The recipe I’d hastily Googled while heading downstairs to the street required chia seeds, agave nectar, and almond milk, and I had no idea where I’d get any of those. Fortunately, I lived in one of those bits of London where you couldn’t walk twenty paces without tripping over a wholefood store or an artisanal cheese stand so I was pretty confident I’d be able to source them without too much trouble. Besides, they sold half this stuff in Tesco. Part of me was a bit concerned that almond milk was supposed to be an ethical no-no, although I couldn’t remember why or if I was getting it mixed up with palm oil, but I decided that from Oliver’s perspective at least it was preferable to cow.

In the end the ingredient I had most trouble with was “sturdy bread” because I had no idea what that meant and didn’t want my French toast to fall apart in the pan. But for some reason when you went up to somebody in a shop and said, “How sturdy is your bread?” they thought you were taking the piss. The internet told me I should be using brioche, but it also told me that brioche wasn’t vegan unless you got a specific brand, and that brand only made burger buns. In the end I went for sourdough on the grounds that if a bread that you could use to subdue an intruder in an emergency wasn’t “sturdy” enough, nothing was.

Back at the flat, I took the extremely sensible and grown-up precaution of opening all the windows and taking the batteries out of the smoke alarm. And then I got to it. To my joy, the first step of the recipe was basically “stick everything except the bread in a bowl and stick the bowl in the fridge,” and I could definitely do that. I mean, yes, I probably put in too much cinnamon because I dropped the spoon, but then cinnamon was one of those ingredients you could never have too much of. Like, y’know, ginger or garlic. Oh God, I’d inherited my mum’s cooking genes, hadn’t I?