"w e "w high teens in times. in the high teens in scotland, close to 30 across east anglia and the south—east of england. at the start of the working week, high pressure keeping things settled across england and wales but further north and west a front will slip southwards to bring more cloud and patchy rain for northern ireland and patchy rain for northern ireland and scotland, but further south, hanging on to the sunshine and warmth. hello, this is bbc news. the headlines. two thirds of household plastic waste ends up in landfill sites despite efforts to increase the amount we recycle. the local government association says low—grade plastics used in many food containers can't be recycled and need to be banned. detectives investigating the disappearance of the midwife samantha eastwood are carrying out searches in a rural area of stoke—on—trent. the 28—year—old has not been seen since last friday when she finished her night shift at stoke university hospital. three men have died from heatstroke in spain as temperatures in parts of southern europe continue to rise above a0 degrees celsius. holiday—makers are being urged

to stay out of the sun as forecasters are warning of record—breaking temperatures. the us secretary of state says he hopes north korea's nuclear programme can be stopped. his comments come after a un report claims it is still continuing. the record breaking hydroplane bluebird is being relaunched this weekend. it will carry out a series of runs in the water on the isle of bute. it's more than 50 years since it crashed, killing its pilot donald campbell. now on bbc news, a talking books cookery special. gavin esler meets chef and restaurateur rick stein. hello, and welcome to talking books, with me, gavin esler. we are in london where it is no exaggeration to say, some 30 years ago, the food was pretty terrible. nowadays, it is home to plenty

michelin star restaurants. one of those responsible for this transformation is the restauranteur and author, rick stein. i'm going to meet him to find out how his love of simple ingredients and travel informs his writing and his cooking. in restaurant kitchens, everything is all prepped up before you start. this is a way of cooking fish which i really like, which is actually cooking it under the salamander. it's quite a sort of pure way of cooking. so there we go. rick stein, hello, and welcome. you have, as i say, written a lot of books. do you find the act of writing quite difficult? because you did it, first, didn't you, the very first one you did? yeah, my first book was called english seafood cookery and i call myself richard stein, because "rick" sounded a bit racy, a bit american. was it difficult to write that one? yes, it was, because...

now i have people helping me cook recipes, so the books i do now, i work with a girl called portia, and we talk food all day long, we cook together and then i write up the recipes, but in those days, i did everything myself, and the only way i could test the recipes, really, we used to have these literary lunches of seafood, which is when i had a load of recipes i'd just got down for the book and get, actually, the waiting staff in, to sort of try the recipes and see what they said. but it is also difficult because of the discipline of writing. it took me about two years. as i then discovered, the only way to do is to do a little bit each day, particularly when i did the autobiography, you just have to say i'm going to do 1,000 words a day and you end up doing 500. and the other thing i sort of realised after a while is it does not matter what you write down the first time. i always thinks it is a bit

like plasterers, you come and you do the first coat and it looks rough because you know you're going to come back and do the second one. and that, to my way of thinking, that's the way to do it. because, once you have it down on paper, it sort of assumes a life of its own. half the thing about writing is just thinking "this is no good. my thoughts are just crazy". but what actually... the first book i did, the cookery book, it won a prize, it won a food prize — it was the glenfiddich award — at the time. and i could not believe that i won a prize for it because itjust never occurred to me that anybody would be interested about a small fish restaurant in padstow, and anyone would be interested in me and i couldn't write anyway. i think what i learnt then was that, of course, they'd be interested because the next generation's coming on, and you are endlessly, the industry, the literature, and books and everything, notjust books, but films, always needs younger people coming up.

and that's what i didn't get at the time. i thought, "why me?" and i am sure a lot of young people feel the same way. your autobiography, under a mackerel sky, you'd better explain the title first. well, i didn't come up with it. it was actually someone at ebury books, one of the editors. but i thought it was such a good one because, when my father died, and i left england, rather hurriedly, i was walking out of a pub in notting hill gate, and there was a mackerel sky and i put it in the book, "mackerel sky is a sign of big change ahead", which indeed was the case for me. i didn't name it that but it's just the best name possible, as far as i'm concerned because, obviously, a lot of it is about my life as a seafood cook so it worked a treat. the thing that really struck me about your book was how rootless you were at first. you just didn't really know who you were.

there's a great quote right at the start from james thurber, "all men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from and to and why." i love james thurber, those fables. the book was called further fables of our time, itjust does these little bits... i think a lot of comedians are highly intelligent and highly thoughtful people and, obviously, he was a great writer. but really it is, and i think life is a bit of a quest to find out who you are and what you are doing and why. certainly in my case, because i had quite an upsetting experience when my father committed suicide, when i was 17, 18, and i sort of feel i have been on the run ever since. if something like that happens in your family, you are a bit apt to go off the rails but also work a bit harder than anybody else to try and prove you are somebody because it is such a confidence zapper. maybe we could get a reading

of the start of the book, when you are talking about... in many ways it was a happy childhood, quite a privileged childhood, in fact, but you write very movingly, and perhaps you could read a little bit of how your mother protected you from some of the things that were going on. "my mother spent much of my childhood trying to hide the worst from me..." — this was about my father's illness — "i merely knew that my father was someone i was scared of. most of the time i was uneasy in his presence". years later i did a television programme on manic depression with stephen fry. stephen, who is himself bipolar, said in that programme, that in his depressive stage he felt completely useless. i think that's how my father must have felt. most of my life i've had to fight against a creeping conviction that i might be completely useless too. and, at such times, i can understand that my father wouldn't have wanted me to be like him. but the result was that he could

be very tough on me." that has taken quite a lot of time to work through. also my mother was very good, after my father's death, about it. when you think of somebody being incredibly low, you just think, "i am so ordinary, such a complete non—person, i do not want my darling son to be like me". nowadays we are more familiar and some of the taboos have been broken about talking about mental illness. it certainly was not true when you were a child. was that difficult to write? i suppose not because he is dead. i have been very lucky that all my family have been very supportive, my brothers and my sister, in me saying things like that because i think they all feel the same way about it. he's dead, my mother's dead, and i think i've never felt that i should not say it because everybody, there

is probably not a family in this world that hasn't got some skeleton in the cupboard, something they'd rather people not know about but i think it is important that the people do know about it, that we all suffer, in some way, somebody with mental illness, probably. i am sort of writing about life, not about specific circumstances. you go through some of the jobs you did, really menialjobs. sweeping up, literally sweeping up, and then there's another passage perhaps you could read too of how you found out what had happened to your father and, again, this is very, very moving. i suppose, at the time, i wanted to experience what it was like doing tough and boring manual labour. i had been reading a lot of hemingway at the time. all the time when i was that age, i was pitting myself, saying, "how would i cope in this or that situation"?

"i was sweeping the road outside the natural history museum, when my flatmate tim drove up in his land rover. "i think you should get in," he said in a tight voice. he then told me my father had died. i often think i have no memory for detail but i can remember every colour, every hue of that moment. the greyness of the sky, the blue—green of the land rover, the darker green of its seats, the coat i was wearing, a brown raincoat, short and, i thought, italian—looking, which i had worn with such swagger at school with the blue scarf which meant i had been awarded my colours for rugby. the coat was showing its age and i had tied it round with a bit of parcel twine to keep out the wind of london's streets." that's not a bad bit of writing, isn't it? basically, i was just thinking, if somebody was to analyse that, and what i'm doing is using the slight patheticness of me to outline how i felt underneath. you discovered that your father had jumped off a cliff and then, in a curious way, did that liberate

you to go off and do the hemingway thing, be the macho guy, going off to australia? i suppose in some senses it liberated me, yes. but i was awfully confused. i still think, even at my age now, that was the making of me and partly because i did it on my own. if you're on your own then there's a lot of times when you're going to feel incredibly lonely but there are also times when you so crave, as a result of the loneliness and the craving to find other people, that you do make lots of friends. sometimes that did not work out too well but other times it really did. as a rite of passage, it is not a bad one to be able to cope as a 19—year—old and realise that you can. as you can see, i am the clumsiest cook known to man, which i think is why some people quite like me cooking because i'm sort of more like them.

you are relatable. this is what chefs do, right, that's coriander, but rather than chop it like you or i would, they slice it neatly. half the time i say, "i do not want that, it looks too bloody smart". there is a lovely passage again, in this book, in which you say, "all the cooking i've ever done since is, in some ways, an attempt to recapture some of the flavours of the cooking at home when i was a boy. pollock fish cakes, dazzling fresh mackerel, just put under the grill with a sprig of fennel are the best i've ever eaten." i mean, throughout your books, it's simple food simply done, but in a way which is elaborated in the taste. is that a fair kind of summary? it is. i just think that for so many people, if you have had a nice childhood, it is recreating childhood memories in so many things that you do, in my case with food. that is why i have always tried to keep everything i do, fish cooking, simple.

because my mother cooked things simply and i have always been quite supportive of british cuisine even when everybody thought it was the worst in the world. i was doing some filming in france once — this is about ten years ago — and this girl said, "you eat a lot of boiled meat in england, don't you?" i . but really it is about simple cooking of really excellent ingredients. that is basically what i have done all my life. one of the interesting things you also say in your autobiography is, your mother was a great cook, but, for instance, you write about making bouillabaise and how hard it was to get the ingredients, you say, "the olive oil perhaps from the chemist". is that where you got it? well, yeah, that was the only place you could get it because that was the only thing the english used it for, unblocking your ears.

no wonder the french thought we ate boiled meat! not too far off! hake is a fish, if you go to western europe, france or spain, you eat a lot of it. in the uk, we catch it but we sell it abroad. i know. i always get a bit amused, because a lot of cornish people think the spanish have got all of our hake quota and are nicking our hake, especially around cornwall, there is lots there, especially in the irish sea. but we don't eat it anyway, so don't be so dog in the manger about it! it's extraordinary to me. it's a member of the cod family and very much like cod, a bit softer than cod but it comes in nice, thick steaks. if anything, i think it's a bit tastier than cod. for the spanish, it's their favourite fish. we are very conservative in our taste. we need somebody to come along and change it. one of the things — you say this repeatedly in a number of your books — the test is, would

i cook this at home? and i think that is why people like your books. because it's not "please stir this risotto for the next 25 minutes." it's something that we would actually do. and the tips are just as important as the recipes. that's very nice of you to say that. i think it is absolutely right, because sometimes when you look at cookery books you think, "christ, who's going to bother with that", you know? and that was very much the case in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and a lot of chefs came along with tremendous reputations and just put the recipes they used in their kitchens in books, you know? fortunately everybody has become a lot, you know, the processes have become a lot more simple, because half the time nobody would cook them anyway. most kitchens have got every stock known to man in the fridge, and everything all prepped up, so you've got onions, tomatoes, everything chopped up and ready to go. you want to think of a new recipe, you just get it out of the fridge and off you go.

i love those sort of books where it's like "meals in ten and a half minutes." you think, for whom? yes, exactly. you also wrote, "i sort of liked cooking and i sort of didn't." what was the "didn't" bit? i didn't really like the hours. i never did. you know, i had my sister who lived in london, in my main years that i was cooking, and a lot of the time there was only two or three other people in the kitchen. iwas thinking, god, you know, she lived in islington, and there were parties every weekend, and i was always stuck in the kitchen. that's what i didn't like. my older sisterjaney, who sadly died in the mid—1980s, she said to me, when i would be saying to her it was so boring to spend every winter in padstow, she said, "there's no substitute for really good fresh fish and people will end up beating

a path to your door". and they did. the other thing that runs through your book and your career is your love of cornwall. you are really rooted in that place. every time i come down the hill into padstow and look across the estuary i think, "this is where i want to be." i think it is very human that as much as i believe i would love to spend all my life there, i would get bored. but as a place to spend most of my childhood and most of my adult life, it's just my spiritual home, really. it's very difficult to sort of put your finger on what's so special about it. i suppose it's always because it's this peninsula jutting out into the atlantic, it's a bit cut off from the rest of the world and we all like to think of it as being cut off. we like this idea that you keep still bumping into cornish people who have never been across the tamar, the river that separates cornwall from devon. i mean, that's really good. it's lovely, in this sort of mad world that people still feel

so rooted in such a place. and the fact that although i have lived there for over a0 years, i will never be considered a local. you know, no chance of that. did you find the business side of it quite tricky? because there is a lot of, you know, those people who love to create in the kitchen, and then actually making the finances add up and being able to pay your way is a different skill, isn't it? i think i was sort of lucky, because i originally opened the building, the seafood restaurant, as a nightclub. i bought it with a friend of mine, my best friend johnny, off a guy who had been running it as a nightclub. a nightclub in padstow, i might have said this in the book, is like an opera house in the middle of the amazon. certainly in the ‘70s. we were a couple of nice boys in our early 20s. we just couldn't run it properly

and it was closed down, really, because it was declared an unruly house or something like that and the police took away our licenses, the booze licence. i was faced with imminent bankruptcy and the restaurant was the only thing i could do and my fear at the time was of going bust again. we didn't go bust because my mother and his mother bailed us out. but it is a salutary lesson, for anybody who has gone bankrupt, it's such a terrible thing to happen to you. i thought, i am never going to let that happen again. so i have always been first and foremost about making profit and that has always stuck with me. i am not particularly good at figures but i know that if you keep piling lobster on a plate for your customerjust because you like your customer, it's not going to happen. how have our tastes changed? the french person who said we all eat boiled meat,

and over—boiled cabbage is the other thing, they have certainly changed. that is why when you write books about mexico and india and travelling in europe, they sell, because of what the british are more open to now. yes, it is really down to a mix, i think, of obviously much cheaper travel and available travel, but also a rise in, sort of — i would put it, for want of another word, leisurejournalism. when i started cooking in the late ‘70s, there were not many restaurants in the uk, and not many journalists writing about food. and all activities, whether it is what you are doing in your home or whatever, has become part of everybody‘s life. and everybody likes to cook. what i always find extraordinary is, why wouldn't anybody like to cook? it's what we have to do every day. everybody likes sex, why wouldn't we like food, too?

it's bleeding obvious. let me take you up on that. do you sometimes wonder whether the more cookery programmes there are, the more books written about cookery, the less we actually cook, because we're spending all our time watching you on tv and ordering takeaway pizza? ithink... i mean, i know it's a question, but you are actually stating something which i think is fairly true. that is a problem. but there are certainly more people cooking now. one of the problems is, it is a bit like being a teacher, you have to keep one step ahead of your students. but i think that's great. people are so, sort of, when you talk to people who are really into cooking, it's a lovely thing. also, my second or third book came out, i first did the penguin one, when the second one came out, i remember a guy coming up to me in the restaurant,

in the conservatory at the front of the restaurant, saying it changed his life. he said, "i would have never thought of cooking before." he saw my first series and he said he loved cooking now. i think for me that was a tremendous gratification, that a lot of men started thinking it was ok to cook. you do say in one of your books that recipes are also designed to use bought—in products, from mayonnaise to chilli sauce. has your view of that changed, how you make stuff? it has, really, because when i first did the first book, it was harder to get things. but i remember in the very first book i did a lengthy recipe for making your own puff pastry. and when i finally had to sort of write, "you can actually get really good puff pastry in the supermarket," i thought, "i don't really want to be saying this". it wasn'tjust me. i remember delia smith doing a book about cutting corners and buying in things,

and i think it'sjust that we've all changed. in the early days, you had to make everything yourself but now, you know, because the supply of good quality — notjust fresh produce, but things like stocks and sauces — is so advanced and it's so easy to get good sauces, so why not bring them into a good recipe? do you have a sense of mission about these books? i'm afraid so! you're an evangelist? iam. i think if you care for something you end up being a bit of an evangelist anyway, because you're just saying, "why can't they see this?" do you sometimes think, looking back at your books, tv presenting, the business that you run, all the people that you give work to, all the other people you give pleasure to through your books, we're sitting here by the river thames, on a beautiful day, the rootless kid who didn't really know what he was doing and was sweeping the streets — you have come quite a long way.

yeah, i suppose so. but i sort of... i think the problem is that you sort of think somebody‘s going to find you out. you're a bluffer, really? yeah, in some curious way. on that happy note, i think we will leave it. rick stein, thank you very much. it has been really nice, gavin. it's really nice being interviewed by somebody who knows how to do it properly. look at that. i'd be happy to eat that. i'd be happy to eat that! in fact, i might eat that! it's very much a story of two halves

across the country today. warmth and sunshine continuing across much of england and wales. a bit of high cloud around at times, turning things hazy but much more cloud across scotland and northern ireland. that has been bringing some patchy outbreaks of rain which have been slowly working northwards. equally, a few breaks in the cloud, particularly to the east of high ground across scotland. the reason we have the cloud while much of the countries under an area of high pressure which continues to build through the weekend, in the far north of scotland we have front which has generated the cloud and also as i mentioned, the patchy outbreaks of rain. you can see the zone of cloud of the earlier satellite picture, stretching across northern ireland coming to scotland, but also some breaks, particularly to the east of high ground. this afternoon, the best of the sunshine will continue to be across england and wales. at times, the sunshine will turn hazy as the high cloud d rifts will turn hazy as the high cloud drifts across. thieving thicker cloud across northern ireland and parts of scotland, with outbreaks of rain working northwards. temperatures raining from the high

teens across scotland and northern ireland to close to 30 celsius in south—east england. foremost, a fine evening with some mates buzz of sunshine. clearer skies overnight across england and wales, keeping more cloud again for northern ireland and scotland. the rain will become confined to the far north—west of scotland. temperature is not as high as they were last night, generally between 11—16. the high pressure we spoke about still with us tomorrow. keeping things dry and settled, plenty of sunshine again across england and wales and across scotland and northern ireland, a bit more cloud but it should stay largely dry except for the odd shower. temperatures on a par with today, high teens across parts of scotland and northern ireland perhaps to 21. mid 20s in england and wales and close to 30 in east anglia and south—east england and the warmth continues across england and wales into monday. hanging on to high pressure. further north and west, a front approaching from the north—westward will strengthen the breeze, increase the cloud and bring outbreaks of more useful rain across scotland and

northern ireland through monday. some of it may get across into the far north of england but otherwise across much of england and wales, monday is dry and very warm if not hot, temperatures climbing even further to start the new week, exceeding 30 celsius across east anglia and south—east england. a bit cooler, pleasantly so, the further south and west you go. in the middle of the week, a chance some of us could see some showers and we have not had much rain recently. otherwise, quite settled although eventually the temperatures will stop to come down. goodbye. —— will start to come down. this is bbc news, i'm lukwesa burak. the headlines at 3:00. two—thirds of plastic food containers still can't be recycled. campaigners are calling for action. this report is actually no surprise for us. it confirms something we've known for a long time, that producers are putting plastic products on the market without any thought for what happens to them at the end of their life. detectives investigating the disappearance of the midwife samantha eastwood carry

out searches in a rural area of stoke—on—trent. concern over northamptonshire county council's financial difficulties has led england's children's commissioner to ask for reassurances that services for young people will be protected. spain and portugal could see record temperatures this weekend, as the heatwave continues across parts of the continent. here in cordoba at midnight last night