I remember a time at work when we had a problem.

It was a big problem, involving a huge amount of data. I sat down with the resident data guru, and she tried to explain what the matter was by dancing around between two spreadsheets that spanned a couple of very large monitors, flitting from row to row, column to column in a way that was both easy and natural to her. She had this data under total control. She could see patterns and connections in it, trends and meaning in the vast sea of numbers.

I, however, could not.

I sat and nodded a lot, trying not to look lost at sea, which is exactly where I was, obviously.

I went away no closer to solving that particular problem, and it took a very different approach to eventually get anywhere.

Later, I told somebody else who had a similar mastery of that particular set of data about the issue. He got  up and headed for the printer, and came back with a big piece of A3 paper and a pack of coloured pens. He started to draw big circles, and connected them all up as he talked about the same things that my other colleague had done, but this time, it all connected. The picture grew, and I had something I could see and feel, something that helped me to relate to The Problem, and ultimately to see what I needed to do to solve it.

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I catch the train into Leeds every morning, and instead of rushing straight to the office, I take a slight detour through some of Leeds’ alleys and yards, down onto The Calls and back up to work through the Markets.

I see the same faces every morning, passing the same people in the same places, our independent routines apparently choreographed.

I do this in the name of exercise (those 10,000 steps aren’t going to step themselves, are they?), but really, I just like a bit of a wander in the morning, ten minutes or so to collect my thoughts and listen to a bit of music before whatever-the-hell is going to break loose at work actually breaks loose.

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It’s the first day of the year that I’ve had to rid the car windscreen of ice. The temperature has plummeted in the last few days, and this morning, I dropped a big piece of beef brisket into a slow cooker to compensate.

There are a couple of things to deal with yet, the last hangovers of the early autumn, a few things that cling to summer but don’t feel quite so out-of-place in the cold.

One is this salad of roasted beetroot, goat’s cheese and pine nuts, a bowl full of big, robust flavours that neatly straddle the seasons.

Beetroot are good at the moment, but they won’t be around for long. The big bunches on the market stalls are the last of the season, but they keep well in the fridge as long as you chop the leaves off and use them first.

For this salad, the unpeeled-but-scrubbed beetroot is roasted, in a tray covered tightly with aluminum foil, a few sprigs of thyme, an orange, quartered but unpeeled, a few cloves of garlic, a good drizzle of olive oil and slightly too much salt and pepper for company. Use about half a kilo of beetroot, but more won’t hurt – beetroot roasted in foil with some punchy flavours is a good thing to have around in the fridge, and can make for a good mid-week lunch with some bread, so it’s worth making double here.

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There’s a paragraph in the introduction to Nikkei Cuisine: Japanese Food the South American Way in which Luiz Hara discusses The ‘F’ Word … fusion.

Fusion food often gets a bad press, the result of too many car-crash combinations of flavours. If it can be done, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it should be done, but many chefs haven’t heeded this simple maxim in the past and the results have been, well, disastrous.

Hara’s hesitation and desire to bring this issue up right at the start is understandable, for this is a book of fusion food – it sits neatly in that place where two distinct culinary traditions collide – but it has a clear edge in that the Nikkei tradition of cooking is so well-developed and established that it’s moved far the latest brain wave from some upstart chef in a new hipster noodle type place somewhere in Manchester. Nikkei is no mere fad.

‘Nikkei’ is the name given to the food cooked by Japanese people as they migrate around the world. A good number of Japanese settled in South America from about 1872 onwards, and they found a food tradition very different to the washoku, or traditional Japanese, cuisine they’d left behind. Importing Japanese ingredients, many of which are pretty esoteric and difficult to get hold of in a modern Western city, let alone Victorian era South America, was hard, so people had to improvise, using whatever was available to them. This led to a gradual blending of styles and techniques, with Japanese flavours sneaking into South American dishes, and South American ingredients deployed as substitutes for the ‘proper’ Japanese ones.

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