Herbs & Spices

This colorful, big-flavored tomato salad is something you could eat alongside rose-pink cold roast beef, but it could easily make a more substantial candidate for a main course with the addition of a few croutons or some slices of olive oil–drenched toast. The colors are important here if the salad is to look lively—I usually use a mixture of tomatoes, including little peardrop ones and yellow cherry tomatoes. I think it is worth adding that this is also good with cilantro instead of basil.

How a dish smells is important. It whets the appetite, brings us to the table, and opens up a host of pleasures. With coconut, cardamom, and coriander, this simple dish of baked tomatoes is heady and aromatic. It curdles a bit, but no matter. You will need some rice or bread to go with it. Creamed coconut, a block of pure dried coconut, is available at Asian markets and online.

A good savory little number this, fantastic with all manner of roasts and grilled foods but equally worth making as a side dish for cool, almost liquid mozzarella or a bowl of basmati rice flecked with torn herbs.

A tomato’s flavor intensifies in the heat of the oven. All its sweet-sharpness comes to the fore. I eat these warm, sprinkled with a little herb vinegar, sometimes sandwiched inside a crisp and chewy baguette.

Late summer, the sun high, the vegetable patch is filled with slow-moving bees and tiny, piercing-blue butterflies. The day stands still, baking in the sunshine. The cats lie silently on the dusty stone terrace, too hot to move. It is the day for a lunch of melting softness. I wander into the kitchen on bare feet to roast tomatoes and break open a milky, silky buffalo mozzarella.

A good soup for a spring day, bright green and not too filling.

It’s late March and green leaves as sharp as a dart are opening on the trees that shield this garden from the most bone chilling of the winter winds. The mornings are still crisp. You can see your breath. Stew weather. Unlike carrots, rutabaga becomes translucent when it cooks, making a casserole the glowing heart of the home.

The first time I included pumpkin in a coconut-scented laksa was for a Bonfire Night supper in 2004 (see The Kitchen Diaries). The soup had to be sensational to make up for our distinct lack of fireworks (I think we wrote our names in the air with sparklers). Rich, sweet-sour, mouth-tinglingly hot, and yet curiously soothing, it had everything you need in a soup for a frosty night. There is much pleasure to be had in the constant tweaking of a recipe to change not its essential character but its details. And so it has been with this soup. I have since gone on to remove the tomatoes or add some shredded greens as the mood and the state of the larder take me. Such improvisations, many made at the last minute, need to be done with care: you don’t want too many flavors going on. Vietnamese soups such as this are traditionally ingredient rich but should never taste confused. By the same token, to simplify it too much would be to lose the soup’s generosity and complexity and therefore its point. The laksa appears complicated at first but in practice it is far from it. Once you understand the basics, the recipe falls into place and becomes something you can fiddle with to suit your own taste. The basic spice paste needs heat (ginger, garlic, tiny bird’s eye chiles); the liquid needs body and sweetness (coconut milk, rich stock); the finish needs sourness and freshness (lime juice, mint, cilantro). The necessary saltiness comes from nam pla and tamari rather than salt itself. These notes in place, you can feel free to include noodles, tomatoes, greens, sweet vegetables, or meat as you wish. What matters is balance.

Sweet squashes marry well with the earthy flavor of beans and lentils. This is apparent in the dhal and pumpkin soup in The Kitchen Diaries and here in a more complex main dish that offers waves of chile heat with mild citrus and the dusty “old as time itself” taste of ground turmeric. Dried (which is the only way most of us know them) chickpeas are the stars of the world’s bean dishes, used to fill bellies everywhere from India to Egypt. Their character—knobbly, chewy, and virtually indestructible in the pot—makes them invaluable in slow-cooked dishes where you need to retain some texture. Fresh chickpeas are bright emerald green and have an invigorating citrus note to them that is completely missing in the dried version. I saw some for the first time this year. I have long wanted to put lemongrass with chickpeas, partly to lift their spirits but also to return some of their lemony freshness to them (I use more lemon juice in my hummus than most as well). This recipe, which just happens to be suitable for vegans, does just that. Like many of those slow, bean-based dishes, it often tastes better the next day, when all the ingredients have had a chance to get acquainted.

A warm scone is an object of extraordinary comfort, but even more so when it has potato in it. The farl, a slim scone of flour, butter, and mashed potato, is rarely seen nowadays and somehow all the more of a treat when it is. I have taken the idea and run with it, mashing steamed pumpkin into the hand-worked crumbs of flour and butter to make a bread that glows orange when you break it. Soft, warm, and floury, this is more than welcome for a Sunday breakfast in winter or a tea round the kitchen table. Cooked initially in a frying pan and then finished in the oven, I love this with grilled Orkney bacon and slices of Cheddar sharp enough to make my lips smart—a fine contrast for the sweet, floury “scone” and its squishy center.

Marrying textures and tastes to one another is one of the most satisfying pleasures of cooking: the soft with the crisp, the steamily hot with the icily cold, the spicy with the mint cool. I somehow had a feeling that crisp crumbs might work well with the soft, collapsing flesh of a squash. They do, but are more interesting when the crumbs are not packed on top like a crumble but lightly scattered over and between the pieces of squash.

This is my version of the Spanish omelette, being lighter, crisper, and more studded with herbs than the norm. The point here is that you can mix the herbs to suit your taste. Tarragon and mint are a must for me, but any of the more unusual herbs is worth using too: chopped sorrel leaves, salad burnet, lovage, or any of the lesser-known basils. Because the herbs are only lightly cooked in this recipe, their flavor will stay true.

Two of these cheese-and-potato cakes are ample for a main course with maybe a spinach or chicory salad to follow.

I am constantly on the lookout for potato dishes that will flatter a piece of meat or fish such as grilled mackerel, flash-fried lamb’s liver, or some thick bacon slices. This is such a dish.

A beautiful marriage of textures, this: creamy salt cod purée and crisp potato skins. As baked potatoes go, this is a lot of work, and much washing up too, but the result is worth the trouble. Salt cod is not easy to track down; Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese markets and major supermarkets are your best bet. The recipe makes rather too much filling, but it is not worth dealing with a smaller quantity of salt cod. There’s no hardship anyway—simply keep the leftover purée in the fridge and eat it the next day with fingers of hot toast.

Good with lamb.

If you crush a cooked potato with the back of a spoon or fork, its broken edges are receptive to any dressing you wish to drizzle over it. Cream and garlic is a rather sumptuous treatment for a virginal new potato, but it works very well.

Goat cheese—sharp, chalky, a little salty—makes a sound addition to the blandness of a potato cake. The fun is coming across a lump of melting, edgy cheese in among the quietness of the potato. This is what I eat while picking eagle style at the carcass of a roast chicken or wallowing in the luxury of some slices of smoked salmon. It also goes very well with a humble smoked mackerel.