Dairy Free

Green lentils and bacon has long been a salad worth making. I will occasionally fold in some shards of crisp, olive-oil-drenched toasted ciabatta or lots of whole parsley leaves. A couple of years ago I started moving the whole thing up a notch by putting the lentils against a few pieces of exquisite Spanish ham and adding a certain smokiness with wide slivers of zucchini, their edges blackened from the grill. This has become a late-summer lunch I can’t get enough of.

Middle Eastern cooking is flecked with the cool pepperiness of fresh mint. Italian, and especially Sicilian, cooks include mint with zucchini, often in tandem with garlic and lemon. I find mint invigorating with all summer squashes and often make a dish where they (pattypan is particularly suitable) are cooked in olive oil with mint and the merest hint of garlic. It is very good with grilled fish.

2008 saw not only my usual terra-cotta pots of Striato d’Italia on the back steps but also a trailing variety known as Caserta, a pale fruit the color of mint ice cream, with darker stripes. The light-skinned varieties such as Clarion, Di Faenza, and the almost ivory Lebanese White Bush look particularly delicate and summery when sautéed in butter and olive oil with a handful of herbs thrown in at the last moment, the scent of late summer hitting you as you spoon over the pan juices. Perhaps that should be swoon. Squashes of every variety love a tomato. Occasionally you could argue they need it too. Late last summer, just as the beans were forming on the poles in the vegetable beds, I made a last-minute, rough-edged supper with little more than a few zucchini and a couple of tomatoes. It was done in fifteen minutes flat. There are many who would insist on skinning and seeding the tomatoes for this, but not only do I think it unnecessary here, it also means missing out on all their rich juices and scrunchy seeds.

Young summer squashes of any sort grill rather well, but better if you salt them first, so that they relax rather than harden over the heat. As soon as they are lifted off the bars, I toss them in dressing, keeping them moist and silky. A side dish, and very good with mozzarella or feta.

Most Asian markets carry Japanese nanami togarashi seasoning. It is a mixture of ground chile, orange peel, spices, and sesame seeds. For this beef salad, it is simply a question of rolling the beef in the seasoning and searing it quickly in a heavy pan. The beef is barely cooked and is eaten thinly sliced, like carpaccio. There will be some left over for tomorrow. I cannot think of a better accompaniment for it than a simple tomato salad.

Beef and tomatoes have enjoyed a long history together. Whether it’s tomato ketchup on your burger or tomato paste in your beef casserole, the two have an established friendship. Winter tomatoes—why do we buy them?—can add a surprising depth to gravy if they are roasted alongside the Sunday beef. I chuck them in with the onions and bay leaves that provide the background music for the gravy. The tomatoes sharpen up in the searing heat, their skin catches and burns, and they add a certain piquancy to the sweet onion and caked-on roasting juices. The winter tomato has at last found a point. You may well want some roast potatoes to go with this. I usually boil them first for ten minutes, then drain and add to the roasting tin.

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.

The classic Indian spinach dish saag aloo, where spinach and potatoes are added to spiced and softened onions, is often cooked a while longer than I would like it to be. Authentically, the spinach goes in before the potatoes, so that it makes an impromptu sauce. Delicious. But I sometimes make it less than classically, keeping the spinach almost whole and adding it last, so that it comes to the table singing brightly, more as an ingredient than a “sauce.”

There is no fish I can think of that doesn’t work with spinach. But where creamed spinach seems perfectly fine with a steak of halibut or haddock, the richer, oily fish such as salmon are more appropriately matched to the leaves in a simpler state. A mouthful of lemon salad, at once breathtakingly sharp, is more than at home on the same fork as a piece of salmon or a bunch of meltingly soft spinach. Bring all three together and you have a dish of extraordinary vitality.

I ate this rather soothing way with lettuce twice last week, once for lunch, accompanied by a piece of salmon, the second time for supper, with nothing but a hunk of soft farmhouse bread, the sort with a dusting of white flour on top. Light, juicy, and clean tasting.

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

The fry-up has always appealed to me, in particular the bits that stay put at the bottom of the pan, the crusty scrapings that brown rather too much. I call them “the pan-stickings.” One of potato and duck fat is a deep-winter supper of immense pleasure; another of herb-speckled sausage meat and zucchini. This is robust cooking, crisp edged and flecked black and gold. It is not for those days when you want something genteel or elegant. This is the sort of supper to pile on a plate and eat with a cold beer. The latest of my fry-ups is extraordinary in that two generally sweet ingredients come together to produce a deeply savory result. The key here is not to move the ingredients around the pan too much, letting them take on a sticky crust while allowing them to soften to a point where you can squash them with little or no pressure. The caraway seeds, which people tend to either love or hate, are entirely optional.

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.

An hour after leaving Dijon, I was lost. A tangle of lanes, endless vineyards, and a low mist left me confused and desperately looking for a farm at which to ask for directions. It wasn’t the most poetic of farmyards, but there was dry mud and clean straw underfoot and tight bales of hay on which were perched a hundred or more fat, round pumpkins soaking up the late-afternoon sun like a group of ladies in a Beryl Cook painting. I whistled and called without reply; not even a dog barked. As I waited, the pumpkins seemed to be watching me, growing faintly malevolent in the fading golden light. I felt like a lost child in a haunting fairy tale. Whether it was the watching fruits or the deserted farm that spooked me, I got back in the car and left as fast as I could. Thirty years on, I think of them in an altogether friendlier light, but they are still what I want at Halloween and on Guy Fawkes’ Night. I came up with this modern take on the classic sausage and mash a year or two ago in an attempt to pacify a herd of boisterous and hungry kids that descended on me one October. It worked.