Now that chametz is back on the menu my thoughts return to one of my favourite treats — the knish.

Every nation has its knish or equivalent — the Brits or Cornish love a pasty, the Spanish, empanadas while the Chinese go wild for a wonton. Sephardi Jews plump for a bureka but for Ashkenazi folk, it’s the knish.

He loves to eat, but when he opened his eclectic bookshop in London’s Temple Fortune and added a little cafe, lawyer-turned-bookseller-and-restaurateur Michael Joseph never imagined it would one day become a dining destination.

Many of you will already have cooked for two Seder nights and numerous other meals so far this Pesach, but by the time it comes to these final days, you might be in need of some inspiration.

If you think preparing your kitchen for Pesach is a challenge, imagine how much more difficult the festival is for those who avoid not only chametz, but also meat, fish and all dairy products.

For vegans, a Seder plate featuring a tofu version of a lamb shank or chicken neck, is not an unfamiliar sight.

When I was a young lad, my favourite part of the Seder meal was — I am not kidding — the karpas. In our house it was crinkly parsley (flat-leaf hadn’t appeared on the gastronomic horizon then) and I can still remember swirling it around vigorously in the salt water.

When we last met Deb Perelman of The Smitten Kitchen — her cookery blog for which she cooks and photographs recipes from her tiny New York kitchen — she was regularly cooking (virtually of course) for four million people.

Fast-forward two years and Perelman’s audience has more than doubled, with close to 10 million salivating readers clicking on her site each month.

If the orange is the king of the citrus family, then the exotic Seville and the ravishing, marbled blood orange, all but disappeared from the shelves after their too-short season, are the golden girls, their innate attractions enhanced by the part they play in the history of this most fascinating of fruits.

A culinary highlight on March 18 is “Beyond Bubbie: Tales from the Kitchen” — an evening of food-related storytelling in London’s Shoreditch. Hosted by food writer Jay Rayner and featuring raconteurs including Great British Bake Off winner Edd Kimber, Itamar Sruolvich of Honey & Co and food artist Caroline Hobkinson, the event will be raising money for the Ministry of Stories charity.