This lip-smacking dish will help you rediscover your culinary mojo, says Eleanor Steafel

Ihad a few days off last week and had great plans to spend time in the kitchen. I was supposed to make strawberry jam and a big batch of red onion pickles, and bake various complicated things I’d been meaning to try. I’d planned a dinner for friends who were coming to spend the evening on my terrace and thought we’d eat antipasti with homemade focaccia, that I’d make a spatchcocked roast chicken and serve affogatos with homechurned vanilla ice cream.

I achieved precisely none of the above. Towards the end of the week, I managed to muster a birthday cake for my sister (chocolate and cherry with whipped cream). The friends who came were served sausage pasta with Nineties-style garlic bread and didn’t even get pud – just bars of Lindt salted chocolate. I ate a lot of summer rolls from the local Vietnamese takeaway, and found new ways to justify bread and cheese as a legitimate dinner.

This week, though, I have rediscovered my mojo. My desire to eat delicious things never wanes, but my energy for cooking does, especially at the moment. It’s always a relief when it returns. I remember Guy Garvey, lead singer of Elbow, talking on Desert Island

Discs about that feeling when a song finally comes to him. “It’s like finding your footing in a busy river,” he said.

Cooking is like that for me, not that I’d claim to be the culinary equivalent of a Mercury Prize winner. But while the inclination to do it can disappear sometimes, when it comes back it’s at once reassuringly familiar and exciting in a whole new way.

This week, I had a craving for something lip-smacking. I wanted something salty, sharp and sweet. I plumped for pork chops with a good bit of fat to render and become golden. My local grocers had an abundance of Kentish cherries, which seemed the perfect accompaniment. I tossed a slightly random selection of greenery I had knocking about in the buttery pork fat while the meat rested, adding a squeeze of lemon. Fluffy white rice would have been a good addition, or a mound of crispy potatoes.