Sweet potato and chickpea curry

I like to make a vegetable curry as an accompaniment when I make a meat one, but this curry is substantial and tasty enough to stand up as a meal on its own with rice. This curry is in a southern Indian style, with coconut milk making the curry rich and thick, and lime juice adding zing. It's great for vegetarians - it's loaded with flavour, and will have the meat-eaters fighting among themselves (probably with forks) for a helping too.

I have been lazy in this recipe and haven't made my own curry paste. A good shop-bought curry powder works very well here - as usual, I recommend Bolst's Madras powder, which is really well-balanced and fragrant. To serve four, you'll need:

3 sweet potatoes
2 onions
6 spring onions plus more to garnish
2 tablespoons curry powder
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 inch piece of ginger
4 cloves garlic
1 can chickpeas
1 can coconut milk
1 bird's eye chilli (more if you want a hotter curry)
1 handful chopped coriander leaves
Juice of 1 lime
3 tablespoons oil
Salt to taste

Dice the onions and slice the spring onions, and sauté them in the oil with the curry powder and the coriander, cumin and fennel seeds until the onions are soft and translucent. Add the garlic and ginger, both chopped finely, with the diced and peeled sweet potato and the sliced chilli, and continue to sauté until the sweet potato starts to caramelise and brown a little at the edges.

Pour the coconut milk over the curry, cover and simmer for fifteen minutes, until the sweet potato is soft. Add the drained chickpeas to the pan with half the lime juice and a teaspoon of salt, and simmer for another five minutes. Taste for seasoning - you may want to add more lime. Remove from the heat and stir in the fresh coriander, and garnish with some sliced spring onion.

This curry tastes even better if you leave it in the fridge for a day before reheating and serving. If you do this, add some more fresh coriander when you serve it.

Padron peppers - Spanish roulette

One of the things I love about tapas is that they're often so easy to prepare. Slice a chorizo, pour over red wine, stick in pan, reduce, eat. Slice some manchego and quince cheese. Eat. Place olives in small bowl. Eat. Put prawns in dish with olive oil, garlic and chillies. Make hot. Eat. Procure a ham. Slice. Eat.

Given that tapas are there primarily as a salty accompaniment to your drink, these simple, clear flavours make a lot of sense. The quality of raw ingredients in preparations like this becomes all-important, and often the best of those raw ingredients are the seasonal ones. Enter the Padron pepper.

These little green jewels are a deliciously sweet, fresh-tasting pepper which comes ready in the summer. They are, for the most part, delightfully mild - but one in every ten or so has a strong chilli kick. There is nothing better than a dish that engages your sense of danger. The Spanish have a saying: Pimiento de Padrón, pequeño pero matón. Translated very approximately, this means: "Padron pepper - teensy-weensy thug".

To serve two as a nibble with drinks or as a starter, you'll need:

150-200g Padron peppers (see below for suppliers)
5 tablespoons olive oil
A generous sprinkling of sea salt

Heat the olive oil in a large pan to a medium temperature, and drop the peppers in. Stir the peppers in the oil for about four minutes, until their skins are blistering. Remove the peppers to bowls with a slotted spoon, sprinkle over plenty of salt, and serve piping hot. To eat, hold the peppers by the stem and bite off the whole fruit. Keep a glass of something cold to hand in case you get one of the very spicy ones.

It's worth getting your hands on some Padron peppers at this time of year, when they are at their very best. I've seen them in Waitrose, but if you don't have a local branch you can also order them online in the UK at Little Green Men, where they have some great chilli products.

Japanese coleslaw

This coleslaw is very quick and easy to throw together, and it's a great alternative accompaniment for your barbecues. Wasabi and ginger give this coleslaw a great SE Asian kick, and the sweet white cabbage and carrot shreds really respond well to the savoury dressing.

I've used powdered wasabi here, which you can usually find at Asian grocers. It's sweeter and has more zip to it than the pre-prepared version. Check your wasabi packaging to make sure that wasabi (horseradish on some packs) is the only ingredient.

To serve about four people, you'll need:

1 white cabbage
2 large carrots
½ inch piece of ginger
3 tablespoons seasoned Japanese rice vinegar (I like Mitsukan, which you should be able to find at a good supermarket)
1 ½ tablespoons toasted sesame oil
1 ½ tablespoons soy sauce
1 heaped teaspoon wasabi powder
2 teaspoons soft brown sugar

Shred the cabbage finely with a knife, and grate the carrots. Mix the vegetables together in a large bowl.

Add the vinegar to the wasabi in a small bowl, and leave aside for five minutes. Grate the ginger and stir it into the vinegar and wasabi mixture with the soy sauce and sugar, and keep stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Add the sesame oil, whisk briskly to emulsify all the ingredients, and pour the finished dressing over the cabbage and carrots. Toss everything together and serve immediately. This coleslaw does not keep well (the salad will wilt in the dressing), so you have a great excuse to eat it all in one go.

Sautéed cauliflower

Ah, the cauliflowers of our youth. I'm sure you remember the buggers: grey and brain-ish, boiled until soft and claggy by the school dinnerladies; or (worse) bobbing up and down in salty water in your Grandma's kitchen sink as a legion of little black insects died in unison and floated out of the florets. They never all vacated the cauliflower - I spent miserable hours at the table with the tip of a knife, digging out wiggly, squashy bodies and things with far too many legs, and smearing them on my napkin.

It took me some years to mentally rehabilitate the cauliflower, and I know plenty of adults who still won't touch the things. Happily, these days you are very, very unlikely to come across an insect-riddled specimen (pesticides are the modern cook's friend), and grey mush is easily avoided if you're cooking them at home. Best of all, it turns out that a cauliflower which is roasted or sautéed is totally delicious. It has a great texture and takes on a sweet and toasty flavour a little like roast chestnuts - nothing at all like the bitter, wet stuff you remember from school. Serve as a side dish or as one of a selection of vegetably nibbles. And if you're low-carbing, which at least two of my friends are at the moment, this is a very tasty way to get your vitamins without carbs.

To saute a head of cauliflower you'll need:

1 cauliflower
Olive oil to cover the bottom of a large saute pan
Salt

(This may be the shortest ingredient list I have ever posted!)

Separate the cauliflower into large florets (see picture) and slice them lengthways so you have flat pieces of cauliflower about a centimetre thick. Heat the oil in the pan until it is shimmering, and slide the cauliflower in. Brown on one side (four or five minutes) before turning carefully and browning on the other side. Serve spread out on a large plate, sprinkled generously with sea salt.

Roast asparagus with shaved parmesan

If you thought the hollandaise sauce recipe from the other day sounded like too much hard work, this asparagus recipe will suit you down to the ground. It's very quick and easy, and this cooking method makes the most of the tender sweetness of the stems. It also looks posh, so you can serve it up as a starter (or as an accompaniment) to guests and feel smug when they congratulate you on something which, in reality, only took you five minutes to put together.

For a starter, look at serving between six and eight stalks of asparagus per person. You can get away with less than this if you're making it to accompany something else as a main course, but it's worth making plenty because roast asparagus is downright delicious.

To serve two as a starter you'll need:

16 stalks of asparagus, as fresh as possible
½ teaspoon flaked Italian chilli peppers
Zest of a lemon
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
50g parmesan cheese
Salt (preferably something crystalline, like Maldon) and pepper

Preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F).

Snap the bottoms off the stems of asparagus. They'll come apart naturally, with a lovely snapping sound, at the point where the woody part (which you don't want to eat) begins. Arrange them in a single layer in a baking dish.

Sprinkle the flaked chilli and lemon zest over the asparagus, and drizzle with the olive oil. Roast the asparagus in the oven for 10-15 minutes until bright green.

While the asparagus is roasting, use a potato peeler to shave the parmesan into little pieces. As soon as the asparagus comes out of the oven, scatter over the parmesan, which should soften a little as it meets the hot asparagus. Serve the roast asparagus with crusty bread if you're eating it as a starter.

Celeriac purée

These days, few of the vegetables you'll find in the supermarket are truly seasonal. We've got year-round mange tout peas (I remember the days when my parents grew them in the garden - the season only lasted for about about a month, but my, were we sick of peas at the end of that month); year-round broccoli and year-round cauliflower. Spring cabbage appears in the shops in summer, autumn and winter, and out-of-season asparagus is there whenever you want it. It doesn't taste of anything, but if you want it, it's there.

Happily for those outraged by man's twisting of nature, here are a few season-specific things that you won't find all year round. Some English root vegetables in particular are only easy to find in the winter (for the most part - there's always bound to be someone bussing turnips in from Australia in high summer), and they're wonderful in the cold months. It makes sense really - these roots are the energy store of the plants, and so they're full of sugars and other nutrients.

Celeriac is one of my favourite winter roots. It's the taproot of a celery plant (not the same one you use to dip in your hummus or to stir your Bloody Mary), but tastes much richer, deeper, creamier and sweeter than celery. I know people who can't bear celery, but who will happily munch on celeriac; they're really very different flavours. This vegetable isn't readily found outside Europe, but if you are an American reader and happen upon one in a market, snap it up so you can impress your friends with your cosmopolitan cooking.

Although modern 'best before' stickers tend to suggest you can only keep your celeriac for a week or so, the root will actually keep in the fridge for a month or so if wrapped in plastic to keep it nice and humid- inside your fridge it is dark and cold, which fools the root into thinking it's still underground - the celeriac won't be any the worse for it.

The celeriac is a knobbly, rough-skinned vegetable, and its flesh is very hard. Make sure you have a very sharp knife to remove all the skin and nubbly bits, and to cut through the solid root. It makes a lovely soup (which I really ought to blog some time), and it's great raw in coleslaw. One of the very nicest of French crudités is simply grated raw celeriac blended with a little home-made mayonnaise. But for my money, one of the best things you can do with a chunk of celeriac is to cook it until soft, mash it with a little potato, push the resulting mixture through a sieve and whip it with butter and cream for a very fine and rich side dish.

To make celeriac purée as an accompaniment for four, you'll need:

1 large celeriac, about 20 cm in diameter (anything larger than this may be a bit woody)
2 medium potatoes (choose a variety which is good for mashing)
100 ml double cream
2 heaping tablespoons salted butter
2 level teaspoons salt (plus more to taste)

Using a very sharp knife, peel the celeriac and cut it into 2 cm square chunks. As soon as you have cut a piece, put it in a saucepan of cold water to stop it from oxidising and turning brown. Peel the potatoes and cut them into chunks about twice the size of the celeriac pieces, and add them to the pan. Warm a mixing/serving bowl.

Bring the potatoes and celeriac to the boil, put the lid on the pan and simmer for 15 minutes. Poke the vegetables with a fork to check they are soft (if they are not, cook for another 5 minutes). Drain and use a potato masher to mash the celeriac and potatoes until they are as even as you can manage.

Melt the butter and cream together in a milk pan, and bring to a very low simmer as you sieve the purée.

Push the mashed mixture through a sieve using the back of a ladle. You can also use a mouli or food mill if you have one. The resulting purée will be extremely smooth. Put the purée into the warmed bowl and use a hand whisk to whip the butter and cream mixture into the purée with the salt, and serve immediately. This is particularly good with rich meat dishes and roasts.

Mexican squash and corn cream

Do try this one - it's seriously good and has worked its way up to being a frequent star alongside my roast dinners. This silky, sweet puree works unbelievably well as an accompaniment, especially with poultry - I hope some of you will try it with your Christmas turkey. It's rich and packed with flavour; and like many recipes which utilise creamed corn, it's a favourite with children. It also works as a great quick main dish (and is lovely if you're entertaining vegetarians - try it over rice with an interesting salad).

Butternut squash originates in Mexico, and it has an affinity for other Mexican ingredients like the corn, the coriander and the chillies. I've used crème fraîche here to loosen the mixture - an authentic Mexican dish might use crema, the thick, Mexican, sour cream, but really the difference between the two products is minuscule. If you can't find smoky ground chipotle chillies where you are, just substitute your favourite crushed, dried chillies or chilli powder.

To serve two as a main dish or about four (depending on greed) as a side dish, you'll need:

1 butternut squash
1 can creamed corn
3 heaped tablespoons crème fraîche
1 tablespoon salted butter
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
¾ teaspoon ground chipotle chilli
1 large handful roughly chopped coriander

Peel the squash (you'll find a serrated knife the best tool for this job - that peel is tough), remove the seeds and stringy pith, and chop the flesh into pieces about an inch square. Cover with water and simmer for 15 minutes until the pieces of squash are tender and soft when poked with a knife.

Drain the water off and return the squash pieces to the pan. Add the corn, butter and crème fraîche to the pan and mash with a potato masher off the heat until smooth. Season with the salt, pepper and chillies - you'll find this dish will require quite a lot of salt for maximum flavour because of the natural sweetness of the vegetables.

Return the pan to a low heat and bring to a gentle simmer. Remove from the heat again and stir in the coarsely chopped coriander. Serve immediately.

This squash and corn cream freezes well.

Golden winter vegetable soup with frizzled chorizo

Soothing, sweet, buttery, winter vegetables are a real blessing when the weather's cold. Plants keep a store of energy in the form of sugars in their tubers and roots, and those tubers and roots make for some surprisingly uplifting eating. This soup is passed through a sieve after being liquidised to ensure a silky, creamy texture. If you don't own a food processor you can still make it - at the stage where the ingredients go into the processor bowl you can just mash them with a potato masher for about ten minutes, then pass the resulting mush through a sieve, pressing it through with the bottom of a ladle. You will end up muscular and with a very good pan of soup.

Because of all the plant sugars in these vegetables, you'll find you need something salty to counter the sweet taste. I've cut chorizo into coins and fried it until it's crisp and friable - a lovely contrast in texture with the silky, creamy soup. The result is a lovely sun-coloured dish at a time of year when the sun is a distant memory.

To serve four as a main course, you'll need:

1 small celeriac
3 small sweet potatoes
1 small swede
1 small butternut squash
1 small onion
2 shallots
1 parsnip
3 carrots
1 leek
3 tablespoons butter
1 litre chicken stock (vegetarians can substitute vegetable stock and use croutons instead of the chorizo)
200 ml double cream
2 teaspoons salt
½ a nutmeg, grated
10 turns of the pepper mill
2 tablespoons chopped chives

Peel all the vegetables and cut them all into 1-inch chunks. Melt the butter in a large pan with a heavy base (this will help the soup cook evenly - I recommend Le Creuset pans, which are made of enamelled cast iron, and disperse heat beautifully) and sweat the vegetables, stirring regularly, until they begin to soften. You'll find that the sweet potato pieces may brown a little. Don't worry about it; they contain so much sugar that it's hard to prevent a little of it caramelising, and it just gives depth to the soup.

When the vegetables are softening evenly, pour over the hot stock. It's best if your stock is home-made, but some of the liquid stocks you can buy at the supermarket these days are a good substitute if you don't have any in the freezer. Bring the stock and vegetables to a simmer, cover with a lid and leave for 20 minutes or until all the vegetables are soft all the way through.

While the soup simmers, slice a chorizo into pieces about the same size as a pound coin and fry over a medium flame in a dry frying pan, stirring and flipping the pieces occasionally. The chorizo will release its fat and the pieces will become crisp. After about 20 minutes, when the chorizo is crisp and dry, remove the pieces and drain on paper towels. Reserve the oil.

Transfer the vegetables and stock to a large bowl and liquidise in batches, passing each processed batch through a sieve back into the large pan. You will find you need to push the soup through the sieve with the back of a large spoon or ladle. Return the pan to a very low heat and stir in the cream, salt and pepper and the grated nutmeg. Bring to a simmer and serve with a drizzle of chorizo oil, some chorizo scattered over (keep some more in a bowl for people to help themselves) and a sprinkling of chopped chives.

Ezme - Turkish crushed tomato and chilli salad

It's been an exciting few days. Some readers will be aware that I have a horrible allergic reaction to lobsters (face swells, airways close, scalp comes out in lumps, I get injected with adrenaline and then sleep for two days). Unfortunately, at a Chinese meal on Sunday where the rest of the family was munching their way through a couple of lobsters while I stuck to crab, I must have accidentally ingested some, because the evening saw my eyelids slowly but surely swelling up to resemble one of those bobbly goldfish. The rest of my face soon followed, and I've been lying under a duvet, groaning, ever since.

Then, as soon as I felt well enough to tackle a post here, I realised that I've left my camera at a party the day before the lobster incident. Fortunately the party was at my parents' house, where we were celebrating my lovely Dad's 60th. The camera is safe and sound, but it is about 60 miles away, full of photos, and this does mean that two of the Turkish posts I was planning on making will have to wait until I have it back. Similarly, today's post has no accompanying photographs - please imagine a cheering, dark red paste.

Ezme is served as a starter alongside other salady nibbles to be eaten with bread in Turkey. It's extremely spicy, and also serves as a deliciously fresh cold sauce to go with grilled meats. If you're in Cambridge, check out the Turkish delicatessen on Mill Road for the hot paprika paste you'll need. (Tips from readers about where other Turkish delis can be located would be very welcome - please leave a comment.)

To serve six, you'll need:

½ lb fresh, ripe tomatoes
1 pointy green pepper (the pale sort which is good barbecued)
½ a cucumber
2 spring onions
1 small handful mint leaves
1 tablespoon hot Turkish paprika paste
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons sherry vinegar
Salt, pepper, paprika to taste

Peel the tomatoes and the cucumber, and remove the stalk, interior ribs and seeds of the pepper. Chop the tomatoes, cucumber, pepper and spring onions as finely as you can without reducing them to a pulp (careful pulsing in the food processor will also do the job). Stir in all the other ingredients, tasting for seasoning. Serve at room temperature.

Sweet pepper salad

I've given quantities here for four diners, but you should be aware that this is one of those things that people will ask for seconds and thirds of, so cook a generous amount. This is a lovely sunshine-filled salad, assertively flavoured with garlic, fresh lemon juice, sweetly salty anchovies, and good olive oil.

The peppers are grilled and peeled before the salad is assembled. This makes them much more digestible (many people's stomachs are bothered by the indigestible skins of peppers in quantity), and gives them a wonderfully satiny texture. Allow your peppers to macerate in the fridge overnight (or preferably for two or three days), and you'll find that all the flavours in the dish meld sweetly into a gorgeous golden, silky whole.

To serve four, you'll need:

6 peppers - use a mix of red, yellow and orange
½ a lemon
4 anchovies in oil
3 cloves garlic
8 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper

Start by cutting each pepper into three or four segments (you'll be able to see the pepper's ribs - just cut along these). Discard the stalk and seeds, and lay the segments out, skin side up, on the grill tray.

Grill the peppers until the skins are brown and blistering. Put all the segments into a plastic freezer bag and knot the top, then leave the bag alone for about twenty minutes. The peppers will steam gently inside the bag, loosening their skins. When the peppers are cool, unseal the bag and start to peel the skins off. You'll find they come away easily. Do this over a bowl to catch any drips of sweet juice.

Cut the peeled segments of pepper into slim strips and put them in the bowl with the juice. Add the garlic, crushed or grated, the chopped anchovies, the lemon juice and the olive oil. Mix well, cover and refrigerate. The peppers will get better and better as they macerate, so feel free to leave them for up to three days - just remove them from the fridge a couple of hours before serving so they can come up to a toothsome room temperature.

Pathetically easy guacamole

I am almost ashamed to be calling this a recipe, given that it'll take you about three minutes to make. All the same, it's very tasty, and it's a great partner to the other Mexican recipes I've been making this week.

I have an interesting piece of avocado trivia for you today: the word guacamole comes from the Nahuatl word ahuacamolli - literally ahuacatl mole, or sauce. Ahuacatl is the Nahuatl language word for avocado...and it also means 'testicle'. Be gentle as you chop your avocados.

Some people assert that tomatoes have no place in guacamole. I think it's much, much nicer with tomatoes, which offer sweetness and a little acid to the mixture - if you use tomatoes, you can get away with a little less lime. Experiment at home and see what you think.

To make guacamole for four, you'll need:

4 avocados (I used the Hass variety)
6 cherry-sized tomatoes
1 medium onion
1 handful coriander (cilantro for Americans)
2 jalapeño chillies
1 lime
Salt and pepper

Cut the tomatoes into eighths, and cut the onion into small dice. Chop the coriander finely. Remove the seeds and ribs from inside the chillies and dice their flesh finely. Finally, chop the flesh of the avocados roughly and mix vigorously with the other chopped ingredients, squashing things around a bit in the bowl. Squeeze over lime juice to taste and season with salt and pepper.

Imam Bayaldi

I'm writing about Imam Bayaldi, a favourite middle-eastern aubergine dish (it means 'the imam fainted'), specifically in order that my friend Martin, who has a vegetarian to entertain, has something new to cook. Sorry Martin - I've been meaning to get round to this for ages. I guess I just like meat.

It's odd how many dishes from places all over the world have names like this, where religious men are felled by dinner. There's Buddha Jumps over the Wall soup (a Chinese soup so good, apparently, that even the Buddha was driven to interrupt his meditation with worldly gymnastics - I wouldn't know, because it's so expensive I can't bring myself to order it). There's Strozzapreti, an Italian pasta which translates as 'strangled priests', apparently because they are so good a venal priest choked himself to death when gorging on them. The imam in the case of Imam Bayaldi has, at least, only been driven to unconsciousness rather than unseemly jumping or choking, so I suppose he wins.

There's a lot of olive oil in this recipe. Aubergines are notorious for soaking oil and flavourings up; it's what makes them so delicious. If you're feeling bad about your waistline, go for a jog tomorrow. Life's too short to avoid aubergines.

To make two stuffed aubergines you'll need:

2 aubergines
1 red onion, chopped
6 cloves garlic, crushed
1 celery heart, chopped finely (make sure you get the yellow/green leaves here)
2 medium tomatoes, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
3 bay leaves
1 small handful fresh oregano
1 small handful fresh mint
1 shall handful fresh parsley (plus extra to garnish)
250ml chicken stock (substitute vegetable stock if serving to vegetarians)
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Begin by slicing the aubergines in half lengthways and use a knife to carefully hollow them out, making them into boat shapes. Chop the flesh you've removed into 1cm squares, and put it in a large covered bowl. Use a serrated knife (like a tomato, the aubergine has a tough skin and soft flesh, so it's easier to cut with a serrated knife) to remove long strips of skin from the outside of the boats (see picture). This will help the aubergines' flesh take on flavour evenly from the stock and olive oil. Try as hard as you can to avoid puncturing all the way through to the inside of the hollowed out shells, but don't worry; it's not the end of the world if you do.

Chop the onion, celery, tomatoes and the green pepper into pieces about the same size as the aubergine pieces you chopped earlier. Mix these with the aubergine flesh, the garlic and the herbs (apart from the bay leaves), a few twists of the pepper grinder and a teaspoon of salt. If you can find some flat-leaved parsley (which does have a subtly different flavour), use that - you can see from the pictures that all I had in the garden was curly-leaved parsley. Add three tablespoons of olive oil to the bowl and mix well.

Place the aubergine shells in a baking tin with reasonably high sides. Fill the aubergines with the mixture in the bowl, and tuck the bay leaves between them. Drizzle with some extra oil so the edges of the aubergines are well-lubricated, then pour the chicken stock into the bottom of the dish so it laps around the sides of the aubergines. Pour another five tablespoons of olive oil into the dish with the chicken stock.

Bake the aubergines, covered with some aluminium foil, for 45 minutes at 180°C (350°F), until they are soft. Remove from the dish and discard any remaining stock and oil in the pan. Serve immediately - the couscous from yesterday's post is a fantastic accompaniment (and, like this dish, can be made vegetarian by swapping the chicken stock for some vegetable stock). You can avoid aubergines which (as in the photograph at the top of the page) look like a chia pet by the simple expedient of not garnishing them with way too much curly parsley. I blame the very large glass of retsina I was drinking at the time.

Swedish cucumber salad

Here's another Swedish recipe for your smorgasbord. This salad is right up there with my favourite cucumber applications: it's sweet and tart, and spiked with aromatic dill and plenty of black pepper. This is a fat-free salad, and its clean and crisp taste makes it an excellent side dish where you're serving up oily foods. It works especially well, for some reason, with fish; this is just fantastic with salmon. If you want to serve up some smoked salmon (or, more appropriately, gravadlax) with your smorgasbord, make the dill sauce here on Gastronomy Domine, which tastes authentically Scandinavian and goes extremely well with these dilly cucumbers.

I'm enjoying cucumbers a lot at the moment, largely because my Mum has been growing some real corkers in her greenhouse. They're smaller than the kind you buy at the supermarket, but are extremely sweet and with a good flavour. If you too are in a particularly cucumberish mood right now, have a quick look at my recipe for Chinese smacked cucumbers.

To make a Swedish cucumber salad to serve six to eight as part of a smorgasbord you'll need:

2 cucumbers
2 tablespoons coarse salt
2 level tablespoons caster sugar (superfine sugar for Americans)
2 tablespoons boiling water
4 tablespoons white wine vinegar
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 small shallot, minced
1 small handful dill, chopped finely

Slice your cucumbers thinly and arrange in a colander, sprinkling with the salt as you go. Put a bowl on top of the sliced, salted cucumbers and weigh it down with the set of weights from your kitchen scales (a heavy book will do the job too if your scales are digital). Salting and pressing the cucumbers like this will drive out some of their moisture, leaving them much crisper, and better able to take up the flavours of the dressing. Leave the weighted colander for an hour (keep it on the draining board so the drips can fall into the sink). Remove the cucumber pieces to a large bowl, chill for an hour and pour off any extra liquid they might have produced.

To make the dressing, dissolve the caster sugar in the boiling water, then add the vinegar, shallot and dill. Mix well and pour over the chilled cucumber. Serve immediately.

I'm very fond of cucumber salads, and there are several on this blog - click here for a few more.

Aubergine caviar

This eggplant caviar recipe is a great way to squeeze every ounce of flavour out of an aubergine. It's extremely easy to make if you have a food processor (and only a little more difficult if you don't; I used to make it when I was a student using a large knife to chop everything very finely instead). Although the amount of garlic in this recipe looks a bit alarming, the garlic in the finished dip is roasted, so it's very mellow and sweet. You won't find it overpowering.

Traditionally called 'caviar' or 'poor man's caviar', this is not at all fishy, nor very similar to caviar. I think it got the name from the days when aubergines were much seedier; those seeds have a lovely texture a little (if you are imagining hard) like fish roe. Today, aubergines are usually propagated without the seeds, which many people do not enjoy.

This is a particularly good accompaniment for lamb, and it's really, really good with yesterday's kofta kebab. The roast aubergine has a wonderful natural sweetness, brought out by the raw parsley, which seems made to be paired with hot lamb. Try it some time.

To serve four as a mezze you'll need:

2 large purple aubergines (eggplants)
10 fat cloves garlic
1 large bunch parsley
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Cut both aubergines in half lengthways. Don't bother salting and disgorging it - the same growing techniques which have made modern aubergines near-seedless have also made sure they aren't bitter. Peel the garlic, lay the whole cloves on the cut side of the aubergines, and wrap each aubergine half with its garlic tightly in tin foil. Bake on a sheet at 180° C for 45 minutes, until the garlic and aubergines are very soft.

Peel the skin from the aubergines and discard it. Use a food processor or very sharp knife to finely mince the garlic, aubergine flesh and parsley. Stir in the olive oil. Add salt and pepper to taste and serve at room temperature.

Aubergine caviar will keep in the fridge for a few days. Try it on its own on toast for a quick lunch.

Smacked cucumber

This is as closely as I've been able to duplicate the wonderful cucumber salad at Fuchsia Dunlop's Bar Shu. It's an easy accompaniment and it's great at cutting through rich flavours. The dressing keeps for a week in the fridge; try making a double amount and keeping half for a really quick salad later in the week.

The smacking of the cucumber is an important first step in this recipe. It opens cracks up in the flesh of the vegetable for the dressing to seep into, and means that when you salt the cucumber, there will be more surface area for its liquid to escape from. I use the flat edge of my Chinese cleaver to wallop the cucumber, but you can use a rolling pin if you don't own a cleaver.

To smack enough for four (although we can easily demolish this amount between two) you'll need:

1 large cucumber
2 teaspoons soft brown sugar
4 cloves fresh garlic
2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
1 teaspoon soya sauce
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1 teaspoon Chinese chilli oil (leave this out if you prefer your cucumber not to be spicy)
Salt to sprinkle

Lay the cucumber on a wooden board and slap it hard with the flat of a cleaver until cracks have opened up all along it. Chop the cucumber into bite-sized pieces, put in a colander and sprinkle with salt to disgorge some of the liquid from the flesh.

Meanwhile, chop the garlic finely and mix it with the sugar, soy and rice vinegar until the sugar is dissolved. Add the oils and set aside.

When the cucumber has been draining for 40 minutes, pat it dry with kitchen paper and place on a large flat plate. Sprinkle over the stirred dressing and serve immediately.

Slow-roasted tomatoes

The recent glut of tomato recipes (the result of a glut of tomatoes) should end with this one, I hope; semi-preserving tomatoes by roasting all the moisture out of them and marinading in olive oil produces something so good that I think I'll be roasting all my future tomatoes too this year. It's a good method for dealing with large number of tomatoes, because when cooked in this way they reduce in volume so dramatically. The few pounds of raw tomatoes I cooked here resulted in about a jam-jar full of finished tomatoes.

Imagine how a tomato might taste if it was twenty feet tall and made of sunlight shining through a piece of red stained glass. Slow-roasting will transform your garden tomatoes into Platonic tomatoes of perfection, more tomato-ish than the juiciest tomato salad. The long, long cooking shrinks the tomatoes, concentrating their flavour - your whole house will smell of sunshine. Start this recipe in the morning; you need to keep the tomatoes in the oven for about seven hours. There's very little actual work involved, though; once your tomatoes are cooking, you can forget about them for the day.

My tomatoes were the cherry-sized Tumbler. If you have a larger variety, you will need to cook them for longer. You're aiming for a texture which is not quite dry, but not juicy. Test your tomatoes every half hour or so after seven hours to check for texture. (Try not to eat them all while you test. It's quite a challenge.)

For one tray of tomatoes you'll need:

Tomatoes, halved, to cover baking tray (about 2lb of cherry-sized tomatoes)
2 pinches caster sugar
1 level tablespoon dried oregano
2 large pinches salt
A generous amount of pepper
Olive oil to drizzle

Arrange the tomatoes in a single layer, cut sides up, on a baking tray. Sprinkle over all the dry ingredients evenly, and drizzle olive oil over the cut surfaces. Make sure you use plenty of freshly ground black pepper, which will help the tomatoes' flavour sing.

Place in a low oven (100° C - you are aiming to dry rather than cook) for seven hours until the tomatoes are no longer juicy. Pack them with their oil into a jar, top up with some more olive oil and seal. Add half a clove of grated garlic to the jar if you want even more flavour to your tomatoes. The tomatoes will keep in the fridge for up to a week, but since you are unlikely to be able to open the fridge without being tempted to eat a spoonful in that time, they probably won't be around for long enough for you to find out.

Ar Jard sauce

You've tried this before - it's the crunchy, raw vegetable relish served in many Thai restaurants. I served it alongside some sweet chilli sauce with Thai pork toasts. It's very easy, and can be prepared in minutes, so if you've a little time, try shaping your vegetables. Somehow a carrot tastes about 300% nicer if it's approximately flower-shaped.

The sauce is delicious with rich dishes like the pork toasts; it's fresh, sweet and sharp, cutting through the intense savouriness of the little toasts. I didn't use any chilli in this recipe, but if you'd like your sauce to be spicy, take a red chilli, shred it finely and add it to the rest of the vegetables.

You'll need:

2 carrots
½ cucumber
1 shallot
1 cup rice vinegar (available in some supermarkets and all oriental grocers)
⅔ cup caster sugar

Put the vinegar and sugar in a pan over a low heat, and stir until all the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat and set aside.

While the vinegar mixture is cooling, dice the vegetables into even-sized pieces. Exercise your artistic side if you like, and cut them into shapes. I cut mine freehand, but you can buy minuscule aspic cutters online and in kitchen shops - they're like fairy cookie cutters, and if you're like me, they're pretty irresistible. Slice the shallot into thin slices.

Pour the cooled sugar and vinegar mixture over the diced vegetables. Serve immediately.

Coleslaw

"I don't like coleslaw."

Mr Weasel really should know better by now. It's been nearly ten years; surely that's enough time to realise that saying such a thing could only have one possible result?

I made some coleslaw.

You'll need:

¼ celeleriac, peeled
5 carrots, peeled
¼ white cabbage
2 tablespoons double cream
2 tablespoons mayonnaise (make it yourself or use Hellman's - I've still not found another I'll allow fridge space)
Juice of 1 lemon
1 teaspoon toasted caraway seeds
2 teaspoons walnut oil
½ teaspoon sugar
Salt and pepper

Julienne (cut into fine strips) all the vegetables. This will be infinitely easier if you own a mandoline or a food processor with the relevant blade. The rest of the recipe is simplicity itself - just mix the lot together in a big bowl. Taste to see if you need more lemon, salt or sugar. Then serve immediately.

The idea with coleslaw is that it should be creamy and fresh. It's really not good if you leave it hanging around (like supermarket or fast food coleslaw); it needs its crunch. This means that it doesn't make for good leftovers. This will make enough for two people. Swap the mayonnaise for Greek yoghurt if you want a slightly lighter texture.

Mr Weasel's verdict? He finished his bowl in under a minute, wiped his mouth and said:

"Is there any more?"

Sweet roast winter vegetables

Outside it's dismal. The garden is kitted out in a million shades of brown and dark grey. So how is it that vegetables at this time of year are so brightly coloured? Right now, I can buy fresh, dark red beetroot, bright orange butternut squash, and darkest green winter herbs like rosemary and sage. The vegetables in season at this time of year have an added benefit - they're full of the sugars they've been saving up all year, so they are sweet and delicious.

Beetroot is a much maligned vegetable. Unsurprising, really; I can't think of many things which benefit from being drowned in malt vinegar. We used to be served it at school, and God, it was revolting. The holiday in France when I was 9, where I was served a plate of crudites including some raw, grated beetroot, was a revelation. Beetroot in its natural state is sweet, juicy and earthy. If you're only used to the pickled stuff and you see a bunch on sale raw, take it home and experiment with it. You may give yourself a delicious surprise.

Whole bulbs of fennel are on sale at the moment as well. Sweet and fragrant, fennel cooks to a delectable crunch, and here, where it's roasted in white wine and goose fat, it's just beautiful. I've used sweet onions (Vidalia) - these onions are not as easy to come across in the UK as they are in America, but Sainsbury's are carrying them at the moment with a recommendation that you use them in salads. They're so full of sugar that they roast to a caramel perfection. I'm roasting a couple more onions in this than we're likely to eat tonight - they're excellent cold too.

To serve three hungry people or four preoccupied ones, you'll need:

1 butternut squash, quartered lengthways
1 bulb fennel
6 sweet onions
4 raw beetroots
1 bulb garlic
1 handful thyme
1 handful sage
1 handful rosemary stalks
5 anchovies
¼ bottle white wine (I used a Chardonnay)
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
3 tablespoons goose fat
2 tablespoons maple syrup
Salt and pepper

Wash the beetroot and cut the tops and bottoms off. Cut ends like this will allow the edges to catch and caramelise. Cut the squash into four lengthwise, and slice the fennel roughly (into about five pieces). Divide the garlic into cloves - don't peel them.

Peel four of the onions and trim the roots and tips off, then push a knife through them so they are nearly quartered, but still held together at the bottom. Stuff each nearly-quartered onion with thyme, making sure there's a good amount of salt sprinkled over the cut surfaces. Chop the rest roughly.

Put all of the vegetables into a baking tray with the anchovies on the bottom. The anchovies will not make the dish taste fishy, but they'll give everything a rich, dark background flavour. Pour over the wine and drizzle with whole coriander seeds, maple syrup and goose fat. Strew the rosemary and the thyme over the top and put in the oven at 180°C for an hour and a half, or until the edges of all the vegetables are golden brown.

The wine and juices will have made an alarmingly pink sauce. Serve the vegetables with some crusty bread to mop up the liquid, and drink the rest of that bottle of wine.

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.