The Pesto You’ll Use on Everything and More Kitchen Tips for Doing a Lot With a Little

THE SPACE that the novelist Charlotte Mendelson cooks in these days isn’t her ideal. That was her last kitchen. Her current one, in Tufnell Park, London, is what she refers to as her “post-divorce kitchen.” At the moment, she shares it with her vegan partner and her daughter, who is home from university and refuses to eat anything with even a trace of chile.

A gardener so passionate she wrote a memoir about it (“Rhapsody in Green”), Ms. Mendelson has both an allotment plot a 40-minute walk from home and a make-do micro-garden on her roof terrace. Little potted things crowd even the windowsill by her desk, where she is working on her sixth novel and planning the U.S. launch of her much-lauded last, “The Exhibitionist” (St. Martin’s Press, July 4). She took a break, though, to talk about what she’s currently cooking and growing. Right now, she said, “it’s all about my red Russian kale.”