Fougasse is a bread with a job to do, or at least it used to have one. Before ovens had dials, a baker heating a wood-fired oven needed some way of knowing when the heat was right for the day’s loaves. The answer was to flatten a piece of dough and put it in first. It baked fast, it told you what you needed to know, and then you ate it. The French still say il ne faut pas brûler la fougasse, do not burn the fougasse, which is the sort of phrase that only survives because it was once said often.

It goes back a good deal further than Provence. The Romans had panis focacius, a flatbread baked on the hearth or in the ashes of the fire, from focus, the Latin for hearth. From it came a whole family of breads spread across southern Europe and beyond: focaccia in Italy, hogaza in Spain, fogassa in Catalonia, pogača through the Balkans, pogácsa in Hungary, fouace in other parts of France, and fougasse in the south. They are cousins rather than copies. Focaccia stays soft and deep and oily in its tin. Fougasse is stretched thin and cut open, and those cuts are the whole point, since every one of them makes another edge to go crisp. You get far more crust than crumb, which is why it tears apart so well and why it is almost impossible to leave alone on the table.

Provence made it theirs with what grew there: olives, anchovies, herbs, lardons, sometimes cheese. There are sweet versions too, enriched with orange flower water for Christmas. Sun-dried tomato isn’t traditional, but it works beautifully here: salty, concentrated and intensely savoury, it gives the bread flavour all the way through rather than just on the surface. If there is enough oil left in the jar it is worth brushing over the loaf as it comes out of the oven, though olive oil does the job just as well.

The shaping is where people lose their nerve. The cuts are not decoration. They let the heat through so the bread bakes fast and evenly, which is what made it useful as an oven test, and they open up all that extra edge to go crisp. They need to be few, bold and cut right through to the parchment, and then opened much wider than looks sensible, because the dough closes back up as it proves and again in the oven. Timid slashes give you a solid loaf with some decorative scratches on top. Open them properly and you get the thing you actually want, all edge and air and crackle.

Makes 1 large fougasse, about 30cm long

Prep 25 minutes, plus 1 hour 30 minutes rising

Bake 20 minutes

Ingredients

• 550g strong white bread flour

• 350g water, at room temperature

• 7g instant yeast

• 10g fine salt

• 25ml olive oil, plus extra for brushing

• 4 tbsp jarred sun-dried tomatoes, drained and finely chopped, oil reserved

• 2 tbsp chopped fresh oregano

• Semolina or flour, for dusting

• Flaky sea salt, to finish

Method

1. Mix the flour, yeast and salt in a large bowl. Add the water slowly, mixing as you go, then the olive oil. Knead for around 8 minutes, until smooth and elastic.

2. Add the sun-dried tomatoes and oregano and mix briefly, just until they are evenly distributed through the dough.

3. Cover the bowl with a damp tea towel or cling film and leave to rise for 1 hour, until roughly doubled and airy.

4. Tip onto a lightly floured surface and gently stretch into an oval or triangle on a sheet of parchment, about 30cm by 20cm and 1.5 to 2cm thick. Keeping it on the thinner side gives cleaner cuts.

5. Make one long central slash and two or three bold diagonal cuts down each side, slicing right through to the parchment. Keep the cuts few and large rather than many and fine.

6. Open each cut into a proper hole, pulling the dough firmly apart by 2 to 3cm, far wider than looks natural, as they always shrink back.

7. Cover loosely with oiled cling film and prove for 30 minutes, until slightly puffed.

8. Meanwhile, heat the oven to 210°C fan.

9. Just before baking, re-open any holes that have closed up during proving.

10. Bake for 18 to 20 minutes, until deep golden and crisp. Brush with a little more olive oil or the reserved tomato oil as it comes out of the oven and scatter with flaky sea salt. Serve warm or cooled.

There is a particular satisfaction to walking past an elder in August and finding the whole head tipped right over, hanging heavy under its own weight, the berries gone deep and dark, that near black they turn only once properly ripe. Gone are those weeks of green heads giving nothing away, the berries small and hard and taking their time, a world away from all that white lace back in June. This year I had half given up on them. The heat sat too heavy and too long, and the fruit seemed to stay small and stubborn on the branch, refusing to turn. Then one downpour, hard and sudden after weeks of dry, and within days the whole hedge seemed to have tipped from green to black overnight.

Elder fruit gets less attention from everyday cooks than elderflower does, perhaps because there is no obvious go-to recipe for it, no lingering tradition the way cordial exists for the flowers.

Elderberries are generous enough on the tree, a good patch can give you a few kilos, but of course they are not generous the way blackberries are. You do not strip the berries one by one off the branch, grazing as you walk the way you might with blackberries. You take the whole heads, and only later, sat at the kitchen table, do you strip the berries off the stems, so what ends up in the bowl is a good deal lighter than what came home in the bag.

Cooked down with sugar and lemon they turn almost inky: sharp, earthy, faintly resinous, more intense and less sweet than a supermarket blackberry, sweetness there but harder won. That flavour needs something plain and rich to lean against, which is where the custard comes in. Bay may seem like an unusual ingredient to put into a sweet recipe, but warming it through in cream is an old trick in English baking, and it does something the usual vanilla pod cannot: warmth without sweetness, faintly of the woods, a little green and aromatic. Against the elderberry it works as balance rather than as a flavour in its own right, most people unable to name what it is they are tasting.

A note on the picking, because this one matters: take the berries only when they are properly dark and the whole cluster has tipped over from its own weight and is hanging down. Green berries, along with the stems and leaves, carry high levels of compounds that release cyanide, and no amount of cooking makes those parts safe, which is why they get stripped out and binned rather than simmered down with everything else. Ripe berries carry much lower levels of the same compounds, mostly concentrated in the seeds, but cooking is still what makes them safe to eat, so the jam here wants its full time at a steady simmer, not just until the berries look soft and cooked, since they will look ready well before those compounds have actually broken down.

Elder has a vague lookalike worth knowing, though not one you would easily confuse it with once you look properly: common dogwood carries small black berries at roughly the same time of year, but its leaves are simple ovals with smooth edges, while elder’s are compound, five to seven toothed leaflets running along a stem. As with any wild food, it is important to pick away from busy roads, where the berries will have taken on pollution, and to pick from higher up rather than the low growth right beside the path, since that is exactly dog height.

Ingredients

For the pastry

• 125g cold butter, cubed

• 90g icing sugar, sifted

• 220g plain flour

• A pinch of salt

• 1 egg

• 1 extra egg, whisked, for sealing

For the bay custard

• 9 egg yolks

• 110g caster sugar

• 500ml double cream

• 3 fresh bay leaves

For the elderberry jam

• Around 10 to 15 heads of elderberries to make around 300g of berries when destemmed

• 150g preserving sugar

• Juice of 1 lemon

Method

1. Rub the butter into the flour until the mixture looks sandy. Add the icing sugar and salt, then the egg, and bring it together into a dough. Shape it into a disc, wrap it, and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

2. Warm the cream with the bay leaves. Whisk the yolks and caster sugar until pale, then pour the warm cream over the yolks, whisking as you go. Set aside to infuse.

3. Heat the oven to 170°C fan. Grease a 25cm tart tin and line the base with parchment. Roll out the pastry, lift it into the tin and press it into the corners, trim the edges and prick the base with a fork. Blind bake with parchment and beans for 20 minutes. Remove the beans and parchment and return it to the oven for a further 10 minutes, until the base is dry and lightly golden. Brush the base and sides with the whisked egg and give it a final 5 minutes to set the seal.

4. Strain the custard through a sieve into the pastry case. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, until the centre still has a gentle wobble. Cool the tart fully in the tin, then refrigerate until set.

5. For the jam, put the elderberries, preserving sugar and lemon juice into a saucepan. Cook gently for 20 to 25 minutes, stirring often, until thickened. Test a spoonful on a chilled plate: it is ready when it wrinkles as you push it. Cool to room temperature.

6. Spread the jam over the chilled custard and chill again before serving.

Notes

Freezing the heads overnight makes stripping the berries far easier. The traditional method is to run a fork down the stem, but frozen berries twist clean off without squashing, and the whole job takes a fraction of the time.

The egg wash on the blind-baked base is worth doing properly. You have to prick the pastry to stop it shrinking, and brushing beaten egg over the base for the last five minutes seals those holes so the custard cannot seep through.

Raspberries hang on into the start of autumn if the summer’s been kind, and this is the pie that makes the most of them, letting the fruit bleed a little jammy juice into hot pastry and custard as it bakes. It borrows its shape from a family of Greek filo pies, pleated and coiled into a rose before custard is poured over and the whole thing goes back into the oven, the same trick behind the crinkle pies that did the rounds online last year. The folding technique has its own name in Greek, soufra, an informal word for a ruffle, coming from Medieval Greek. The pies it makes go by galatopita or galaktoboureko depending on the region and whether syrup is involved as well as custard. Portokalopita, the more famous orange and yogurt cake made from torn, dried filo, is a cousin rather than a sibling. Its custard is mixed straight into the batter rather than poured over as its own layer, and the whole cake is soaked in syrup once it’s out of the oven, but it’s one of my favourite things to bake and eat, and deserves its own place on this page one day. This version uses custard alone, no syrup, and swaps the usual walnuts or cinnamon for lemon and raspberry.

Work quickly once the filo packet is open. It dries out fast and turns brittle rather than crisp, so keep the sheets you’re not using under a damp tea towel while you go. Wrap whatever’s left over tightly in cling film and then foil; it’ll keep in the fridge for a few days, or in the freezer for another spanakopita or a batch of baklava. A light dusting of semolina between the folds does more than you’d think: it keeps a barrier between pastry and custard so the base stays crisp instead of turning soggy underneath.

The custard is what turns this from a pastry into a pudding. Poured over the hot pastry straight from the oven, it seeps down through the folds instead of sitting on top, so every slice comes with pockets of set custard next to crisp, buttery ridges. Serve it warm with a spoonful of crème fraîche or Greek yoghurt if you want the contrast of cool against hot, or let it cool fully and it slices more cleanly, more like a tart than a pie. Either way, a dusting of icing sugar just before serving is the last touch.

Raspberries can be swapped for cherries earlier in the season, or blackberries as it turns towards autumn, or really any other berries you have to hand. Orange zest stands in well for lemon if you want something rounder. However you fill it, the shape does the work: coiled, golden, and coming out unique every time you make it.

Serves 8. Ready in about 1 hour 25.

Ingredients

For the pastry

• 8 to 10 sheets filo pastry

• 150g unsalted butter, melted

• semolina, for dusting

• 300g raspberries

• 50g golden caster sugar

• zest of 2 lemons

For the custard

• 3 large eggs

• 200ml whole milk

• 150ml double cream

• 90g golden caster sugar

• zest of 1 lemon

• juice of ½ lemon

• ¾ tsp vanilla extract or paste

• pinch of salt

To finish

• icing sugar, for dusting

• extra raspberries or lemon zest, optional

Method

1. Heat the oven to 180°C fan, and grease and line a 23cm round tin with baking paper. Lay a sheet of filo on the counter and brush it lightly with melted butter, then scatter with a little lemon zest, a pinch of sugar, and a dusting of semolina. Dot a few raspberries along it, spaced so they’ll still show once folded.

2. Working from a short edge, gather the sheet into a loose accordion, letting the raspberries sit inside the folds, and coil it into the centre of the tin. Repeat with the rest of the filo and raspberries, winding each new strip around the last until the tin is full and the whole thing looks like a rose. Brush the top generously with the remaining butter and bake for 25 minutes, until golden and crisp.

3. While it bakes, whisk together the eggs, milk, cream, sugar, lemon zest and juice, vanilla, and salt until smooth. The lemon juice will make it look slightly curdled at this stage, but that’s just the acid working on the fat; once it’s poured over the hot pastry and baked, the eggs bring it back together and none of it shows in the finished custard.

4. Pour the custard over the spiral as soon as it comes out of the oven, letting it run down into the folds, then return the tin to the oven for a further 30 to 35 minutes, until the custard is set and the top is puffed and golden. If it’s colouring too fast, lay a sheet of foil loosely over the top for the last ten minutes.

5. Let the pie cool in the tin for fifteen minutes before lifting out and dusting with icing sugar. It’s good warm, with the custard still soft, or left to cool completely for a cleaner slice; either way, a spoonful of crème fraîche or Greek yoghurt alongside does it no harm.

For some reason, I reach for fregola most in the summer, pulling it from the back of the cupboard where it sits behind a multitude of other grains, pulses and pasta shapes, not seeing the light of day until summer comes around. It’s a Sardinian pasta, small pearls of toasted semolina, closer in spirit to a grain than to anything you’d twirl on a fork. Toastiness is what gives it its character but it also holds its shape well through the tossing, carrying a salad rather than sinking into it the way regular pasta might. Giant couscous, pearl couscous or orzo will all step in if fregola isn’t to be found, though you lose a little of that particular character. The fregola wants to come down from hot to somewhere around room temperature, maybe just a touch warm, before it all goes together: warm enough that it takes the clementine and white balsamic properly, but not so hot that it wilts the watercress or melts the cheese as everything gets tossed.

Choose ripe but firm apricots, since they need to be robust enough to hold up to being tossed through the other ingredients rather than just sitting on top. Watercress brings the green and a peppery bite that stands up to both the sweetness of the fruit and the richness of the cheese; rocket does much the same job if that’s what’s in the fridge. Soft goat’s cheese benefits from a short stint in the freezer, about twenty minutes, before it goes into the salad. Straight from the fridge it’s too soft to crumble cleanly and ends up in a mess rather than pieces; frozen lightly, it breaks into clean pieces that sit in the salad rather than disappearing into it and defrosts in the time it takes to make the salad. I dress it in two stages: most of the cheese, mint and dressing get tossed in a bowl with the watercress, apricots and fregola, then it’s plated and finished with the last of the dressing, a scattering of pistachios and the reserved bits of cheese and mint on top, so every plate gets a proper share of both rather than whatever’s left at the bottom of the bowl.

Taste the dressing before it goes anywhere near the salad: it should be sharp enough to cut through the apricots and the cheese, and if it tastes flat, it usually just wants a little more balsamic or another pinch of salt. White balsamic isn’t always easy to find in a regular supermarket, and it’s worth seeking out here since regular dark balsamic will stain the whole salad; if you’re stuck, white wine vinegar with a small pinch of sugar gets you close enough. Pistachios are entirely optional but earn their place for the colour and the crunch against all that softness; toast them briefly first if you want more from them. If you fancy something deeper and jammier from the apricots, give them a couple of minutes cut-side down in a hot pan before they go into the salad.

This one flexes easily as the summer goes on. Peaches or nectarines will take the place of apricots later in the season, feta gives a saltier, firmer crumble than goat’s cheese if that’s what you have, and a torn ball of burrata makes the whole thing feel more substantial and meaty. Add cold roast chicken or a few slices of prosciutto if you want it to stretch further.

Serves 2 as a light main, or 4 as a side.

Ready in about 25 minutes.

Ingredients

For the salad:

• 120g fregola

• 500ml vegetable stock or water

• 4 ripe but firm apricots, halved and stoned

• 100g soft goat’s cheese

• 60g watercress

• 2 tbsp fresh mint, chopped

• 2 tbsp pistachios, chopped (optional)

For the dressing:

• 3 tbsp olive oil

• Juice and zest of 2 clementines

• 2 tbsp white balsamic vinegar

• Salt and black pepper

Method

1. Start with the goat’s cheese: put it in the freezer for about twenty minutes so it firms up enough to crumble cleanly, then get on with everything else while it sits.

2. Put the fregola in a pan with the stock or water, bring it to a simmer, cover and cook for about 10 minutes, until tender with a little bite still left in it. Drain and fluff it with a fork and leave it to cool slightly, just enough that it won’t melt the cheese later.

3. While that’s happening, make the dressing: whisk the olive oil with the white balsamic and the clementine juice and zest, season with a good pinch of salt and pepper, then taste. It should be sharp enough to cut through the sweetness of the apricots and the richness of the cheese.

4. Halve and stone the apricots, then slice each half into three or four segments. Toss the warm fregola with the watercress, mint, apricots, most of the crumbled goat’s cheese and most of the dressing. Spoon over what’s left of the dressing, crumble the remaining cheese on top, scatter with pistachios if you’re using them, and serve while the fregola still has some warmth in it.

There’s a point in blackberry season, usually a week or two after the hedgerows first turn, when there are enough good ones for baking, not just eaten by the handful. This traybake wants them firm rather than fully ripened and soft, so they hold their shape once pressed into the batter instead of collapsing and bleeding colour into the crumb around them. Pat them properly dry first. Any moisture left on the skins stops a seal forming against the sponge and you end up with pale, wet patches once it’s baked.

Ground almonds make up close to forty per cent of the flour here, about as high as it can go before the crumb turns greasy and too fragile to hold the fruit. It’s what gives the sponge its weight and body, dense enough to hold the berries. Press the berries onto the surface of the batter rather than folding them through: they sink in a little as the cake rises, which is what leaves them suspended through the crumb instead of sitting on top and scorching.

Lemon curd goes into the buttercream itself first, so the whole thing carries a citrus tang, then again on the surface, dotted on and dragged through with a knife in loose swirls. Stop as soon as the streaks show; work it any further and you lose the marbling and end up with one flat yellow. The sponge and buttercream both keep well made a day or two ahead, but leave the final swirl and the last of the blackberries until just before serving, or the fresh fruit starts to weep.

Raspberries or blueberries will both stand in if that’s what you’ve got. Raspberries break down more in the oven and want a light dusting of flour first to stop them turning to a smear, blueberries hold their shape closer to blackberries with a milder flavour. A strong coffee or a pot of Earl Grey cuts through the sweetness well. Makes twelve generous squares, or up to twenty-four smaller ones.

Ingredients

For the sponge

• 210g unsalted butter, softened

• 120ml mild oil (sunflower or light olive)

• 340g caster sugar

• 6 large eggs

• 250g plain flour

• 160g ground almonds

• 10g baking powder

• 4g fine salt

• 75g whole milk

• zest of 2 lemons

• 2 tsp vanilla extract

• 200g blackberries, whole, patted dry

For the buttercream

• 350g unsalted butter, softened

• 660g icing sugar

• 40g lemon juice

• 1 tsp vanilla extract

• 200g lemon curd

For the topping

• 100g blackberries, halved

• 3 tbsp lemon curd

Method

1. Heat the oven to 170°C fan and butter a 20x30cm tin at least 5cm deep, then line it with baking paper.

2. Beat the softened butter, oil and caster sugar together until pale and light, three to four minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well between each; if the mixture looks like it’s splitting, add a spoonful of the flour to bring it back. Beat in the lemon zest and vanilla.

3. Fold in the flour, ground almonds, baking powder and salt until just combined, then loosen with the milk to a thick dropping consistency, thick enough to hold a berry exactly where you put it.

4. Scrape the batter into the tin and level it off. Press the blackberries into the surface rather than folding them through the batter, some pushed further down and some left on the surface. They’ll sink in a little more as the cake rises, which is what leaves them suspended through the crumb rather than sitting on top.

5. Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, until risen, dark golden and a skewer through the centre comes out clean. Tent loosely with foil if the top is colouring before the middle sets. Cool in the tin for fifteen minutes, then onto a rack and leave to cool completely before icing.

6. For the buttercream, beat the butter alone until very pale, around 2-3 minutes. Sift in the icing sugar in two or three batches, beating well and scraping down the bowl between each, then mix in vanilla and lemon curd until light and spreadable.

7. Spread the buttercream generously over the cooled cake, swooshing it up into peaks rather than smoothing it flat. Just before serving, dot the remaining lemon curd over the top in a few places and drag a knife through in loose swirls, stopping as soon as the streaks show rather than working it in fully. Scatter over the halved blackberries and cut into twelve squares.

Apricots only turn properly ripe for a short stretch in August, yielding gently to the touch and smelling sweetly perfumed, ready to soften into something jammy the moment they meet heat. Following on from the tomato galette and the roasted strawberry pastries, by now, I’ve more or less accepted that in this heat, a block of puff pastry is one of my favourite ways to venture back into the kitchen: quick, uncomplicated, and somehow always glorious for so little effort. There are worse habits to fall into.

The appeal is how little any of these bakes actually ask of you. No tin, no lining, no blind baking, just a sheet of pastry rolled or cut roughly to shape and folded around whatever fruit or vegetable is having its moment. The strawberry pastries wanted roasted fruit and a chilled crème pâtissière, cool and set just enough to hold its shape against the fruit. The tomato galette leaned on salted, well-drained tomatoes and thick ricotta to keep the base from turning soggy. This one is really its sweet cousin: a thin layer of almond frangipane goes under the fruit and does the same job as that ricotta, catching the juices as they run so the base stays crisp rather than soggy.

The honey goes on warm at the end, once the galette is out of the oven, so it soaks into the hot pastry slightly rather than just sitting on top. It’s a small thing but it makes a real difference, much like a ball of burrata torn open on the tomato galette, adding an extra element to a beautiful dish. Little finishing touches like this are usually where a bake goes from good to properly worth making again.

Serves 6 to 8. Ready in about an hour.

Ingredients

For the galette

• 500g block of all-butter puff pastry

• 50g softened unsalted butter

• 50g golden caster sugar, plus 1 tbsp for the apricots

• 50g ground almonds

• 2 large eggs (1 for the frangipane, 1 for glazing)

• ½ tsp vanilla paste

• 500g ripe apricots (about 8 to 10), stoned and sliced into eighths

• 2 tbsp demerara sugar

For the honey and thyme drizzle

• 3 tbsp (about 60g) runny honey, English if you can get it

• 4 thyme sprigs, leaves picked

• Greek yoghurt or ice cream, to serve

Method

1. Heat the oven to 200°C fan. If you can, slide a flat baking tray or a perforated pizza tray in to heat up: a hot tray helps crisp the base, though it will still work without one.

2. Beat the softened butter with the 50g of caster sugar until pale and creamy.

3. Beat one egg into the butter along with the vanilla, then fold in the ground almonds to a soft, spreadable paste. Beat the second egg in a small bowl and set it aside for glazing.

4. Roll the puff pastry out on a lightly floured surface to a rough circle about 3 to 4mm thick. Keep the edges rustic or trim to a neater round. Spread the frangipane thinly over it, leaving a 3 to 4cm border clear all the way round.

5. Arrange the apricots over the frangipane, cut-side up, nestling them close in a single layer in concentric circles, and scatter with the 1 tbsp of caster sugar.

6. Fold the border up and over the edge of the fruit, pleating as you go, then brush the folded pastry with the second beaten egg and sprinkle with the demerara.

7. Slide the galette, still on its parchment, onto the hot tray and bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until the pastry is deep golden and crisp underneath and the frangipane is set.

8. While it bakes, warm the honey gently with the thyme until fragrant, then take it off the heat and leave to steep for 10 minutes.

9. Drizzle the warm honey over the galette. Serve warm or at room temperature, with yoghurt, crème fraîche or ice cream.

Courgette flowers appear so briefly each summer that coming across them feels like a small stroke of luck, on a market stall, at a good greengrocer, occasionally on a menu you weren’t expecting. Grow your own courgettes and you’ll get a proper flush of them for a week or two. Female flowers grow with a baby courgette already forming behind them, the courgette is essentially the flower’s stem, so picking the flower means you won’t get a courgette from it later. Most courgette plants are so prolific you’ll have more than you can get through anyway, so sacrificing a few for a dish this good is well worth it. They’re delicate things and go brown and limp within a few days, so a quickish turnaround is wise, though ordering online works well too, they generally arrive in good shape. The season for them is fleeting because the plants only flower for a short window before the flowers die back and the full sized courgettes take over, so that’s the only time anyone has them to sell. Prise the petals open with care, they tear if you rush, then work the stamen loose at its base with one finger until it clicks free, it can taste bitter if left in, and check inside for anything that’s crawled in to escape the heat.

The classic version, and the one I’m making here, is goats cheese and ricotta, drizzled with honey once fried. There’s also a Roman version, plainer and less tightly filled, with mozzarella and anchovy tucked inside rather than a soft cheese, worth trying if you want something simpler. Mine goes soft and rich: ricotta, goats cheese and a little dolcelatte, lifted with lemon zest, chilli and toasted pine nuts, spooned or piped in and the petals pinched shut. Dipped in a batter made with ice cold sparkling water and fried until they puff and crackle, then finished with a thread of honey, they make a beautiful summer starter. On a restaurant menu they’ll often cost eight to twelve pounds for a single flower, so if you can get hold of them for a couple of pounds or so each, it’s well worth making your own, though I’ll admit, if I see them on a menu, I still always order them.

Serves 4 Prep 20 minutes Cook 20 minutes

Ingredients

For the flowers

• 4–6 tbsp mixed herbs (fennel, sage, chives, basil)

• 140g ricotta, drained

• 250g soft goats cheese

• 85g dolcelatte

• Zest of 1-2 lemons

• 1 tsp chilli flakes, or to taste

• ½ tsp white pepper

• A good grating of fresh nutmeg

• 30g toasted pine nuts

• ½ tsp sugar (optional)

• Salt and black pepper

• 12 courgette flowers

For the batter

• 330ml sparkling water, chilled

• 4 ice cubes

• 180g self-raising flour, sifted

To fry and serve

• Vegetable oil, for deep frying (1 to 2 litres, depending on your pan)

• Runny honey

• A herb salad, to serve

Method

1. Peel back the courgette flower petals gently without tearing them. Press at the base of the stamen until it clicks off, and check each flower is free of insects.

2. Finely chop the herbs and mix with the ricotta, goats cheese, dolcelatte, lemon zest, chilli flakes, white pepper, nutmeg, pine nuts and sugar if using. Season to taste with salt. Spoon into a piping bag, snip the end, and fill each flower three quarters full, then gently twist the petals closed to seal.

3. Pour the oil into a wide pan, keeping the level at least two inches below the rim, and set it over gentle heat. Line a tray with kitchen paper.

4. Whisk the sparkling water into the flour with the ice cubes still in, keeping the batter as cold as you can. It should coat the back of a spoon lightly, not thickly.

5. Test the oil by frying a small cube of bread, it should turn golden in about thirty seconds, or use a thermometer and hold it between 170 and 180°C.

6. Dip each stuffed flower into the batter, let some of the excess drip away, then fry for around 3 minutes until puffed and golden. Lift out with tongs, drain on the kitchen paper and repeat in batches so not to over crowd the pan which makes the oil drop in temperature.

7. Serve straight away, drizzled with honey and with a herb salad alongside. Go easy on the honey, it should balance the filling, not drown it.

Where to find them

If you grow courgettes, you likely already have a nice flush of flowers and the plants throw them off generously, so it’s worth picking a few rather than letting them go to waste. If not, they’re not something some greengrocers or farm shops carry if you’re lucky, but a few specialist suppliers deliver them:

• Westlands (currently out of stock, worth checking back)

• Fine Food Specialist (reliable, but on the pricier side)

• Watts Farms

Serves 8–10

Prep time: 25 minutes (plus overnight straining)

Cook time: 40 minutes

There’s something glorious about early August tomatoes, the way they finally taste of something after months of the watery, flavourless ones that pass for tomatoes the rest of the year. This galette is a good way to meet that abundance head on: a free-form tart, pastry folded roughly round the edges rather than fitted to a tin, so it forgives every wobble in the rolling.

The trick with tomatoes this juicy is to salt them first and let them sit in a colander for ten minutes or so. It draws out the water that would otherwise turn your pastry to paste. The ricotta wants the same treatment, strained but this time, overnight through a muslin-lined sieve until it’s thick enough to hold a shape rather than slump. Both are small jobs, done the evening before, that make the difference between a soggy base and a crisp one.

Use an all-butter puff pastry rather than the standard block: it gives a richer, flakier result for a small difference in price. If you want a bit of theatre, tear a ball of burrata open in the centre of the tart just before you bring it to the table, or simply scatter over a few basil leaves and a good glug of olive oil. Neither is necessary, but both never hurt.

This one adapts easily. Swap the thyme for basil or oregano, or the parmesan for pecorino if you want something sharper. For dairy-free, a firm plant-based ricotta or feta and a vegan hard cheese work well, with olive oil brushed over the crust instead of egg. Gluten-free puff pastry is good enough now that I wouldn’t hesitate to use it. Any leftovers keep for a few days in the fridge and are best revived in a hot oven rather than a microwave, which only softens the layers.

Serve it warm or at room temperature, not straight from the fridge, with a green salad sharpened by a lemony dressing and something crisp and cold to drink. A dry Sauvignon Blanc suits it well.

Ingredients

500g ricotta

8–10 firm medium tomatoes

1 tsp thyme leaves1 small clove garlic, finely grated

Finely grated zest of 1 lemon

40g parmesan, finely grated

700g all-butter puff pastry (around two standard UK supermarket blocks)

1 egg, whisked, for glazing

Plain flour, for dusting

Method

1. The night before you plan to bake, mix the ricotta with a teaspoon of salt. Spoon it into a muslin-lined sieve set over a bowl and leave it in the fridge overnight to strain.

2. Slice the tomatoes and put them in a colander. Salt lightly and leave for ten to fifteen minutes, then pat dry with kitchen paper.

3. On a lightly floured surface, roll the puff pastry into a circle about 40cm across and 3–4mm thick. Transfer it to a lined baking tray, or a perforated pizza tray if you have one; the airflow underneath helps keep the base from turning soggy.

4. Mix the strained ricotta with the thyme, garlic and lemon zest. Taste and season with salt and pepper, remembering the ricotta has already had salt in the straining. Spread it over the pastry, leaving a 5cm border. Scatter over the parmesan and arrange the tomatoes on top.

5. Fold the pastry edges in over the outer two or three centimetres of the filling, pleating as you go for a rough, rustic edge. Brush the exposed pastry with the whisked egg.

6. Bake at 200°C, or 180°C fan, for 35–40 minutes, until the pastry is deep golden and the tomatoes have softened but still hold their shape. If the crust is colouring too fast, drop the oven slightly and give it a few extra minutes. Let the galette rest for ten minutes before slicing, then serve warm, scattered with basil if you like.

This is a great pastry to reach for when you want that same strawberries and custard pairing without the fuss of a proper tart, using pre-made puff pastry cut straight into squares rather than rolled and pressed into a tart tin before blind baking. It’s softer and looser by design too, unlike my black pepper strawberry tart, which needs a firm, oven baked custard and a lot more patience. For this one, you could use a good thick shop-bought custard instead if you’d rather skip making your own.

A few quick tips for success; Once the pastry is cut, it’s important to chill it again so the butter lamination firms back up, this helps the pastries rise better once they hit a hot oven. Also, cutting the puff pastry into squares rather than circles means you can use every bit of a rolled sheet without wasting offcuts. Chill the crème pâtissière fully in a bowl, with clingfilm pressed onto the surface as it cools to stop a skin forming, then spoon or pipe it into the pastries once everything is fully chilled. Classic ceramic baking beans are heavier and conduct heat more evenly, reducing the chance of a soggy bottom, but rice or dried beans will do in a pinch.

I don’t know about you, but my strawberries have been coming in a little slower and in smaller batches than usual this summer. I suspect the heat’s been a bit much for them, but they’re still turning up steadily through August. If yours have given up entirely, fresh raspberries work just as well here, or swap in roasted apricots, or stewed apple with cinnamon for something more autumnal when the season starts to change.

Ingredients

Serves 6 Prep 35 minutes, cook 30 minutes, chill 90 minutes

For the pastry

• 2 x 320g sheets all-butter puff pastry

• 1 egg, beaten, for egg wash

• Baking beans or weights, for blind baking

For the crème pâtissière

• 500ml whole milk

• 1.5–2 tsp vanilla bean paste

• 6 egg yolks

• 120g caster sugar

• 60g plain flour

• 60g cold unsalted butter, cubed

For the roasted strawberries

• 400g strawberries, hulled and halved if large

• 2 tbsp caster sugar

• Zest of 1 lemon

Method

1. Unroll both pastry sheets. Brush one lightly with water, edge to edge, then lay the second sheet on top and press down gently. Roll over lightly with a rolling pin to seal, even it out and remove any air.

2. Cut into 6 equal squares, or 8 for smaller portions. Using a sharp knife, score a 1.5cm border inside each square without cutting all the way through. Prick the centre with a fork and chill for 30 minutes.

3. For the crème pâtissière, heat the milk and vanilla in a small saucepan until steaming but not boiling. In a large bowl, whisk the egg yolks, sugar and flour until smooth and pale, then slowly pour in the hot milk while whisking continuously. Return the mixture to the pan and cook over medium heat, whisking constantly, until thickened.

4. Remove from the heat and stir in the cold butter, a few cubes at a time, until fully melted. Strain the custard into a clean bowl, cover with clingfilm pressed directly onto the surface, and chill until cold and set.

5. Preheat the oven to 180°C fan. Transfer the chilled squares to a parchment-lined tray, giving them as much space as possible to puff, and brush the borders with beaten egg. Weigh down the centre of each square with a small ovenproof ramekin, egg cup, or a scrunched piece of parchment filled with a handful of baking beans.

6. Bake for 15 minutes, then remove the weights and bake for a further 5 minutes, until golden and crisp. Cool completely.

7. Reduce the oven to 160°C fan. Toss the strawberries with the sugar and lemon zest in a small baking dish and roast for 10–15 minutes, until softened but still holding their shape. Cool to room temperature.

8. Spoon or pipe the crème pâtissière into the centre of each pastry square. Top with the roasted strawberries and a little of their syrup, then serve

   

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Som tam is normally built on shredded green papaya, pounded with chilli, lime and fish sauce until it’s sour and salty enough to cut through anything fatty on the plate. This version swaps the papaya for firm summer cherries, which do a similar job in a completely different register: sweet enough to hold their own, but not so sweet that the salad tips away from sour-led. Buy cherries that are still a little firm rather than fully ripe. They hold their shape when halved and take the dressing without turning to mush, and they carry less sugar than the soft, dark ones you’d eat straight from the bag.

Chicory and celery stand in for the papaya’s crunch, sliced into ribbons and sharp diagonals so they bruise under the dressing without ever going limp or pulpy. Toss them just enough to soften, not to pound them to a mush, or you’ll lose the crunch that carries the whole dish. The cherries go in last, as halves: fold them in once the dressing has already been tossed through the celery and chicory, rather than pounding them into it, and they’ll stay bright instead of bleeding the whole salad a muddy pink.

Palm sugar gives the dressing a rounder, more caramel note than white sugar would, and tamarind brings its own sourness plus a savoury depth that the clean, sharp acid of lime doesn’t touch. If you want it sharper and more traditionally sour-led, drop the palm sugar to about 2 tsp or lift the lime a touch and taste as you go. Dress the salad no more than ten minutes before it hits the table. Any longer and the shreds weep and go slack, so prep everything ahead, keep it separate, and bring it together at the last minute.

This is ideal sitting next to something hot and crisp off the grill. Gai yang style crispy chicken thighs are the obvious match, but a pan-rendered duck breast, sliced pink, does the same job with more richness. Seared prawns or a whole roasted sea bass work just as well, and crisp or sticky glazed tofu turns it into a proper vegetarian plate; leave out the fish sauce, or swap it for light soy, if you want the whole thing meat-free. A cold lager cuts straight through the chilli, or pour an off-dry Riesling if you’d rather open wine.

Nothing here needs to go to waste. Coriander stems carry more flavour than the leaves, so pound them into the dressing or freeze them for a curry paste. The pale inner leaves at the top of a celery head are worth tearing in with the herbs rather than binning, and once you’ve zested and juiced your lime, the spent shells still hold oil: drop them into a jug of water in the fridge, or freeze them for infused water another day.

INGREDIENTS

Serves 4 as a side or starter, 2 as a light main

Prep 25 minutes

10 minutes resting

For the salad

• 300g firm cherries, halved and pitted

• 2 celery stalks, thinly sliced on the diagonal

• 1 to 2 heads chicory, leaves separated and sliced into ribbons

• 50g roasted peanuts, roughly chopped

• A large handful of coriander, Thai basil and mint, torn

For the dressing

• 2 garlic cloves

• 3 to 4 green bird’s eye chillies

• 1.5 tbsp palm sugar (or brown sugar)

• 50ml fish sauce

• 50ml fresh lime juice (around 2)

• 3 tsp tamarind paste

METHOD

1. In a pestle and mortar, pound the garlic and chilli together. Add the palm sugar, peanuts, fish sauce, lime juice, and tamarind and pound and stir until the sugar dissolves and the peanuts are broken down. If you have no mortar, blend everything in a mini food processor.

2. Halve and pit the cherries, slice the celery and chicory on a sharp diagonal and add to a large bowl. Tear over the herbs and pour over the dressing and toss, bruising the shreds lightly so they take the dressing without turning to a pulp.

3. Gently

   fold in the cherries, keeping the cherries as halves so they stay bright and do not bleed.

4. Leave for 5 minutes so the shreds drink the dressing, then serve and scatter over the remaining peanuts and serve.

The cream in the name comes from two quiet decisions. Good white chocolate, melting into soft pockets through the dough, and a spoonful of skimmed milk powder in the dry mix, which lends a milky, faintly malted note and helps the cookies brown. Melting the butter rather than creaming it keeps the crumb dense and chewy instead of cakey. And since the drying step is forgiving of fruit that is a little past its best, this is a good thing to make with the tired end of a punnet rather than letting it go to the bin.

Two things affect whether they come out right: dry the strawberries only until they are pliable, like a dried apricot, never crisp, or they turn to dust and lose their chew. And take the cookies out while the centres still look slightly underdone, because they carry on cooking on the hot tray, and that is what leaves you a soft middle. It also helps to rest the dough for an hour before baking and to tap the tray right after it comes out of the oven to give that wrinkled appearance.

They are best eaten slightly warm while the white chocolate is still soft but will keep well in an airtight container for 3 days.

Makes 16 large cookies

Prep 30 minutes

Bake 10 to 14 minutes

3 to 4 hours drying and chilling

Ingredients:

For the dried strawberries

600g strawberries, hulled and quartered

For the cookies

170g unsalted butter, melted

180g light brown sugar

70g caster sugar

1 large egg

1 large egg yolk

2 tsp vanilla bean paste

280g plain flour

½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

½ tsp fine sea salt

25g skimmed milk powder

200g good-quality white chocolate chips

50g home-dried strawberries

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 80°C fan (100°C conventional). Lay the strawberry slices in a single layer on a lined tray and dry for 2 to 3 hours, until they feel like soft dried fruit, pliable and slightly chewy rather than crisp or wet. They firm up again once baked into the dough, so stop while they still have some give. Cool completely.

2. Melt the butter gently, then leave it for 10 to 15 minutes until warm rather than hot. You want it melted, not creamed, which is what keeps the cookies chewy instead of cakey.

3. Whisk the warm butter with both sugars for 1 to 2 minutes until glossy. Add the egg, yolk and vanilla and whisk again until the mixture thickens slightly.

4. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, salt and milk powder. Fold into the wet mixture until just combined.

5. Fold through the white chocolate and dried strawberries. The dough will be fairly soft.

6. Cover and rest in the fridge for at least 1 hour.

7. Heat the oven to 170°C fan (190°C conventional) and line 4 trays with baking paper.

8. Roll the dough into balls about the size of a walnut in its shell, for 16 cookies. Space them well apart to allow for spread.

9. Bake for 10 to 14 minutes, checking from 10 minutes. The edges should be set and pale gold while the centres still look slightly underdone.

10. Bang the tray firmly on the counter once to settle the cookies.

11. Leave on the tray for at least 15 minutes to finish setting.

There are a few weeks around the turn of May into June, when the hedgerows seem to burst into white. It happens almost overnight. One damp morning the elder is all tight green buds, and the next the whole tree is carrying flat plates of creamy white, tipped towards the light, smelling of warm honey and something faintly muscat. The scent travels on a still morning, and once you have learned it you will find elder everywhere: in country hedgerows, at field margins or where the woodland opens to a little light

Elder is one of the kindest plants to start foraging with. It’s generous, it’s common, and once you can recognise it there is very little chance of harm, provided you take a moment over the few flowers that resemble it from a distance. More on those further down. First, the tree itself, why its woven so deeply in old belief.

A tree with a reputation

Few hedgerow trees have gathered as much folklore as the elder. In old country belief the tree was home to the Elder Mother, a guardian spirit of both English and Scandinavian tradition, known in Denmark as Hyldemoer and in parts of England simply as the Old Lady. You did not cut elder, or take from it, without first asking her leave; to do otherwise was to invite bad luck, or worse. There was a whole etiquette to it, a small spoken request before you broke a branch.

I am not suggesting you have to believe in spirits. But I have always liked that the old way of taking from the elder began with a pause and a kind of permission, because it lines up neatly with how you should still gather from it: lightly, and never all at once.

The rest of the lore is just as tangled. Elder was protective, planted by the back door to keep lightning and bad luck at bay, but was also a tree to be wary of, one the old stories tied to fairies and a tree witches were said to favour or even shelter inside. It was thought unlucky to burn elder wood on the hearth. Instead its stems are hollow and pithy, easily cleared into pipes and whistles, which is why the elder was once known as the Pipe-Tree. The flowers themselves have a gentler, kitchen-bound history: steeped into cordials and wines, fried into fritters, even pressed into elderflower water, which Tudor and Victorian women used to brighten the complexion. The point of all of it, for our purposes, is that people have been gathering this exact flower for a very long time, and there is something quietly satisfying in joining that line.

When to pick, and why the timing matters

Elderflower keeps short hours. The flavour you are after lives largely in the pollen and the volatile oils of the open flowers, and both are at their best when the day is warm and dry.

Pick on a dry, sunny day, ideally in the late morning once the dew has lifted but before the real heat of the afternoon. Damp flowers, or flowers picked after rain, have had much of their pollen washed away, and with it a good deal of the fragrance. They can also turn musty before you get them home. Give yourself a clear, bright morning and you will be rewarded with heads that almost glow with scent.

Use your nose as much as your eyes. Good elderflower smells sweet, floral, lightly of honey. Set aside any heads that have started to brown at the edges, that smell sour or faintly of cat pee, or that are still half in bud. You want flowerheads that are fully open, creamy rather than yellowing, and lively with a warm, heady fragrance. Choose the cleanest heads you can reach, picked higher than a passing dog might reach.

Taking only a little

This is the part the Elder Mother would care about. A typical elder tree carries far more flowerheads than you could use in one sitting. Take only a few heads from any one tree, and where there are others nearby, spread your picking between them. Elder does not grow in great runs the way brambles do, though; often it is just one or two, standing on its own in a stretch of hedge, so the one in front of you may be all there is. That is all the more reason to go gently on it.

There are good reasons beyond manners. Every flowerhead you leave becomes a cluster of elderberries in late summer, food for blackbirds and thrushes through the autumn, and a second harvest for you if you want it.

Processing it the same day

Elderflower wilts almost as you watch. By the time you have walked home the heads will have begun to droop, and within a day they go limp and brown, so plan to deal with your basket the moment you are back through the door.

Start by giving each head a brisk shake over the sink or the grass. Elder is a city of tiny insects, and most of them will leave at this point of their own accord. Opinions are divided on how to process the flowers from here on; some foragers will tell you not to rinse them and some insist you should. I prefer to submerge the flowerheads in a bowl or sink of cold water and leave them for 10 minutes. This coaxes out the remaining visitors and settles any dust but you do lose some of the pollen and the strength of the flavour. I then lift the heads out gently, as you should with salad leaves, so that any debris is left behind, and lay them in a single layer on clean tea towels to dry.

If you are heading straight into a syrup or a cordial, you can skip the drying. The flowers are going into liquid in any case, so a little water clinging to them does little harm, and you save yourself the wait and any potential wilting. The rinse and dry is imperative for recipes like fritters where you are keeping the flowers whole; for syrups you are straining them through muslin which filters out the last of the bugs which you would rather not eat.

The few you must not pick

Elder is easy, but a handful of plants flower around the same time in similar flat, creamy clusters, and it is worth knowing them so a glance from across the lane never becomes a mistake. The single most useful thing to fix in your mind is that elder is a woody shrub or small tree, with bark and proper branches, while some of its lookalikes are soft, green and herbaceous.

The first group to know is the umbellifers, the carrot family, named for the flat, umbrella-shaped white heads they carry, which can read like elder’s from a distance. The one in the photo is common hogweed: broad white heads with the outer flowers larger than those in the middle, on hollow, ridged green stems that rise straight from the ground, with big, coarse, lobed leaves. It is the family as a whole that matters, though, because its members are hard for a beginner to tell apart and they run from harmless to deadly. Cow parsley is harmless; common hogweed’s sap can irritate skin in sunlight, and giant hogweed’s can blister it badly; hemlock is among the most poisonous plants in Britain. What they all share, and what divides them from elder, is that they are soft and green and grow up out of the ground. So the simple rule keeps you safe: if it is soft and green from the ground up, walk past it. Elderflower comes from a tree.

Guelder rose carries flat white clusters that can catch your eye from a distance, but look closer and you will see a ring of larger flowers around the outside of each head with much smaller flowers in the middle, a lacy, two-tier effect the elder never has. Its leaves are lobed like a small maple, quite unlike elder’s leaves, which are made up of several separate leaflets along a stalk.

Common dogwood also flowers white around now, but its individual flowers each have four narrow petals, where elder’s are five and altogether smaller and more crowded. Its leaves are smooth along the edges, without the small teeth that run along elder’s and its young stems often carry a reddish tinge. Once you have elder’s toothed leaves and five-petalled flowers clearly in your eye, none of these three should trip you up.

And then, to the kitchen

That is the gathering done: a bright morning, a few heads from many trees, a quick shake and maybe a brief soak, and a tea towel laid with cream-coloured flowers smelling of early summer. What happens next is the best part, and I will be sharing a few ways to use them in their own posts to follow, starting with a rhubarb and elderflower cordial.

The French toast first, because rhubarb won't be here much longer. Field rhubarb is still in good form for now, deeper pink than the forced stuff that finishes in March, more honest, slightly more astringent. Roasted with a little sugar and orange peel for fifteen minutes or so, it holds its shape and lets out just enough juice to pool around thick caramelised brioche. Vanilla yoghurt sits between the two. A spoon of ginger granola on top gives the dish enough crunch to be breakfast and not pudding, although in truth I'm not sure the distinction needs holding too firmly at the weekend.

Then onto the savoury one. Turkish eggs or Çılbır. Garlicky yoghurt under two soft-poached eggs, hot butter loosened with rose harissa and lemon spooned over the top, fresh herbs and crushed pistachios scattered across, and bread to drag through it all. It looks like a restaurant dish but the ingredients list is short, the method is mostly waiting for the eggs to poach, and the result is far better than the effort suggests.

Rhubarb French toast

Ginger oat granola

• 75g scotch oats

• 40g flaked almonds

• 2 tbsp pumpkin or sunflower seeds, optional

• 30g unsalted butter, melted

• 3 tbsp ginger syrup (from a jar of stem ginger)

• 1/2 tsp ground ginger

• 1/2 tsp vanilla bean paste

• Pinch of salt

Roasted rhubarb

• 300g rhubarb, cut into 10cm batons

• 2 to 3 tbsp caster sugar

• Zest of 1 orange

Vanilla honey yoghurt

• 350g Greek yoghurt

• 50ml single cream, optional

• 50g honey

• 1 tsp vanilla bean paste

• Pinch of salt

French toast

• 4 thick slices brioche, shop-bought or homemade

• 4 eggs

• 150ml whole milk

• 75ml single cream

• 3 tbsp golden caster sugar

• 1 tsp vanilla extract

• Zest of 1 orange

• Unsalted butter, for frying

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 170°C fan/190°C conventional. Line two shallow baking trays with baking parchment.

2. Mix the oats, almonds and seeds with the melted butter, ginger syrup, vanilla bean paste and a pinch of salt until everything is lightly coated and just starting to clump. Spread onto one of the lined trays and put in the oven.

3. While the granola begins to bake, toss the rhubarb batons with the sugar and orange zest on the second lined tray and put in the oven alongside the granola. The granola needs around 20 minutes, turning once halfway through, until deep golden and starting to crisp at the edges. The rhubarb needs around 10 minutes depending on thickness — you want it just tender and still holding its shape with lightly syrupy juices. Remove each tray when ready and leave to cool completely.

4. Stir together the yoghurt, cream, honey, vanilla bean paste and a pinch of salt until smooth. Chill until needed.

5. Whisk the eggs, milk, cream, sugar, vanilla extract and orange zest together in a shallow dish. Heat a generous knob of butter in a frying pan over a medium heat. One at a time, dip a slice of brioche into the custard for about 10 seconds each side and place straight into the pan. Fry in batches of one or two — overcrowding the pan reduces the heat and makes flipping difficult. Cook each slice until deeply golden and lightly caramelised on both sides. Keep finished slices warm in a low oven at around 100°C while you fry the rest.

6. To serve, place the French toast on plates. Spoon over a generous dollop of the vanilla yoghurt, lay the rhubarb on top with some of its juices, then scatter over the ginger oat granola. Serve immediately.

Turkish eggs

Ingredients

For the yoghurt

• 300 g thick 5% Greek yoghurt

• 2 small garlic cloves, grated or crushed

• A pinch of sea salt

For the eggs

• 4 medium eggs

• 2 tbsp white wine vinegar (for poaching water)

For the toppings

• 80 g unsalted butter

• 3 tsp rose harissa

• Juice of ½ lemon

• Handful of dill, parsley, or mint, finely chopped

• 2 tsp shelled pistachios, crushed or chopped

• Optional: extra lemon juice or a drizzle of pomegranate molasses

• Salt and black pepper, to taste

To serve

• Toasted sourdough or warm flatbread

Method

• Stir the grated garlic and a pinch of salt into the Greek yoghurt. Warm gently over a bain marie until just above room temperature, but not hot.

• Bring a pan of water to a gentle simmer and add the vinegar. Crack each egg into a small cup, then slide into the water one at a time. Poach for about 3 minutes until the whites are set and the yolks still runny. Lift out with a slotted spoon and drain on kitchen paper.

• While the eggs poach, melt the butter in a pan until foaming. Stir in the rose harissa, lemon juice, and a pinch of salt. Remove from the heat just before the butter begins to brown.

• Spread the garlic yoghurt over two plates. Top with the poached eggs, then spoon over the harissa butter. Scatter with herbs and crushed pistachios, season with salt, and finish with a squeeze of lemon juice or drizzle of pomegranate molasses if you like.

• Serve immediately with sourdough or warm flatbreads

This cake is baked in a fluted tart tin, so it comes out with neat scalloped sides that look deliberate. That’s the whole reason for using the tin. The rest of the cake is straightforward.

Passion fruit is expensive, but I buy them anyway. I remember the first time I tried one as a kid, when they appeared in the supermarket for the first time and my mum brought a few home as a treat. They felt so exotic and jewel like that I got a little obsessed.

Passion fruit is contrary. The smooth, glossy, handsome ones are sharp and sulky and not worth your money, and the ones you actually want look like they’ve had a hard week: heavy, wrinkled, caving in on themselves. The uglier the better. The pulp goes into the batter seeds and all, so you get a gentle crunch running through the sponge, much like poppy seeds.

Ground almonds keep the crumb moist and slightly tender. The zest of two limes lifts the whole thing, picking up the sharpness of the fruit. The only place this cake can actually go wrong is the icing. Whisk the cold mascarpone only until it loosens, fold in the sifted icing sugar, and stop the moment it’s smooth. Pushed too far it splits into grainy regret with no way back.

For the cake

• 260g unsalted butter, softened

• 260g caster sugar

• 4 large eggs

• 300g self-raising flour

• 75g ground almonds (optional)

• 1 tsp baking powder

• 3 tbsp passion fruit pulp, seeds included

• Zest of 2 limes

• 2 tsp vanilla bean paste

• 3 tbsp milk (optional, if needed)

For the mascarpone icing

• 500g mascarpone, chilled

• 125g icing sugar, sifted

• 1 tbsp vanilla bean paste

• Zest of 1 lime (optional, to garnish)

For the coulis (optional)

• 5 passion fruit, pulp only

• 5 tbsp caster sugar

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C conventional or 160°C fan. Grease and line the base of the tin.

2. Cream the butter and caster sugar in a large bowl until pale and fluffy.

3. Beat in the eggs one at a time, making sure each is fully incorporated before adding the next.

4. Fold in the self-raising flour, baking powder and ground almonds, if using, until just combined.

5. Stir in the passion fruit pulp, vanilla paste and lime zest. Add the milk if the batter feels too stiff.

6. Spoon into the prepared tin and smooth the top.

7. Bake for 50 to 55 minutes, until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.

8. Cool in the tin for 15 minutes, then invert onto a serving plate and peel away the baking paper. Leave to cool completely.

9. For the coulis, simmer the passion fruit pulp and caster sugar over a low heat for 3 to 4 minutes, until the sugar has fully dissolved. Set aside to cool.

10. Whisk the mascarpone briefly to loosen. Sift in the icing sugar, add the vanilla paste and lime zest, and mix gently until just smooth. Stop as soon as it comes together to avoid splitting.

11. Once the cake is completely cool, spoon or pipe the mascarpone icing over the top and spread to the edges.

12. Drizzle with the cooled coulis just before serving. Serve chilled or at room temperature.

This is what I am turning to, minimum cooking, fresh cool flavours and something you can carry out to the garden in a matter of minutes. There is a tiny amount of heat involved, I will be honest about that, but it’s only a few minutes to toast some nuts and crisp some ham. Everything else is slicing and blending.

Why these ingredients work

Strawberry and asparagus overlap beautifully in the British calendar, and they get on far better than you might think. The trick is what you put between them. Strawberries have a genuine affinity with black pepper: the heat and the slight bitterness give the sweetness an edge so the fruit tastes brighter and more defined rather than dessert-like. Basil is a classic pairing in many strawberry salads and here it ties the strawberry to the asparagus.

The asparagus stays raw and this isn’t laziness, although on a day like today I would not blame you for assuming so. Sliced thinly on a long diagonal, raw asparagus keeps a clean, grassy note that you lose the moment it hits hot water. Against the soft sweetness of the berries you want that bite and freshness.

Another thing I love about this salad is the dressing which is built around the basil stems; the part you would normally throw away. You blend them with oil, vinegar and a few peppercorns into something thick, intense and fragrant that carries more flavour than the leaves do.

A note on the heat, since that is the point today

This salad does have two jobs that need a pan; toasting the nuts takes three to five minutes and crisping the ham takes another five or so. That is it, and both can be left to do their thing for most of the cooking time so you can walk away. Just remember that nuts turn from golden to burnt in seconds so check as soon as you smell them toasting. If you prefer a vegetarian version, crumble a little feta or goats cheese over instead of the ham. They add a similar saltiness that this salad needs.

Two things not to throw away

The dressing has already saved the basil stems, so while you are at it, keep the strawberry tops too. Simmer them with equal parts water and caster sugar for a quick strawberry syrup that is very good over pancakes or ice cream, or steep them in vinegar or vodka and use them later.

Serves 4 as a side

Takes 15 minutes

For the salad

• 400g thick asparagus, woody ends snapped off

• 250g strawberries

• 1 large handful of rocket

• A small bunch of basil

• 50g pine nuts or hazelnuts

• 6 slices of Serrano or Parma ham

For the dressing

• The basil stems, reserved from the bunch above

• 5 tbsp avocado oil, or a good olive oil

• 3 tbsp white balsamic vinegar

• 8 black peppercorns

Method

1. Toast the nuts in a dry pan over a medium heat for three to five minutes, shaking often, until golden. Watch them closely from the three minute mark, as they go from perfect to burnt in seconds. Tip them straight onto a plate to cool.

2. Pick the basil leaves and set them aside. Blend the stems with the oil, vinegar and peppercorns until thick and fairly smooth. Add a pinch of salt, then taste and adjust the vinegar and salt until it sits right. The strawberries and the ham will both push the balance around later, so it is worth getting this honest now.

3. Crisp the ham in a dry non-stick pan over a medium heat, two to three minutes a side, or under a hot grill for three to four minutes, until firm and golden. Let it cool fully, then break it into shards. It crisps further as it cools, so do not rush this.

4. Slice the raw asparagus thinly on a long diagonal, keeping the tips whole. Hull the strawberries and cut them in half.

5. Put the asparagus, strawberries, rocket, basil leaves, nuts and most of the ham into a wide bowl, holding back a few of each to finish. Pour over half the dressing and toss gently.

6. Build it on a wide platter rather than a bowl, so the layers stay visible. Scatter over the reserved asparagus, strawberries, basil, nuts and ham, and serve the rest of the dressing on the side

The batter is yeasted and left to ferment for an hour before it goes anywhere near the oil. The technique comes from the British chip shop tradition, where resting gives you a puffed, lacy, almost cloud-like crust with proper depth of flavour. I started out aiming for something Baja-adjacent and kept coming back to the way the batter at a good chippie shatters when you bite it. That texture, applied to small chunks of cod folded into a warm tortilla, was doing something genuinely great.

So this is a hybrid. The batter is British. The lager in it is Mexican (Modelo, Pacifico, Corona, any will do) and the sauce is a vivid green blend of jalapeños, the whole bunch of coriander including the stems, a generous squeeze of lime juice. It’s paired with bright crisp quick pickled red cabbage which only takes twenty minutes and stays crisp in the fridge for up to a week.

Three things to know before you start. The batter needs at least an hour in a warm spot, a sunny windowsill is ideal. The sauce wants the coriander stems, where most of the flavour sits, so don’t waste time picking the leaves off. The oil needs to be at 180°C; without a thermometer, drop in a small cube of bread, it should turn golden in about thirty seconds.

Ingredients

Battered fish

• 300g cod, cut into bite-sized chunks

• 200g plain flour

• 7g fast-action dried yeast (one standard sachet)

• 1 tsp caster sugar

• ½ tsp salt

• ½ tsp ground coriander

• ½ tsp ground cumin

• 330ml Mexican lager (Modelo, Pacifico or Corona), at room temperature

• Around 500ml vegetable oil, for deep frying

Pickled cabbage

• 125ml red wine vinegar

• 125ml water

• 1 tbsp salt

• 100g caster sugar

• ¼ red cabbage

Jalapeño sauce

• 2–3 fresh jalapeños

• 1 garlic clove

• 1 large bunch of coriander, stems and all

• 1 tbsp dried oregano (Mexican if available)

• 3 tbsp avocado oil

• 1 tsp salt

• 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar

• Juice of 2 limes

To serve

• 6–8 small flour tortillas

• Lime wedges

Instructions

1. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, yeast, sugar, salt, ground coriander and cumin. Pour in the lager and whisk to a smooth batter. Cover and leave somewhere warm for 1 to 1.5 hours. A switched-off oven with just the light on is ideal, or a sunny windowsill. The yeast needs proper time to ferment, which is where the depth of flavour and the puffed, irregular crust come from.

2. While the batter ferments, make the pickle. In a bowl large enough to hold the cabbage, whisk together the red wine vinegar, water, salt and sugar until the sugar has dissolved. Shave the red cabbage very thinly on a mandolin and add it to the bowl, making sure it is submerged in the brine. Mix and set aside.

3. For the sauce, trim the tops off the jalapeños and add them to a blender with the garlic, the whole bunch of coriander (stems and all), oregano, avocado oil, salt, cider vinegar and lime juice. Blend until smooth and vivid green. Taste and adjust the seasoning.

4. Heat the oil in a deep, heavy-bottomed pan to 180°C. If you do not have a thermometer, a small cube of bread should turn golden and crisp in about 30 seconds.

5. Using tongs or a fork, dip each piece of cod into the batter, letting any excess drip off, then carefully lower it into the hot oil. Fry in batches of 3 or 4 for 3 to 5 minutes until deeply golden and puffed. Drain on kitchen paper and repeat with the remaining fish, letting the oil come back up to temperature between batches.

6. Put a griddle pan over a high heat and warm the tortillas for 10 to 15 seconds on each side, until just marked and pliable.

7. Arrange the jalapeño sauce, drained pickled cabbage, fried fish and warm tortillas on a platter. Build your own tacos and serve with lime wedges.

With suspected ADHD, which will surprise absolutely no one who knows me, a tendency to overestimate what is possible in the time I have, and a slightly unreliable memory, I lose focus, run out of time, or simply don’t always think things through. It matters to me, genuinely, that my recipes work. I want you to actually be able to make them. So if I’m not sure something will hold up in someone else’s kitchen, or a recipe goes slightly wrong, I can’t, in good conscience, put it in front of you. It isn’t fair. We’ve all made something from a cookbook or a website that just doesn’t work, and once that trust is gone, it’s gone. It’s like someone speaking with complete conviction about a fact, only for you to discover later they were entirely wrong. You’d hesitate before believing them again.

Baking is a science. It requires exact measurements, exact temperatures, exact method. I am no scientist, but I do understand the fundamentals. The finished product can vary wildly depending on the order you add ingredients, you get distracted for a minute and the caramel tips from amber to scorched, or if the oven runs a few degrees hot. With savoury cooking, you can usually course-correct as you go. Taste, adjust, rescue. But if something goes wrong in baking, in bread or in pastry, there is very little you can do. You just have to begin again.

I am currently working on a strawberry and white chocolate cake. A winning combination I think you’ll agree, and deeply seasonal for late spring. The concept is simple: strawberries and cream, but in a cake. Four layers of light but stable sponge, painted with a homemade strawberry syrup, filled with voluptuous pillowy cream and topped with lots of fresh strawberries. But the problem is structural. I don’t want the weight of the sponge to squeeze the filling out, but I’m determined not to use buttercream. It has the structure, but is overly sweet and heavy for this recipe, and that loses the whole point. This cake is supposed to taste like eating strawberries and cream in a garden.

My solution was to firm the cream a little with white chocolate, and keep the whole thing refrigerated which is not something I’d usually do with a cake outside of high summer. But here’s the next problem: butter hardens in the fridge. The crumb tightens, the texture suffers, the whole thing becomes less pleasant to eat. So the answer is to make the sponge with oil instead. Fine. Good.

After some research, a chiffon cake seemed like the perfect solution. Stable enough to layer, light enough to deliver that cloud-like quality I’m after, and well-suited to refrigeration due to the oil. I spent two hours last night preparing and baking. The result was flavourless, spongy, and unattractive. Back to the drawing board.

I woke up this morning thinking about sponges. Not for the first time in my life, and almost certainly not the last. A génoise, that should work. More research, more writing, more baking. Again, not right. Not good enough. Not something I’m willing to share.

As another example, last week I spent two days baking and filming mini strawberry cakes, a rhubarb and pistachio frangipane tart, and a rhubarb semifreddo. Between miscalculating how much time I had before I needed to leave for an event, being unhappy with the visual results, and the boiler man arriving at exactly the wrong moment, none of them will likely make it to you. I’ll probably return to the concepts at some point, possibly next year, when the irritation has passed and the ingredients are back in season. So that’s two days, essentially lost.

A small note on waste here, because it matters to me: during the testing phase of baking, I only ever make a small proportion of a recipe to begin with. It takes longer, double the time sometimes, but ingredients are expensive and throwing food away sits badly with me.

There’s also the issue of beauty. The recipe has to look attractive in the photos. Food stylists on big advertising shoots have infinite tricks to make food look appetising that you would never actually eat. Mashed potato standing in for ice cream, chicken skin painted in glue for shine, a burger or cake riddled with pins to hold its layers in place. None of that is something I’m willing to do. I want to eat what I make, and I want your finished version to be able to look like mine.

So. Do I try again with this particular recipe? Spend another few hours researching, writing, baking, hoping that third time’s the charm.

I don’t know yet. That’s the truth of it. The excitement that started this is still there, buried somewhere underneath the frustration, but excitement doesn’t always survive. Often you need to walk away from a recipe, let it sit, come back to it when you’ve stopped being annoyed at it, just like you would in an argument. Whether that’s tomorrow or next month, I can’t tell you.

What I can tell you is that this is what the work actually looks like, most of the time. Not the finished cake on a beautiful plate. The two days that may come to nothing. The kitchen that needs cleaning again.

This version keeps the spirit of it but the toppings are entirely seasonal. We are right at the start of asparagus season, that short window from late April through to June, so it felt right. Sweet peas alongside them, lightly cooked, then tossed in butter and chopped mint until they pick up a light glaze. A lemony sour cream underneath, made sharper with Greek yoghurt and lemon zest, shaved pecorino on top. Absolutely delicious!

Here, the dough is shallow fried rather than deep fried, which is easier for home cooking. You still get proper colour and a crisp edge, and the dough puffs beautifully around the edges. The dough needs two proves, so this is not a quick lunch. Plan for a slow afternoon, but the actual hands-on time is short and everything else falls into place around it.

One little tip about asparagus prep: hold each spear at both ends and bend it gently until it snaps. It will break naturally right where the woody base meets the tender stalk, which is exactly what you want. I am collecting all the woody ends from my recipes right now and plan to do something zero waste with them. I am leaning towards a quick pickle or some kind of fermentation. Or simply add them to a vegetable stock. They are too tough to eat but too valuable to throw away.

For the dough

• 250g plain flour

• 7g dried yeast

• 1 tsp salt

• 1 tbsp sugar

• 150ml warm milk

• 50ml neutral oil, for shallow frying

For the topping

• 300ml sour cream

• 100g 2% Greek yoghurt

• 1 lemon, zested and juiced

• 350g asparagus spears, cut diagonally into 2–3cm pieces

• 100g peas (fresh or frozen, defrosted)

• 30g butter

• Small handful of mint, finely chopped

• 30g pecorino, shaved

• Salt and black pepper

  1. Knead for 8 to 10 minutes until smooth and slightly springy. Transfer to a lightly oiled bowl, cover and leave to rise for 1 to 2 hours until doubled in size.

  2. While the dough proves, combine the sour cream and Greek yoghurt with the lemon zest, a small squeeze of lemon juice and a pinch of salt. Stir well and taste. It should be gently sharp but not aggressively acidic. Set aside.

  3. Divide the risen dough into two equal pieces. Stretch each into a rough round of around 20cm. Lay on a lightly oiled board, cover loosely with oiled cling film and leave to rise for a further hour.

  4. Heat the oil in a frying pan over a medium-high heat and fry each lángos until puffed and deeply golden on both sides, around 3 to 5 minutes per side. Transfer to a tray lined with kitchen paper and keep warm in a low oven.

  5. In a separate 20cm frying pan over a medium-high heat, add the asparagus and peas along with 50ml of water. Cover with a lid or plate and cook for 3 minutes, then uncover and cook for a further 2 minutes until the water has almost fully evaporated and the asparagus is just tender but still with a little bite.

  6. Add the chopped mint and butter. Toss the pan so the butter and the remaining water emulsify into a light, glossy glaze. Season with salt and remove from the heat.

  7. Spread each lángos generously with the lemony sour cream. Spoon over the peas and asparagus along with any glaze from the pan. Shave over the pecorino and serve immediately.

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Despite the name, buckwheat is not a wheat at all, it is a seed, naturally gluten-free, and completely unrelated to the grass family that wheat, rye and barley belong to. It’s been grown in Brittany since the 15th century, brought back from Asia along trade routes and adopted quickly because it thrived in the poor, acidic soil that wheat couldn’t tolerate. The galette bretonne, made from nothing more than buckwheat flour, water, salt and sometimes egg, became a staple of the region and remains one of the most enduring examples of a cuisine built around what the land could offer. The buckwheat is what gives the crêpe its character, that faintly earthy, nutty flavour you don’t get from a plain flour batter, and it is what makes a savoury filling feel genuinely at home inside it.

This version uses a combination of buckwheat and plain flour rather than buckwheat alone. The plain flour adds a little more elasticity and makes the crêpe easier to fold without cracking, which matters when the filling is generous like this. The water in the batter is deliberate too. Milk adds richness but too much of it makes the batter heavy, so the water thins it without adding fat and gives you a finer, lacier crêpe with crisper edges.

The filling of slow-cooked leeks sounds modest but is worth taking seriously. Given enough time and butter over a low heat, leeks become something completely different, sweet and almost jammy, with none of the sharpness they start with. Tarragon, lemon and a little cream go in towards the end, and the Stilton is crumbled over at the last moment rather than stirred in, so it softens gently against the warm filling without disappearing into it.

INGREDIENTS

For the batter

• 140g buckwheat flour

• 60g plain flour

• Pinch of fine salt

• 2 large eggs

• 350ml whole milk

• 50ml water

For the filling

• 3 large leeks, finely sliced and washed (see notes)

• 40g unsalted butter

• Juice of half a lemon, or 1 tbsp white wine vinegar

• 150ml single cream

• Small handful of tarragon leaves, roughly chopped or torn

• 200g Stilton, crumbled

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Make the batter first, as it benefits from resting. Whisk together the buckwheat flour, plain flour and salt in a large bowl. Make a well in the centre and roughly whisk in the eggs, then gradually whisk in the milk and water until you have a smooth, thin batter with no lumps. It should be the consistency of single cream, if it feels thick, add a splash more water. Cover and rest for at least 30 minutes. This rest matters: it allows the flour to fully hydrate and gives you a more pliable, less fragile crêpe.

2. While the batter rests, make the filling. Melt the butter in a wide pan over a low to medium heat. Add the leeks and cook gently, stirring occasionally and more frequently towards the end to prevent catching, for around 15 minutes until completely soft, sweet and almost melting. They should not colour. Add the lemon juice and tarragon and stir through, then pour in the cream and cook for another 3 to 4 minutes until the cream has reduced slightly and coats the leeks. Taste and season with a little salt and black pepper, keeping in mind that the Stilton will add significant salt later. Keep warm over a very low heat while you cook the crêpes.

3. Heat a 28–30cm ceramic or non-stick crêpe pan over a medium heat. Add a small knob of butter or a spritz of oil. Add a ladleful of batter and immediately tilt and swirl the pan to spread it thinly and evenly across the surface. Cook for about 3 minutes until the edges are lacy and lifting and the surface looks dry. Using a spatula, flip carefully and cook for another 1-2 minutes on the second side, the crêpes should be on the lighter side at this stage, as they go back into the pan later. Slide onto a warm plate and repeat with the remaining batter, stacking the crêpes as you go.

4. Once all four crêpes are done, lay one flat in the pan still over a medium heat. Spoon a quarter of the warm leek mixture onto one half of the crêpe, then scatter over some of the crumbled Stilton. Leave for about 2 minutes to warm the filling and allow the Stilton to just begin to soften without fully melting. Fold the crêpe in half, then in half again to form a triangle, with the filling visible in the open centre. Lift onto a warm plate and repeat with the remaining crêpes.

5. Serve immediately, with a simple green salad alongside if you like.

Wild garlic is in everything I am cooking right now. It seems to work its way into whatever I am making, almost without thinking, the way tomatoes do in August or squash does in October. The season being so short fills me with a strange urgency and makes me want to use every way I can before it disappears. The woods smell of it. The kitchen smells of it. For a few weeks every spring it becomes the flavour that makes food taste like this particular moment in the year.

Finely chopped wild garlic with red onion, fresh chilli, olive oil and red wine vinegar, left to sit until the sharpness mellows and something more complex emerges. Bright and garlicky and acidic, with a warmth from the chilli that builds slowly. It does something extraordinary to the spiced, charred cauliflower underneath it. It soaks into the silky white bean purée and stains it green at the edges. It is the kind of sauce that makes you want to drag bread through the bowl long after the main event is finished.

Pick the leaves before the white flowers open. Once the plant puts its energy into flowering, the leaves lose some of their intensity and the flavour becomes a little coarser. You want them young and flat and deeply green, when the garlic scent is at its sharpest and the leaves still have that almost juicy quality to them.

You have a few weeks left of wild garlic season. This is worth making before it goes

INGREDIENTS

Chimichurri

• 80g wild garlic leaves, washed thoroughly

• 2 small red onions or 4 shallots, very finely diced

• 2 to 4 fresh red chillies, finely chopped (depending on size and heat preference)

• 150ml good olive oil

• 4 tbsp red wine vinegar

• 2 tsp caster sugar, or a small squeeze of honey

• Salt and black pepper

Cauliflower

• 1 cauliflower, outer leaves removed, cut into 2x 1 inch-thick steaks

• 3 tbsp olive oil

• 2 tbsp cumin

• 1 tbsp paprika

• 1 tsp onion powder

• Salt and black pepper

White bean purée

• 1 x 400g tin cannellini beans, drained

• 100ml to 150ml vegetable stock, adding more as needed

• Salt and black pepper

To finish

• 30g pine nuts, toasted in a dry pan until golden

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C fan. Mix the olive oil, cumin, paprika, onion powder and a generous pinch of salt together, then brush the mixture over both sides of the cauliflower steaks.

2. Place a large frying pan over a high heat. Add a little oil and fry the steaks for 2-3 minutes on each side until deeply golden and charred at the edges.

3. Transfer the steaks to a roasting tray and roast for 10 to 15 minutes until caramelised, turning once halfway through.

4. While the cauliflower roasts, make the chimichurri. Finely chop the wild garlic leaves - you want them fairly fine but not a paste, with some texture remaining. Combine with the diced red onion, chilli, olive oil, red wine vinegar and sugar or honey. Season generously with salt and pepper. Taste, it should be punchy, acidic and well seasoned. Adjust the vinegar or salt as needed. Leave to sit for a few minutes to let the onion to mellow.

5. For the white bean purée, warm the drained cannellini beans in a small pan with the stock over a medium heat for a few minutes. Season well, then blend until completely smooth, adding a little more stock if needed to loosen to a spreadable consistency.

6. To serve, spoon the white bean purée onto warm plates. Place a cauliflower steak on top and spoon over a generous amount of chimichurri. Scatter over the toasted pine nuts and serve with extra chimichurri on the side.