When I told my taxi driver the address of Kirsty Wark's Glasgow home, he sucked in his breath through his teeth and said: 'Oh, now that road is probably the best in Glasgow. It's where Donald Dewar [the late First Minister of Scotland] used to live. The flats there are vast.'

It turns out that Kirsty Wark lives in one of the only houses on the street that hasn't been made into 'vast' flats. Her entrance hall is so palatial that it has its own enormous fireplace to keep it warm, and each room aches with stature, their ceilings high enough to shrink you back to childhood. However, Kirsty and her husband Alan Clements, creative director of their production company IWC Media, are not the type to accentuate these showy proportions.

This fact is most evident when you enter the kitchen at the back of the house, next to the old butler's pantry. The effect is like walking from a mansion into a country cottage, and it is here I find Kirsty, busy laying the table in anticipation of a relaxed dinner with old friends. Their two children - Caitlin, 15, and James, 14 - are floating about, ordering Chinese food for their separate TV dinner with the kids of Kirsty and Alan's friends. Their dog, Pepper, follows everyone around the room and climbs on Alan occasionally, who is sitting on a sofa drinking Chilean red and watching Kirsty prepare dinner. This room is obviously the hub of the house. 'The kitchen should be one of the most social places in a home,' says Kirsty. 'When we moved here there was a formal dining room. We made it into Alan's study because I can't imagine not wanting to be around everybody when I cook.'

Away from the studio lights, Kirsty's serious, pointed expression mellows into a warm smile. A couple of years ago she was voted third most influential woman in Scotland (the first was JK Rowling), and her reputation for being interested in everyone she meets is evident from our first exchange. Practically her first words to me are a rush of excitement about how she had spent the day interviewing singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright.

However, despite her chatty manner, even while doing a mundane task like laying the table, Kirtsy's presence commands attention. She rarely gets the chance to have dinner parties, and is bemused by the fact that she's been hauled up for 'trial by press' for having 'intellectual salons' at her home and for entertaining the First Minister of Scotland, Jack McConnell, at her Majorcan villa.

'The whole image the press have given me is ridiculous,' she says. 'We really don't have people round much, and when we do it's usually friends and neighbours. In fact, we only get a chance to do that a few times a year, if we are lucky.'

She commutes 900 miles from Glasgow to London and back each week to present Newsnight and Late Review, and any spare time she gets is reserved for her family. However, food is her passion, and although she has a library of political books, she prefers to relax reading a cookbook last thing at night. The urge to test their recipes on friends is pretty strong. When I ask her if she finds cooking for lots of people stressful, she looks at me as if I'm mad. I suppose if you've conducted a landmark interview with Margaret Thatcher and worked with Jeremy Paxman, cooking is a rather tranquil alternative. 'It's not like I find my job stressful at all, it's just that cooking is something completely different. It's incredibly relaxing.' 'You're not so good at the dishes, though,' adds her husband. 'Maybe not,' she concedes.

Kirsty's favourite food is leeks; her worst is tripe. 'The only thing my mother cooked that I wouldn't taste is tripe in milk.' She wrinkles her face in disgust. 'Yuck!' She turns to Alan. 'You've eaten the most ridiculous thing, haven't you? You've eaten a horse's willy in Kurdistan.' He laughs.

Tonight's menu is fairly tame. Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries is Kirsty's current bedtime read and it inspires tonight's main course of leg of Shetland lamb with mint marinade, puree of parsnips and butternut squash, caramelised onions and rosemary roast potatoes. Her guests are bringing the rest of the food. Rob Casement, a garden designer, and Bridget McCann, an actress and voice trainer, provide the pre-dinner margaritas, plus Scottish cheeses, including Isle of Mull Tobermory cheddar, homemade quince paste and tablet. Teacher Fiona MacInnes and her husband Ranald, an architectural historian, have brought the starters - blinis with smoked salmon from Loch Fyne - while Lorna Maloney, an arts administrator, and Paul Maloney, a PhD student, contribute a chocolate roulade with raspberry sorbet. The menu, Kirsty realises, is largely made up of Scottish produce. 'It looks like we were setting out to do a Scottish meal but there happens to be really good food around. I don't want to sound like a political national, but if you have good products, why not use them? It seems ridiculous that the Scottish diet is so much fried food ...'

'Don't be patronising,' interjects Alan. 'It's not patronising, it's demonstrably true,' argues Kirsty. 'It's the worst diet in Western Europe. Horrible. And it's a shame when this country has amazing produce. I don't think that is a controversial thing to say, really.'

Dinner is served around a huge table that was built for the house. 'This huge drawer is for all the oats and flour,' she shows me, proudly. Kirsty and Alan bought the house 10 years ago, and it has only had three previous owners, so there are lots of original features. Even her Shaker-style kitchen was specially designed to fit in with the original kitchen cabinets that were also built with the house.

The courtyard garden is right next to the kitchen, but, unfortunately, it isn't large enough to indulge Kirsty's hankering for home-grown produce and livestock. 'I want some chickens,' she says. I ask if she would feel squeamish about slaughtering them, and Wark replies without hesitation: 'Oh yeah, I would kill a chicken. At least then I'd know where it came from.'

The bi-annual dinner with this particular group of friends can get quite raucous. They have all known each other so long that they talk in a kind of shorthand and exchange jokes loudly across the table. 'Sometimes we turn the music up and dance at the end of meals, but rather badly. Everyone flings their hands over their heads and dances to terrible things like Iggy Pop, Roxy Music and lots of Talking Heads. Then we might go up to the snooker room upstairs.' Tonight there was no dancing but Kirsty puts this down to the kids' disapproving presence (they are all gathered around the TV eating Chinese). 'It can't go on that late because all the kids are around so we've got to be quite restrained.' However, despite Kirsty's views on binge drinking, which she 'regrets', the Arran Malt bottle gets hit very hard by the men, the Pogues are turned up and the margarita- and whisky-fuelled banter continues into the small hours.