Italian tuna dip

This is a lovely starter for lazy days when you're eating outdoors. I like to dibble crudités (especially sweet batons of carrot) and good bread in this tuna dip. It's also very good spread on toast or crostini, and, cold or warmed through, makes a good strong sauce to dollop on bland cooked fish.

Apologies for the horrendous photo - by the time I realised how rubbish this looked, the bowl had been licked clean, so there was nothing to photograph.

To serve two as a starter with crudités and bread, you'll need:

1 small can tuna (in oil, brine or spring water), drained
2 anchovies
2 teaspoons Marsala
1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
1 heaped teaspoon grainy Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon fennel seed
1 tablespoon finely chopped oregano
½ teaspoon finely chopped rosemary
1 teaspoon finely chopped sage
1 teaspoon thyme
1 tablespoon finely chopped basil
1 tablespoon finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
1 tablespoon finely chopped mint
1 small clove of garlic, crushed
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon honey

Bash the fennel seed lightly in a pestle and mortar, and chop the herbs. Chop the anchovies very finely. Put all the ingredients in a mixing bowl and mix well until the dip ingredients all come together to form a rough paste. Add a little more olive oil if you prefer a looser texture, and taste for seasoning. Serve chilled as a dip or crostini topping, or warm through in a small saucepan to use as a sauce.

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.

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.

Asparagus with hollandaise sauce

Isn't eating at this time of year brilliant? The rhubarb is still sprouting away, and now the asparagus is shooting up as well. If you live in Cambridgeshire, it's well worth making a trip to Burwash Manor Barns in Barton, just outside Cambridge, where they grow tonnes of the stuff. It's picked fresh daily and sold on-site at the Larder (a very nice deli), where you'll find a lady outside trimming the stems of an enormous heap of asparagus fresh from the fields, and packing it in wrappers for sale. If you cook it as soon as you get home so the sugars don't have a chance to turn into starch, you'll find it amazingly sweet. Supermarket (and, sadly, market) asparagus is never available this fresh.

English asparagus is a real delicacy. Unlike asparagus grown in hotter climates, it pops up out of the ground relatively slowly, allowing the plant to build up a much greater concentration of sugars. Burwash asparagus is available as Class I and Class II (50p cheaper than the Class I this year) - I'd recommend the Class II packs, which taste exactly the same as the Class I asparagus, but contain spears which are a bit bendier than the ruler-straight Class I. (See picture for extent of bendiness.) The thickness of spear you choose is entirely a matter of personal taste, but do make sure that all the asparagus that you steam is the same thickness, or else it won't cook evenly.

Of course, dressing your asparagus with melted butter or just dipping each spear into the yolk of a soft-boiled egg makes for a perfectly delicious starter. That said, dressing them with a hollandaise sauce - essentially just butter and yolks with an acidic spike of reduced vinegar - somehow works out to be about ten times as delicious as either butter or yolk on their own.

Hollandaise sauce is a rich emulsification of butter and good vinegar (or lemon juice in some recipes), held together by egg yolks. I always add a little boiling water to loosen the sauce and prevent it from becoming too solid - a very thick hollandaise can be overpoweringly rich.

Making hollandaise isn't as intimidating or difficult as some make out, but it will need your full attention, so you need to make sure the answering machine gets any phone calls and ignore any cries of 'I can't find my shoes!' from the family for the ten minutes or so it takes to make.

Hollandaise is cooked at a very, very low heat. In order to stop the yolks from getting too hot and turning into an omelette, you'll be making the sauce in a bain marie or double boiler. I don't own one of the expensive dedicated double boilers - sitting a mixing bowl on the rim of a pan part-filled with simmering water works just fine and doesn't take up any extra precious cupboard space. To dress asparagus for four, you'll need:

2 egg yolks
2 tablespoons boiling water
3 tablespoons good white wine vinegar (I used Maille, which, for no very good reason, keeps turning up at my local branch of TK Maxx.)
225g (half a pat) good butter
2 peppercorns
1 bay leaf
Salt to taste

The quality of your butter is all-important here. I used Bridel from Normandy. Bridel or Beurre d'Isigny is fantastic here because of its rounded and smooth flavour.

Make sure the water for steaming the asparagus is ready and boiling on the hob as you make the sauce - you'll need a couple of spoonfuls of it for the hollandaise. Throw the asparagus into the water and put the lid on as you start to whisk the butter into the hollandaise - it only wants a little cooking, and should be bright green and ready when you finish the sauce.

Put the vinegar in a small pan with the peppercorns and bay leaf, and simmer it gently until it has reduced to about a tablespoon-full. Remove from the heat but keep warm. Melt the butter and put it in a warm jug.

Place a mixing bowl on top of a saucepan part-filled with water. The water should not touch the bowl. Bring the water to a simmer while beating the egg yolks vigorously with a hand whisk in the bowl. As the bowl warms, you will notice that the yolks start to thicken. Add a tablespoon of the boiling water to the yolks and continue beating until they begin to thicken again. Add another tablespoon and beat until the yolks are thickening once more, then add the vinegar with the bay and peppercorns removed, beating all the time until the sauce starts to thicken up again.

Pour the butter into the egg mixture in a very thin stream (as if you were making mayonnaise). Continue to whisk as you pour until all the butter is amalgamated, then remove the bowl from the heat. Taste for saltiness and acidity. If you want a little more bite to the sauce, squeeze in a few drops of lemon juice. Remove the asparagus from its water and serve with the sauce either drizzled over or as a dip.

Hollandaise sauce freezes well - when you want to use it, just bring it back to room temperature slowly.

Smoked mackerel pate

This is a lovely starter (or a light meal on its own), and looks a lot more complicated than it actually is, making it a great stand-by for dinner parties. I've prepared my smoked mackerel pate in little ramekins, but you can also take spoonsful of the pate and wrap them, Chinese dumpling-style, in a sheet of smoked salmon tied tight with a string of chive if you want something particularly pretty to serve. The finished pate is quite stiff, so if you line your ramekins or another mould with an abundance of cling film (saran wrap for Americans) you will also be able to tug on the edges of the film once the dish is cooled and turn out the smoked mackerel pate onto a plate. Smoked fish fans in and around Cambridge should head out to the River Farm Smokery in Bottisham for some very superior smoked mackerel.

I've used a generous amount of horseradish here. If you can find the whole root for sale, grab it and use a coarse grater (swimming goggles can come in handy here for minimising something similar to the effects of mustard gas) on it. Otherwise, the English Provender company does freshly grated horseradish in a little jar, which you can also use to make your own creamed horseradish by folding it into some lightly whipped cream with a pinch of sugar, lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste.

I really like this pate with melba toast. See this crab pate recipe for instructions on how to make melba toast at home.

To make enough for a starter for four, or lunch for two, you'll need:

200g smoked mackerel
200g soft cream cheese
Juice of 1 lime
2 tablespoons snipped chives
1 tablespoon snipped chervil (leave this out if you can't find any - it's easy to grow at home and worth cultivating, because it's often hard to find fresh in the UK)
2 teaspoons freshly grated horseradish
Salt and pepper to taste

You don't need any machinery here - simply peel the papery skins off the mackerel, check for any stray bones, then flake finely with a fork. Stir the flaked fish vigorously into the cream cheese and lime juice with your fork (if you don't have any limes use a lemon - I prefer the aromatic nature of lime here, but lemon will be just fine), and fold in the herbs, horseradish and seasoning.

Pack the pate into ramekins and chill until you are ready to eat.

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.

Salt and pepper prawns

This Chinese appetiser is one of my favourites, and it's surprisingly easy to make at home. Szechuan peppercorns are toasted in a dry pan until they release their amazing fragrance, then combined with flours and some other seasonings to make a feathery crisp and light coating for the prawns. Garlic and aromatic spring onions (scallions for American readers) are dusted in the flour coating and fried, making a crisp and delicious garnish for the prawns.

Those American readers are probably also wondering what these prawn things I'm on about are. Sometimes these linguistic differences become downright annoying. The United Nations (not somewhere I usually visit for culinary advice, but surprisingly helpful in this instance) informs me that:

...in Great Britain the term "shrimp" is the more general of the two, and is the only term used for Crangonidae and most smaller species. "Prawn" is the more special of the two names, being used solely for Palaemondiae and larger forms, never for the very small ones.

In North America the name "prawn" is practically obsolete and is almost entirely replaced by the word "shrimp" (used for even the largest species, which may be called "jumbo shrimp"). If the word "prawn" is used at all in America it is attached to small species.

So there you have it. Every time I say 'prawn', please substitute 'large shrimp about the size of your thumb, once the head has been removed', and get frying. For salt and pepper shrimp for two, you'll need:

500g raw, shelled prawns
2 tablespoons Szechuan peppercorns
1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons rice flour (rice flour will give your coating an amazing crispness)
3 tablespoons cornflour
2 tablespoons fleur de sel, Maldon salt or any salt with a flaky, crystalline form
4 spring onions (scallions)
6 cloves garlic
Flavourless oil to shallow fry

Begin by toasting the Szechuan peppercorns over a medium flame in a dry frying pan until they start to release their fragrance (about 4 minutes). Combine the toasted whole peppercorns in a large bowl with the black pepper, rice flour, cornflour and salt. This sounds like a great deal of salt, but this dish requires a lot, and you may actually find that you want to sprinkle a little more over at the end, so be generous.

Chop the garlic very roughly, and slice the spring onions into little discs.

De-vein (actually de-intestine) the prawns if you want - if I am confident with the source of my shellfish, I don't usually bother. Dredge them in the seasoned flour. Heat up a 2cm depth of oil in a thick-bottomed pan, and fry the prawns in small batches when the heat is searingly hot, turning until the coating is golden and crisp. Transfer to a kitchen paper-covered plate in a warm oven to drain and keep warm as the other prawns are cooking.

When all the prawns are ready, dredge the garlic and spring onions in the seasoned flour, using a slotted spoon to remove them from the flour bowl. Saute them in the oil you cooked the prawns in until their coating is also turning golden. Remove from the oil with the rinsed and dried slotted spoon and place on kitchen paper to remove any excess oil.

Arrange the prawns on plates, sprinkle over the onion and garlic mixture, and serve immediately.

Chicken and sweetcorn soup

This Chinese soup is a real favourite with children, and it's pleasingly economical to make. You'll only need two chicken leg joints (the joint with the thigh and drumstick attached) to serve four people.

You might have eaten this in Chinese restaurants. This is an egg-drop soup: this means it's thickened by whisking a thin stream of beaten egg into the bubbling stock immediately before serving, leaving you with delicious strands of seasoned egg mingling with the chicken pieces and the sweetcorn. If you want to make extra to freeze, skip the egg stage, adding it to the defrosted soup immediately before you serve.

To serve four, you'll need:

2 chicken leg joints
1 litre water
1 chicken stock cube
1 piece of ginger, about the size of your thumb, cut into coins
2 spring onions (plus extra to garnish)
3 cloves garlic
1 can creamed corn
2 tablespoons soya sauce
1 teaspoon cornflour
1 teaspoon sesame oil
2 eggs
Salt and pepper

Brown the outside of the chicken pieces in a large, heavy saucepan with the garlic, spring onions and ginger for five minutes. Pour over the water and a tablespoon of soya sauce, and crumble the stock cube into the pan. Bring up to a gentle simmer and keep over a medium heat for half an hour, skimming any froth off the top of the stock as you go.

Remove the chicken from the pan, and use a knife and fork to remove all the meat from the bones, chopping it into small pieces. Set the meat aside and return the bones and skin to the stock, and simmer for another half hour.

Strain the stock through a sieve to remove the bones, ginger, garlic and spring onions. Return the clear liquid to the pan and add the meat you took off the bones earlier and the can of creamed corn to the stock. Add a splash of cold water to the cornflour in a mug, mix well and stir into the stock. Bring back to a simmer. In a large jug, whisk the sesame oil, a tablespoon of soya sauce and the eggs together. Remove the soup from the heat and stir it hard, drizzling the egg mixture in a stream into the rotating liquid. Taste to check the seasoning, adding salt and pepper if necessary. Serve immediately, dressed with some chopped spring onion.

Watercress soup

A friend tells me that there's watercress growing in one of the wet bits of fen round here. I've been out combing the countryside and can't find it - and my friend (who will become an ex-friend if this continues) will not tell me exactly where it is so he can eat all of it.

In the meantime, I've been buying my watercress in the shops and at the market. There's plenty on sale at the moment, so head out and buy some. When you make this soup, try to find watercress with plenty of stalk - there's a lot of flavour in the parts you wouldn't necessarily use in a salad.

This soup is simple and delicious; it also freezes well, so you can make it in advance and bring it out when you have guests. When reheating, try not to bring it to a rolling boil - you'll lose some of the lovely green colour if you overcook the watercress.

For a starter for four, you'll need:

2 large bunches of watercress (about 150g)
1 large knob of butter
2 medium onions
2 medium-sized potatoes
800 ml chicken stock
150 ml double cream
Salt and pepper

Chop the onions roughly and sweat them in the butter until soft, but not coloured. Add the potatoes, chopped into medium dice and unpeeled, and keep everything moving around in the butter for five minutes until the potatoes are glistening. Pour over the stock, put the lid on the pan and bring to a gentle boil for about twenty minutes, until the potatoes are very soft.

Chop the watercress roughly (if you have any stalks left over from salads you've made, you can store these in the freezer until you make this soup and add these too) and add it to the pan, stirring for about a minute until the cress has turned a vivid green. Hold a bit of watercress back to garnish the soup with when you're finished. Remove the pan from the heat and liquidise the soup in a food processor.

Return the soup to the pan and over a low heat add the cream and seasoning. This soup can be served chilled, like a Vichyssoise, but I prefer it hot from the pan with lots of crusty bread.

Chinese spring onion pancakes

(That's Chinese scallion pancakes for those of you cooking under the weight of a transatlantic language barrier.)

When I was a kid, my parents acted as guardians to another girl at my school, whose own parents lived in Hong Kong. Wai boarded at school in the week, but used to come and stay with us at the weekends, and those weekends became positive orgies of Chinese cooking. Wai, my Dad and I sprayed the kitchen with a fine glaze of soya sauce and palm sugar every Saturday in an attempt to pretend we weren't in Bedfordshire, but somewhere far more exotic with zinc-topped tables.

These flaky, crisp, aromatic little hotcakes are messy fun to make, and they were one of our favourites. Like puff pastry, they're folded on themselves and rolled out several times, like a samurai sword (albeit one punctuated with onions), resulting in a glassy crisp surface and a softly flaking interior. My poor mother used to look on in horror at the mess; if you're making these at home, I'd recommend using a glass or marble board (if you own one) to roll the dough rather than using the kitchen surface. They don't take long, and they're a delicious starter.

To make six (serves three people as a starter) you'll need:

1 cup plain flour
⅓ cup boiling water
2 tablespoons lard (duck or beef dripping will also work well, but make sure you use an animal fat for the flavour)
6 spring onions (scallions)
1 drop sesame oil per pancake
Salt and pepper

Combine the flour and water in a mixing bowl, and knead the mixture hard until you've got a smooth, soft dough. You'll have to work the dough to make it smooth; keep kneading for a few
minutes. Leave the dough to rest for 15 minutes to allow the gluten to develop, helping the dough to become more stretchy.

When you set the dough aside to rest, you can use your spare 15 minutes to chop the spring onions finely and take the lard out of the fridge so it's soft when you come to use it.

Divide the dough into six pieces. Roll a piece flat, into as thin a circle as you can manage, and spread one side generously with the softened fat.Add a drop of sesame oil, and sprinkle one chopped spring onion over the top.

Roll the circle of dough up tightly like a scroll, with the onions inside. Use your hand to flatten the roll, fold it in half and use a rolling pin to make it into a flat circle again. You don't need to flour your board; the fat from the dough will stop anything from sticking. Roll into a scroll again, then repeat the folding and flattening. You will have a pancake with many layers, each with a little fat between them. The edges won't be very tidy; don't worry.

Repeat for each piece of dough. Season each pancake on both sides with salt and pepper.

Melt a teaspoon of the remaining fat in a large, non-stick frying pan, and bring up to a high temperature. Slide the pancakes into the pan, and fry on one side for about 5 minutes until golden. Add another teaspoon of fat to the pan and flip the pancakes over using a spatula. Cook for 5 minutes more, until crisp and golden, and transfer to a serving dish.

If you've got guests, you might want to use scissors to cut the pancakes into triangles. I didn't; we just put them on our plates and gobbled.

Chicken liver parfait

...And we resume normal service.

Apologies for the last month's lack of updates, and thank-you to everyone who emailed (or recognised me from the few photos on the site, came up to me in a pub, and demanded to know what was going on). Gastronomy Domine is now officially back in the saddle, so please start checking regularly for updates again.

This chicken liver pate recipe is hopelessly good, and chicken livers themselves are hopelessly cheap. You'll find them occasionally alongside the boned, peeled, pale and sad chicken breasts in the supermarket, selling for less than a pound (cash) per pound (weight). They'll be flopping wetly in a sad, bloody plastic bag. Ignore the aesthetics here and just buy as many bags as you can, and stick them in the freezer for the day you decide you want a very easy, exceptionally good starter. Defrost before you begin, and follow the recipe as below. A frozen liver will not cook as firmly as a fresh one, but we're not after texture here, since the livers will be blitzed in the food processor and then shoved through a sieve.

Far be it from me to condone lying to guests. But if you have an awkward type who remembers the grey stuff with tubes in from school and says they do not like livers coming round for lunch, please feel free to call this something else, and make like it's just lovely . . . meat. The really duplicitous among you will get away with calling this a duck pate; I defy anyone to tell the difference. The Worcestershire sauce, nutmeg and chipotle chillis may sound like curious additions to a parfait like this, but you can trust me here; they work, and are not overpowering.

To fill a terrine dish, serving eight for a starter or four for a boozy lunch, you'll need:

1 ½ lb chicken livers
1 tablespoon salted butter for sauteeing
½ lb butter for puree
¼ lb butter for melting over the top (say a prayer to the cholesterol god at this point)
1 bulb garlic
1 medium onion
3 shallots
Freshly ground nutmeg
½ wineglass madeira
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon chipotles in adobo

Rinse the livers carefully in running water and pat dry. Chop the onions, garlic and shallots roughly (don't worry about being too even here; they're going in the food processor shortly) and saute them in the butter in a large pan over a high heat for about four minutes. When the onions, shallots and garlic start to brown, add the livers, season with salt and pepper and cook for two minutes, keeping everything on the move.

Bring the heat down and keep sauteeing for another five minutes or so, until the livers are nearly cooked through. (You'll be able to tell by prodding them with your spatula; they become less springy as they cook.) Add several gratings of nutmeg (I like quite a lot) to the livers with the Madeira, Worcestershire sauce and the chillis, and deglaze the pan. Turn the heat off when the liquid has reduced to half its original volume.

Turn everything in a bowl and leave to cool. Take half a pound of butter out of the fridge to soften at the same time.

When the livers are cool and the butter is soft, put the livers in the bowl of the food processor and puree. Add the softened butter a tablespoon at a time once the livers are pureed, and keep processing until it's all amalgamated. Your mixture will be very soft (almost like buttercream icing), but don't worry; it will firm up in the fridge.

Push the puree through a sieve into a terrine dish. The straining through a sieve is important; it'll buy you a gorgeously smooth texture which you can't get through processing alone. Flatten the top with a spatula and melt the remaining ¼ lb of butter, then pour it over the surface. If you are particularly fussy, you can clarify the butter first, but I'm afraid I don't bother.

Refrigerate the mixture for a couple of hours before serving. I'm still in two minds as to whether this works most brilliantly with Melba toasts or with a nutty, rustic bread toasted in thick slices. Experiment for yourself and let me know what you think.

Thai pork toasts

Kanom Punk Na Moo, or pork toasts, are right up there with my favourite unhealthy Thai starters. If you're not familiar with them, imagine a Chinese sesame prawn toast without the sesame and the prawns, but with a moist and fragrant layer of pork instead. The little toasts are deep-fried, which makes the bread crisp and seals the rich, savoury coating's flavour in. Some recipes use prawn in the mixture with the pork, but this is as authentic, less expensive and really, really delicious. This is unusual in being a Thai recipe whose ingredients are pretty easy to get hold of in the UK.

It's important that you use boring old supermarket white, sliced bread in this recipe. Your home-made, stone-ground wheat loaf may be delicious toasted for breakfast, but it just won't work in this recipe; you need plain old white bread here. (There are a few things for which nothing but sliced white will do, including the fried bread which accompanies your cooked breakfast.)

To serve six you'll need:

750g minced pork
6 tablespoons mushroom soya sauce (available at oriental grocers' shops)
1 heaped tablespoon cornflour
2 handfuls minced coriander
4 chopped spring onions
6 large cloves garlic, crushed
1 egg
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
8 slices white bread
Oil for deep frying

Remove the crusts from the bread and cut each slice into quarters.

Mix the pork, soya sauce, cornflour, coriander, spring onions, garlic, egg and pepper in a large bowl, using your hands, until everything is well blended. Use a spatula to press a tablespoon or so of mixture into each little piece of bread, cutting more bread if you need it.

Heat fresh oil to 190°C, and fry the little toasts in batches for six minutes each. That's it; you're done. Serve with Thai sweet chilli sauce and Ar Jard sauce.

Crab pate with Melba toast

Something deep in the lizard-bit of my brain seems to be saying that I need to eat more fish. Ever alert to what my inner lizard is telling me, I've been eating a lot of seafood this week. And when the weather's warm and humid, nothing is nicer than a glass of wine and some chilled crab pate on Melba toast.

Dressed crab is always curiously inexpensive in the supermarket - doubly curious, when you consider how delicious it is, and how easy it is to work with, all ready-shucked and packed in its own carapace. To make enough pate for two smug fish-lovers, you'll need:

1 dressed crab
2 tablespoons melted butter
Leafy parts of a stick of celery
½ teaspoon quince jelly (if you can't get hold of quince jelly, use redcurrant)
1 teaspoon tarragon leaves
Small handful chervil
Juice of half a lemon
½ clove crushed garlic
Pinch of cayenne pepper
Salt and pepper

Put all the ingredients in the blender and whizz until you have a fine purée. Pack the resulting pate into a greased mould (I used a silicone muffin mould, which looks like a timbale mould in shape, but is easier to handle) and chill for an hour, until the pate is firm enough to turn out in one piece. Dress with chives and some more chervil.

The tiny amount of fruit jelly in this really brings out the strangely fruity sweetness of the crab. We ate the pate with Melba toast, which is delicious and looks dreadfully complicated. It's actually simplicity itself. Just toast white sliced bread in the toaster as usual, and when it's done, slice off the crusts. Separate the two sides of the slice of toast from each other by pushing a sharp knife through the soft bread in the middle of the slice, and grill the white side of each bifurcated toastlet under the grill until it's golden and curling. Pour a glass of Semillion Chardonnay and get munching.

Seared scallops in smoked prosciutto with chilli oil

Waitrose is currently carrying a really good prosciutto affumicato - a cold-smoked, raw Italian ham. It's delicious straight out of the packet, but I've been wondering for a few weeks what I could do with it in a recipe. It needed to be something simple; this stuff is very good indeed, and deserves not to have its flavour masked with too many other ingredients.

The answer came to me at the fish counter at the end of the day. There were a dozen queen scallops left - small, but sweet and firm, and not pumped full of weight-increasing water. (If you are shopping for shucked scallops, ignore any which are soft and white - they will be full of water. A non-watered scallop is a creamy colour, and is sometimes tinted the palest pink.) They were labelled with some money off, since they'd have gone out in the trash at closing time if they'd not been bought. I snaffled them along with a dozen slices of the prosciutto and ran in the direction of my frying pan.

Pork goes curiously well with shellfish. One of the most memorable meals I've had in years of French eating - I even lived in Paris for a bit, hunting down that perfect supper - was a silky, heady casserole of pig's trotters and beautiful baby clams. (The restaurant was le Pont de l'Ouysse in the Dordogne, for those doing the stereotypically British thing this summer. Turn your speakers off before clicking that link - there's French electric guitar midi on the jump page.) Of course, the Chinese specialise in the pork/shellfish combination; much of the filling in your dim sum is made from a minced prawn and pork mixture, and some of the more wonderful things I've had with scallops, preserved oysters and abalone have been heavy on the stewed belly pork.

This being the case, I got some Chinese chilli oil out of the fridge to go with the scallops. I usually have a few jars on the go; one with a dried shrimp base, one with just garlic and chillis (surprisingly good in Italian sauces) and one with a dried scallop base. This was Way On's XO scallop version (many Chinese supermarkets in the UK carry it - if you can't find it, use one with shrimp), and it finished the dish beautifully, making the scallops darkly rich and spicy without tasting characteristically Asian.

For twelve little parcels, you'll need:

12 queen scallops, without roe
12 slices of prosciutto affumicato (use Speck if you can't find the prosciutto)
1 teaspoon chilli oil (see above)
Olive oil

Wrap each scallop, parcel-style, in a piece of the prosciutto. You don't need to secure with a skewer; the ham clings to itself nicely, and once heated will not be soft enough to unravel. Don't season - there's plenty of salt and spicing in the ham, and you'll get heat from the chilli oil. Heat the olive oil over a medium flame for a couple of minutes.

Cook the scallops for precisely four minutes on each side (you want the ham to be crisp and golden where it's touched the pan, but the scallops should be only barely cooked in the centre to keep them sweet and toothsome). Remove to a serving dish and drizzle with the chilli oil - it's packed with searingly hot chillis, so a little goes a long way. Serve with crusty bread and a Sauvignon Blanc.

Honey-mustard dill sauce for smoked salmon

Before we get onto the recipe, some family boasting is in order. Mr Weasel had his viva voce yesterday, and was let out after two hours fierce examining with no corrections to his thesis. This means that in June, he'll become Dr Weasel at a ceremony for which I get to wear a hat. Well done, sweetheart!

Onto the food.

Evelyn Rose is an English cookery writer who specialises in Jewish family recipes and entertaining on a large scale. This recipe is from her The Entertaining Cookbook, published in 1980, which I seem to find myself drawn back to on every large family occasion. She has a calm and deft ability with cooking for large groups, and all the recipes I've tried have been foolproof. I use my mother's copy, which she's had for twenty years; most of its pages are falling apart now, and the cucumber salad page is splattered with two decades of the best sugary Swedish dressing in the world. Sadly, the book seems to be out of print now, although I have spotted second-hand copies online for around £40. Fortunately, I am frequently to be found in second-hand bookshops, so it's likely I'll find a cheaper copy some time before I get too old to read.

Update: I finally found a copy of the book in late 2007, at the tender age of 31, for a mere quid on good old eBay.

This dill mustard is far better than the stuff from a jar. It's my favourite accompaniment for smoked salmon; try it with salmon, some buttered rye bread and a small salad. Evelyn Rose says it keeps in the fridge for a month - here, it's never hung around long for enough for me to test that assertion. The ingredients list may sound a little unorthodox, but I promise you it's the nicest honey-mustard dill sauce you've tried.

To make a small bowlful (enough for ten people or more) you'll need:

4 rounded tablespoons mayonnaise (I used Hellmann's)
1 level tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 level tablespoon clear honey
2 teaspoons soya sauce (I used Kikkoman)
White pepper
2 teaspoons chopped fresh dill (or more to taste)

Just mix all the ingredients together in a small bowl until everything is well-blended, and chill for a few hours before serving so the flavours mingle. I prefer freshly ground black pepper in this recipe, and usually use far more dill - two of the regular-sized supermarket packs, or about five tablespoons when chopped finely.

Lettuce wraps

Every country has a dish it thinks is Chinese. These dishes don't originate in China, but are often good enough to be celebrated and enjoyed. In the UK, made-up Chinese food includes crispy 'seaweed' (deep-fried, shredded greens served with fish floss) and the ubiquitous chop suey. Americans can point at that peculiar sweet mustard, Crab Rangoon (no self-respecting Chinese dish contains cheese), and General Tso's chicken.

The lettuce wrap is another of these mongrel dishes, but it's so good that you can easily forgive it its roots and embrace it. Preferably with tongue and teeth.

To serve four people, you'll need:

4 chicken breasts
1 inch piece of ginger, diced
4 cloves of garlic, diced
8 spring onions, sliced
1 red, yellow or orange pepper, diced
1 can water chestnuts, diced
3 sticks celery, diced
5 dried shitake mushrooms, soaked in boiling water and diced
1 teaspoon sugar
1 wine-glass Chinese rice wine
4 tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons soya sauce
1 teaspoon cornflour
1 teaspoon sugar
Pinch of MSG (as usual, leave this out if you must, but read this first)
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 large lettuce (I used a Cos)

Put the chicken in a blender, and pulse gently until it's chopped finely. You're aiming for a texture like mince here, not like slurry, so be careful.

Stir-fry the ginger, garlic and spring onions together for three minutes, until their fragrance is filling the kitchen. Add the chicken and the cornflour, and stir-fry until the chicken is all white. Throw in the diced vegetables, stir-fry for another two minutes, then add the rice wine, the oyster sauce and the soya sauce with the MSG and sugar. Let the liquid ingredients start to bubble, and when the cornflour has made the sauce glossy and thick, stir in the sesame oil and transfer the mixture to a warm bowl.

Serve by spooning into the bowl of a lettuce leaf. I used a Cos lettuce, partly because of the charming spoon shape of a Cos leaf, but mostly because my choice was extremely limited; it's near-impossible to buy whole lettuces these days, the whole world having gone mad for pre-mixed salads in bags.

Wrap the leaf around the hot, textured filling, and then wrap your mouth around the whole thing.