Rachel Roddy's recipe for chicken with rosemary, tomatoes and olives | A kitchen in Rome

The scent of rosemary stirs childhood memories and inspires this rustic dish of hunter's chicken cooked in the style of the southern Roman countryside

I once saw a woman pull a plant from a bed, then put it in her handbag. I must have been about eight, and visiting a garden - probably one padding a National Trust house. Either my brother or sister had fallen over, because we were all crouched on the gravel, and Mum was examining a knee. While she pulled things out of her bag on one side of a flowerbed, so did a much older woman on the other side. Namely, a small trowel, which she used to dig up a plant and its wispy roots, and a plastic bag to receive the plant, which she then dropped into her open handbag. Now, I probably wouldn't remember anything about this particular incident were it not for what happened next. As the woman snapped her handbag shut, she looked up, and straight at me. She held my eyes for a few seconds before breaking into a small smile that was both sheepish and victorious. I found myself smiling back and, as I did so, I understood that she was stealing the plant and that now I was her accomplice! After all, I, too, had a handful of leaves and gravel in my pocket.

It is human nature, I know, that of the billions of memories stored and indexed in our frontal lobes, it is the ones with high emotion that repeat on us most often. In this case, it is both guilt and excitement at having witnessed a garden crime, and also admiration at how brazen it all was, to bring a trowel and a bag, and to dig in broad daylight. Later, we would see the same woman in the coffee shop eating coffee cake, her bag hanging on the chair just metres from a National Trust volunteer.