Fiona Golfar and Skye Gyngell cook up a lazy afternoon lunch in London

I’ve been friends with the chef Skye Gyngell since I met her in Sydney when I was 19. She was working in a deli where they made a memorable chicken and celery salad with a great mayo dressing, excellent in a baguette. Our lives have been conjoined ever since, and now our children are best friends.

Often, we congregate at my house in west London for big Sunday lunches. In summer, they mostly happen on my garden terrace, under the wisteria. We cook together – although we are like the odd couple, with polar personalities: she is calm and order and I am drama and chaos. She makes lists, I hurl things together.

For this picnic we have invited an easy group of friends, the kind who don’t mind helping: jeweller Solange Azagury-Partridge, stylist Bay Garnett, Orlebar Brown founder Adam Brown and his husband, the PR Tom Konig-Oppenheimer, Port Eliot Festival co-founder and writer Cathy St Germans and Will Rowley, our wonderful doctor friend.

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Skye and I share a belief that entertaining is theatre. The look of the table sets the scene for the food and allows people to relax and enjoy themselves. It’s nice to think about the mood for the day, and to make a space where things happen slowly – somewhere people can settle into, read a book, take a nap, play cards and, in Cathy’s case, make a Hawaiian lei from the flowers in the garden.

On the lawn we pitched a rustic woodsman’s tent from the Canvas Awning Company; we hauled a piece of plywood out of my garden shed and placed it low on top of some old apple crates. We covered it with a tablecloth from Summerill & Bishop and scattered a selection of rugs and cushions made from recycled plastic bottles from The Unnatural Flooring Company and Weaver Green – totally waterproof. These were mixed with some long, padded sofa cushions from Caravane in Marylebone. 

While we cooked, we kept everyone happy, drinking rhubarb and sweet cicely cordial and grazing on biodynamic radishes, hunks of homemade porridge sourdough bread and creamy butter sprinkled with sea salt, and heirloom tomatoes slipped from their skins and doused in extra virgin olive oil. We took the most beautiful pale-green cabbage leaves and filled them with freekeh and sour cherries, sitting them on a bed of ewe’s curd with a tomato vinaigrette.

In my Gozney wood-fired oven we made focaccia di recco, a type of flatbread topped with stracchino cheese, and added courgettes with their flowers. Then we moved on to langoustines, over which we spooned a shellfish butter. I had to battle with Skye’s perfectionism to let me slide the flatbread around so it could cook evenly near the flames. After a mid-afternoon snooze, we woke up to a rhubarb and strawberry pie and lemon shortbread biscuits filled with lemon cream and mascarpone. The whole thing was utterly relaxed. And the best bit? Everyone helped to clear up!