Little children don’t like green bits in their food and rarely care for sauces with mustard or hard-boiled egg. Many don’t like prawns or mushrooms. Or the strong flavour of smoked haddock. All these ingredients often find their way into my fish pies but this one is plain and simple, just carefully boned white fish,…

The colour of this soup is so dramatic it’s almost worth making it just for its looks. The texture, too, is beguiling. Fluffy, yet creamy, light and easy to digest, satisfying too, as if glides over your tongue leaving a delicious trail of sweet sour beetroot. The sourness comes from cooking apples and fresh lime…

I love mint and it always gives me a frisson of pleasure when I see the first leaves curling out of my enduring mint patch. I picked enough of the pink-flushed early little leaves to make salsa verde and they sang through assertive flat leaf parsley, anchovy, capers and garlic, in this versatile mayo-style dark…

Greek holiday blues always leave me craving spinach dal with squashy grilled tomatoes and crusty lamb chops. It’s a great combination of creamy, spicy dal, slippery, sweet tomatoes and juicy, crusty lamb. Leftover dal is easily turned into delicious soup; I like it with scoops of mango chutney as you can see in this photo….

One of my greatest gastronomic experiences was a meal at Georges Blanc’s restaurant at Vonnas near Bourg en Bresse. While the entire meal was perfection, these little pancakes stole the show. They always remind me of ice cream in wafers because the base forms a crusty surface and the potato ‘filling’ puffs but remains smaller…