Here’s a dish to wake up your taste buds. Full of vim and vigour, crunch and slippery noodles, this salad is an unexpected mix of cucumber and fennel with a sharp, zingy dressing. A hint of sweetness comes from using Thai chilli sauce rather than raw chilli. It gives the pale green and white ingredients…

This is a quick, uncomplicated way of turning a few asparagus spears into little quiche-style tarts. I wish I could share the smell of them baking and you could hear the flaky crunch as my knife cuts through the pastry. Please make them. Serves 6Prep: 15 minCook: 20 min 320g puff pastry 100g/8 British asparagus…

Cheese or spinach, or both? That was the dilemma in the queue for breakfast pies at the favourite Greek bakery on Limnos a couple of summers ago. Filo coils – the favourite – are a devil to reproduce but these little round pies using ready rolled puff pastry are a doddle. Turn them into a…

     This lovely dish could be described as aubergine lasagne but is lighter and less complicated than the real McCoy. Recipes vary from cook to cook but it’s always precooked aubergine slices layered up with tomato, mozzarella and basil, the top lavishly covered with grated Parmesan that cooks to a moreish crisp. It’s a dish…

I’m on the point of reviving my miniscule but surprisingly productive front garden vegetable plot. Two ignored survivors from last year are spinach and chard, so a handful of front garden spinach went into these lamb meatballs. Bright and bouncy, the meatballs were poached in orange zest-flavoured chicken stock then added to orange juice-flavoured tomato…

Lamb boulangere, when a joint of lamb is cooked over a herby gratin of potatoes, is a favourite in my family. This is the potato part, useful when you want pommes Dauphinoise but don’t have any cream. Thinly sliced potatoes are sandwiched with two layers of onion, thyme, bay and garlic, all chopped up fine….

In the days when I shared an allotment with my son and his family, we planted a large raised bed of chard and two of spinach. We loved both plants and what we grew supplied our greedy needs. For the past couple of years, The Barrister and I have attempted an urban plot (An Urban…

One of my regular correspondents, dating back to the early days of my Dinner Tonight column in The Times, sent me his favourite soup; ‘I just love it because it is so easy’. He doesn’t claim originality – ‘…there are lots on the web of the same name all very similar’. I had to tweak…

Puttanesca is a perfectly balanced tomato sauce, spicy and creamy, mellow yet intense, with fleshy nuggets of chewy black olive. It can be made with fresh or canned tomatoes, this is a lockdown version made with chopped canned tomatoes. In an ideal world do not use canned tomatoes flavoured with herbs; just plain. Puttanesca is…

I usually add breadcrumbs soaked in milk or cream to meatballs to soften the mixture. In these strange times, when breadcrumbs are a luxury, I’m using cous cous instead. It’s an old trick that results in light and succulent meatballs, these ones smaller than usual hence the Italian name. The mix is lemon zest, thyme,…