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,…

This is a very good recipe to remember when you are short on sausages but have several to feed. Only seven went into this feast for four but they were big, meaty sausages with a low fat content. I browned them first, cut them into bite-size chunks, adding them towards the end of making a…

In the eighties, when hotel chefs still reigned as top dogs, before rising stars like Raymond Blanc and Marco Pierre White stole a march with their glamorous good looks, the ultimate treat for restaurant critics like me was lunch with the chef in his office overlooking the worker slaves in the kitchen. On one such…

What a glorious upturn in the weather, putting us all in the mood for salads rather than soup. I’m always in the mood for soup, usually following the seasons, a useful way of eating cheaply. Right now, in our strange times, I’m having a field day scrounging round our diminishing supplies for new ideas. A…

This is a painter’s palette of colours and flavours, a forgiving soup with each mouthful slightly different. Cous cous thickens the broth, in turn thick with carrot, red onion, leeks, spinach and tomato, the whole flavoured with garlic, ginger and chilli. It gets its name because it’s really fridge clear out soup, the one of…

In these weird times, it was two wrinkled parsnips withering at the bottom of the fridge that inspired this recipe, a make-do but really delicious version of Jane Grigson’s Curried Parsnip Soup (also in my recipe index). It is very lightly curried using (stale) curry powder, adding double the weight of potato to parsnip, an…

This almost tastes like liquid cauli cheese but it’s a soft, bumpy bowlful. I am low on milk and have no cream, so creaminess comes only from cheese, a particularly sharp, aged Cheddar, a splash of milk and the last piece of soft goat cheese. Salt and lemon juice point up the flavours and the…