasting them over a live flame with a bit of woodsmoke involved…

For extra punch you can add de-skinned cloves of garlic to the mix - or roast entire heads of garlic on top of the veg before squeezing out the flesh and mashing it to a creamy paste. Add this to an egg yoke and knock up some home-made mayonnaise to go with the roast smoked vegetables, and suddenly you are in the land of trendy restaurant cooking.   

This smokey version of aioli goes amazingly well with chicken - especially the hot-smoked chicken you can cook on your barbecue at the same time as the vegetables. 

Some would say it goes even better with hot-smoked salmon. And, indeed, what is better than hot-smoked salmon? Not much. But I can tell you that lightly-cured slices of belly pork (which you’ve prepared yourself by keeping the meat in a container full of salt, sugar, pepper and spices for 24 hours) cooked in the same smokey barbecue will please a meat-lovers beyond almost anything imaginable. Think: thick, juicy, fragrant slices of smokey bacon…

The world is your smoked oyster, so to speak, when it comes to the act of cloaking your food in fragrant woodsmoke. 

But you can overdo it. You can make foods too smokey - and certainly you would not want to eat smoked food every day. But as an easy - almost foolproof - way of jazzing up your late-winter dinner parties, adding a touch of oak, beach or cherrywood smoke is one of those no-brainers. 

Try it once and you’ll soon be kicking yourself you never took up smoking before. 

You can check out Hot Smoked at https://hotsmoked.co.uk