Three seasonal stars come together in this week’s recipe. The first is purple sprouting broccoli, a welcome sight at this time of year, which used to be known as “the hungry gap” in the British vegetable-growing calendar. The second is brown shrimps, the tiny crustaceans – once commonplace, now a luxury – that are still

This being a rare Friday when meat is on the menu — Happy Easter! — I thought I’d do something with a ham hock. It’s a riff on the rustic French idea of salt pork with lentils – jambonneau aux lentilles, petit salé aux lentilles etc – which is one of those simple combinations that just works,

This is a rustic kind of soup, vaguely Greek, really more of a broth with bits. The flavour, with its bright lemon notes, is soothing and gentle rather than rich. I’ve said to add some sea bass or bream, but in truth, it would happily work with just the chunkier white fish, or a different

There was a large beech tree near where I grew up. One of the lower boughs bent down to the ground, forming a bouncy wooden seat that provided hours of childhood entertainment. Some kids had carved their names high among the branches. We called it the “graffiti tree”. But in springtime, it had a different

This is a rustic, Iberian-inspired concoction, the addition of coriander steering it more towards southern Portugal than Spain. Portugal is alone among Western European countries in using this aromatic herb enthusiastically in its own cuisine. I have always assumed it arrived there with the Moors, but then why isn’t it more commonly used in Andalucia?

This is a bubbling, hearty, unpretentious kind of dish – a last foray into overtly wintery food, perhaps, but still a welcome comfort while the evenings are cold. Smoked haddock and cream is one of those partnerships that is meant to be, the dairy enveloping the fish in a suave blanket and becoming infused with

Award-winning food writer Lucas Hollweg suggests a simple and seasonal meat-free recipe for supper tonight - red mullet, leeks, lemon and saffron.

Fritter is one of those words that has largely fallen out of use. In the minds of Britons of a certain generation, it will forever be inextricably linked with Spam – itself no longer exactly the height of fashion. And yet, there is nothing wrong with fritters. They are just fried things – like frites

Blood oranges are one of the bright stars of the citrus world, arriving from the Mediterranean – and Sicily in particular – between winter and early spring. There is a growing trend to rebrand them as “blush” oranges, for reasons I don’t quite understand. Perhaps it is to spare the nerves of the haemophobic –

It was the day after that snowy weather a couple of weeks back. I woke to find an email from a friend. “Look on the table outside the door,” it said. “I got you a present.” Tucked into an inch of otherwise unmolested snow was a bag of cockles, delivered, much to my embarrassment, while

Forced rhubarb is a glorious thing – gloriously pink and also, when you think about it, gloriously odd. Grown in the depths of winter, in darkened sheds, it is (traditionally, at least) harvested by candlelight to ensure its nail-polish pinkness remains untainted by chlorophyl green. The way we use it is equally curious. It’s really

For a few brief weeks at the beginning of each year, boxes of seville marmalade oranges arrive in the shops from southern Spain. At first sight, they are an unpromising fruit, coarse skinned, with wincingly tart juice and meagre, pip-filled flesh. And yet, cooked until the skin turns soft and with their bitterness mitigated by