So, OFM is 100 issues old. Happy birthday! Over the years I contributed to more than a few of those magazines, usually in the form of interviews with chefs: Rowley Leigh, John Burton Race, Richard Corrigan, Giorgio Locatelli, Jamie Oliver (twice), Fergus Henderson (ditto) ... and on, and on.

When I joined the Observer in 2002, I remember thinking that it would be especially lovely to interview the odd chef because - I might as well be honest - they would give me lunch. Which just goes to show how wrong you can be. The first one I tackled was Rick Stein. I went all the way to Cornwall to see him - and back, a day trip of 14 hours - but did he feed me? He did not. On a tour of his kitchen, he offered me a crust of bread - "Would you like to try some?" - but nothing else. At lunchtime I stood in the rain and ate a crab pasty purchased, enragingly, at one of his many outlets. When I had the temerity to write about this, he called my editor in a rage. I think I'm still banned from Padstein, if not from Padstow, though what exactly remains of the latter once you have removed the former I am not sure.

So, lesson one. For all that their business is food, some chefs - quite a few, in fact - are not as interested in eating, or in hospitality, as you might expect. Happily, the Stein saga served as fair warning to others. Several chefs thereafter made a point of cooking for me, two of them - Rowley Leigh and Anthony Worrall Thompson - in their own homes. I got used to the drill. First, the handshake. Then: "I hear you get mean if you're not fed ... lunch is in the oven." However, some people's idea of lunch is not my idea of lunch. I was also banned from the Waterside Inn at Bray for revealing that Michel Roux Sr had made me wait for him, not in his Michelin-starred restaurant, a plate of fresh lobster before me, but in a tiny wooden gazebo outside, with a plate of rather rubbish prawn mayo sandwiches. Later he joined me there. Believe me when I tell you that it was cosy. We looked like a couple of garden gnomes. Lesson two: don't get ideas above your station. Even if you wear your best frock and your most charming smile, and come armed with the crack weapon that is a Dictaphone, Chef has the right - indeed, he may feel it is his duty - to exclude you from his dining room.

Lesson three. A lot of male chefs believe that you will find them sexy. They play up to this. I liked Giorgio Locatelli, and I love his cooking, but it was pretty funny when he took me into his store cupboard, shoved a truffle in my face, and shouted something in full-throttle Italian-accented English about how it smelled like the intestines of a pig on heat. Of course the whole testosterone thing goes hand in hand with their enormous egos. Who has the biggest ego in food? Obviously I can't be scientific about this, but in my experience Raymond Blanc has a very healthy sense of the importance of his place in the world. When I interviewed him at Le Manoir Aux Quat' Saisons, he was an hour late. Fair enough, though an apology, even if insincere, would have been nice. Then he insisted we sit outside in the cold and damp. When I started shivering and scratching - it was dusk, and the midges were going wild - he affected not to notice. He kept rushing off to have his picture taken with guests. Whether these guests actually wanted a picture of him - whether they'd even spotted him in the gloaming given that they lacked the benefit of night-vision goggles - is a moot point. His monologues - lectures on the awfulness of British food, mostly - were immensely long and impossible to interrupt. I truly loathed the time I spent with him, though the rum baba he gave me was good.

And so to lesson four. There are those chefs who are chefs, and chefs alone, and then there are those who are content to think of themselves as cooks, too - or who at least don't fly off the handle should you have the temerity to use such a word, or to ask them for a good recipe for toad-in-the-hole. The latter are the nicer, because less status-conscious and more hospitable. They love cooking rather than the control freakery and fame that comes with Michelin stars.

I'm trying to think of the most delicious thing a chef has made for me in the seven years since I've been writing about them. I've had so many elaborate and luxurious dishes, from truffle ravioli with bone marrow and rabbit brains at El Bulli to omelette Arnold Bennett at the Savoy Grill. But the loveliest was the most simple. Rowley Leigh made me spaghetti cacio e pepe, which is pasta that has been briefly blanched then cooked in a frying pan like risotto, plus a ton of pecorino and black pepper. I dream of it still. It was made if not with love, then with a crucial sense of greed on his part. I watched the expression on his face as he cooked it, and I knew, even as the water boiled, how good it would be.