Bagna cauda

A miracle! The English summer actually seems to be taking itself seriously this year - we have blissy sunshine, bone-loosening heat and, in my village at least, a lovely smell of hay in the air. These conditions do not lend themselves well to lots of roasts and meaty things, so I looked to Provence and Piedmont for today's recipe - a bagna cauda, rich with garlic and anchovies, for dipping hunks of bread, crudités and hot, steamed artichoke petals into. (There have been some fabulous and enormous artichokes kicking around the market in Cambridge this week - if you're local, go and grab a few now.)

This bagna cauda has a texture a lot like mayonnaise, and it's made in a similar way, but without any eggs. (The proteins in the cooked garlic and anchovies help to emulsify the oil and butter in the way that an egg yolk does in mayonnaise.) Like mayonnaise, it keeps well in the fridge and works amazingly well in sandwiches, so if you don't polish off the whole lot in one go, just treat it as a flavoured mayo for next week's packed lunches.

To make enough to serve six as a robust dip with bread, carrots, cauliflower, peppers, tomatoes, artichokes, asparagus, new potatoes...or anything else you can think of, you'll need:

1 fat bulb garlic
Milk
1 tin anchovies
300ml extra-virgin olive oil
350g unsalted butter

Start by peeling the garlic. Choose the sweetest, fattest kind you can find - the Really Garlicky Company grow Porcelain garlic, which I think is the among the most reliable and delicious in the UK. They supply Waitrose, but if you don't have a local branch, they also sell their garlic online. Pop the peeled cloves in a little pan, cover them with milk and simmer for ten minutes, until the garlic is soft and cooked through. Discard the milk.

Put the anchovies in a bowl with a cover and nuke in the microwave for 45 seconds. They should cook down to a paste. Scrape the anchovies into a saucepan (not the milk pan, which will have milky bits stuck to the bottom) with the garlic, and use the back of a fork to squish them together.

Chop the butter into little cubes about the size of the top joint of your thumb. Put four of the cubes into the saucepan with the garlic and anchovy mixture, and turn the heat on as low as possible under the pan. As soon as the butter starts to melt, start to whisk the contents of the pan with a balloon whisk. When the butter cubes are nearly melted, add four more, still whisking, and continue until all the butter is incorporated. As you continue to whisk, drizzle the olive oil very gradually into the warm mixture as if you were making mayonnaise. Eventually, you'll have a thick, glossy bagna cauda. Remove to a bowl, plonk it down in the middle of the table, and get dipping immediately.

Hyères - restaurants and food shopping

Two weeks spent variously floating prone on my back in the Mediterranean, being splendidly cultural and hunting down Provençal recipes have left me tanned, educated, full of the sort of vitamins you only find in absurdly ripe fruit and vegetables, and with a groaning liver. I blame the foie gras and the local rosé wine.

The house we rented (pictured above) was glorious - a heap of palatial decay whose kitchen bristled with good equipment, including a chinois sieve, a mandoline, oyster knives, griddle pans and some of the sharpest knives it's ever been my pleasure to handle. I do not, however, recommend its horse-hair mattresses, which made sleeping feel a lot like vigorous exercise on sacks full of prickly potatoes.

Hyères itself is a town surrounded by small growers with a daily market and a huge number of small grocers and little independent foodshops. If you visit, walk up to the Place Massillon in the old town and explore the labyrinth of small streets around it. You'll find little shops selling nothing but dozens of different kinds of goat's cheese, artisanal bakeries (in season, you can buy lavender bread), greengrocers which only sell local produce and some fantastic ethnic grocers, including a shop devoted to Arabic spices and a really excellent Vietnamese traiteur. Rotisseries punctuate the streets, but you're not limited to chickens; quails and pork knuckles were on offer too.

If you visit the town, you'll find plenty of good restaurants. Les Jardins de Bacchus on Av. Gambetta is a modern gastronomic restaurant, where courses were punctuated with Blumenthal-ish little jokes like a capuccino made from langoustines and foie gras. Service was excellent, and the food very good indeed. For a more casual meal, we really liked Le Jardin (19 Av. Joseph-Clotis), where Provençal food is served on a garden patio from noon until midnight. Try the crudites, which are served with a fierce anchoide and a home-made tapenade. Saigon-Hyeres is a beautifully decorated Vietnamese/Thai restaurant on Rue Crivelli, where the Thai fondue was fragrant and delicious - order plenty, though, as the portions are quite small.

My personal favourite was the Bistrot de Marius, a restaurant in Place Massillon specialising in the local fish and seasonal vegetables. (Bistrot de Marius has no website, but you'll find other reviews of it online.) You can eat on the square in the shadow of the Knights Templar tower, and the food is extremely well-priced, thoughtfully prepared and absolutely delicious. Their soupe de poissons was the best I had on the holiday (and I sampled many), with a dense, heady aroma, served with a glossy, garlic-y rouille. Try the moules au gratin; mussels prepared in the same way you'd eat snails in Burgundy. A hundred times nicer than snails, and the butter was a joy to mop up with your bread. Red mullet was rolled with a fatty ham and pan fried. Iles flottantes were airy, their crème Anglaise dotted with vanilla - and to cap it all, the after-dinner coffee was some of the best I've had. Do drop in if you're in town.

Pan Bagna

I've just bought a new mandoline, having noticed that I was avoiding cooking as much gratin as I would like in order to avoid the slicing. Unfortunately, you've already read my very best gratin recipe, so I put my mind to other dishes which might involve a lot of delicate slicing of hard vegetables.

Pan Bagna is Provençale for Big, Wet Sandwich (actually bathed bread, but Big Wet Sandwich is more descriptive). It's big, it's wet, and it's full of delicate slices of sunshine; olives, garlic, peppers, artichoke hearts and all the best bits of Provence.

You've spent years trying to stop the tomatoes in your sandwich making the bread wet. This is a recipe where you want them to make the bread wet. You want the bread drenched in olive oil, tomato, the golden liquid running off freshly roast peppers, the scent of garlic and savoury juices.

You can make this without a mandoline, but the slicing will take you longer. Make your pan bagna the night before you plan to eat it so that the flavours can mingle and the bread soften. To feed three people (or two obnoxiously overweight ones) you'll need:

1 large loaf of good, rustic bread
½ a cucumber
8 tomatoes
12 radishes
6 artichoke hearts in olive oil
8 anchovy fillets in olive oil
2 shallots or 1 small red onion
2 red or yellow peppers
8 black olives
2 teaspoons of capers
2 cloves of garlic
Pepper
Olive oil

Quarter the peppers, put them in a dry frying pan until charred, and slice into strips. Slice
the loaf (I used a baguette-shaped one - round loaves work well too) in half along its equator. Pour olive oil all over each of the cut sides of the bread, and rub it in with the back of a spoon. Spread a crushed clove of garlic on each of the cut sides - the oil will help it spread evenly.

The oil-pouring stage was the stage at which Raffles the cat decided to do some kitchen-based leaping. He ended up with an Ayurvedic-style stream of olive oil running onto the top of his head, and now looks like an advertisement for cat Brylcreem. It appears to be hard to lick the top of your own head, so we are hoping his sister notices and helps him out.

Lay the oily, garlicky bottom slice on a piece of clingfilm large enough to wrap around a very big sandwich. Slice all the vegetables thinly, and build up layers on the bottom slice of bread. (There's no set order to do things in here, so you can use your imagination.) This may require some engineering skill; this is a lot to fit into one baguette, and you may find it helpful to chock the slice of loaf with teaspoons to keep it level. Make sure the anchovies (chop them), olives and capers end up in layers towards the middle so their flavour can permeate the whole sandwich.

Anchovy-haters are allowed to substitute tuna.

When your sandwich is full of all the ingredients, put the lid on and wrap tightly in cling film. This is a two-person job. When you've got a cling-film cocoon, wrap that in tin foil. Then put the whole thing in the fridge, with weights on the top.

MFK Fisher advocated sitting on your sandwich over an afternoon or so. Feel free to do this if you do not care particularly for your soft furnishings. Otherwise, leave the sandwich, weighted, in the fridge overnight, unwrap carefully, slice and serve. Have a good munch in the snow and pretend you're in Nice.