Summer

The smell you get from slicing freshly picked runner beans and the warm, herbal notes attached to the stalk of a tomato are, to my mind, the very essence of summer. Put those scents together and you have a recipe that is pure pleasure to make. A dish that could only mean midsummer—something to eat with cold salmon, a slice of crab tart, or a plate of grilled sardines.

As much as I like big flavors, I sometimes want something more gentle, a little genteel even. French beans lend themselves to such cooking.

My version of classic Italian baked peppers, but without the anchovies and with a last-minute stirring in of basil. There are some gorgeous flavors here, especially when the tomato juices mingle with the basil oil.

Midsummer is a time of extraordinary activity in my garden. Every day brings with it a new shoot, a newly opened rose, a froth of lettuce seedlings. At this point I make a soup of the older lettuces and peas, and yet there is no reason why I shouldn’t make it throughout the year with frozen peas and produce-market lettuce.

Among the charcoal and garlic of midsummer’s more robust cooking, a quiet salad of palest green can come as a breath of calm. Last June, as thousands joined hands around Stonehenge in celebration of the summer solstice, I put together a salad of cool notes: mint, fava beans, and young peas—a bowl of appropriate gentility and quiet harmony.

Elderly fava beans are possibly not on everyone’s shopping list, but in late July, when their sugar has turned to starch and their skins are as thick as writing paper, I have still made a good meal of them. They make a fresh-tasting hummus that always surprises people with its green notes. A silk purse out of a sow’s ear if ever there was one. There is another recipe for this in The Kitchen Diaries, but with dill. Good with bread, roast lamb, even alongside a piece of grilled fish. Like the popular chickpea recipe, somewhat addictive.

You could measure my life in health-food shops. It is to them I turn for the bulk of my pantry shopping, from parchment-colored figs and organic almonds to sea salt and cubes of fresh yeast. Their shelves are a constant source of inspiration and reassurance. It is also where I first came across organic vegetables, long before the supermarkets saw them as a moneymaker or the organic-box schemes would turn up at your door. It was these pine-clad shops, with their lingering scent of patchouli, that introduced me to the joys of the organic rutabaga. To this day I wouldn’t go anywhere else for my lentils and beans, though I can live without the crystals and self-help manuals. There is something endlessly reassuring about their rows of cellophane-encased dates and haricot beans, their dried nuggets of cranberry, and jars of organic peanut butter. And where else can you get a incense stick when you need one? Health-food shops rarely used to be without a carrot cake on the salad counter, usually next to the black-currant cheesecake and the deep whole-wheat quiche. Good they were, too, with thick cream cheese icing and shot through with walnuts. I never scorned them the way others did, finding much pleasure in the deep, soggy layers of cake and frosting. This was first published in The Observer five or six years ago, and rarely does a week go by without an email asking for a copy to replace one that has fallen apart or stuck to the bottom of a pan. Few things make a cook happier than someone asking for one of your recipes.

I tend to use this chutney as a relish, stirring it into the accompanying rice of a main course. It is slightly sweet, as you might expect, but tantalizingly hot and sour too. Scoop it up with a pappadam or a doughy, freckled paratha (I have been known to use a pita bread in times of desperation). On Mondays I sometimes put a spoonful on the side of the plate with cold meats. Palm sugar (also known as jaggery) is used in Indian cooking and is available in Indian markets.

Vegetable fritters, given a savory edge with a flavorsome farmhouse cheese, are just the job for a quick lunch. Cheap eating, too. Grate the carrots as finely or as coarsely as you like, but you can expect them to be more fragile in the pan when finely grated. A watercress salad, washed, dried, and dressed with olive oil and lemon juice, would be refreshing and appropriate in every possible way.

Perhaps it was the carrot loaf of the 1970s, slimmers’ soups, or the post–Second World War carrot cake recipes without the promise of walnuts and cream cheese frosting, but carrots rarely offer us a taste of luxury. Fiddling around—there is no other word—with grated carrots one day, I wondered if there would be any mileage in a dish similar to creamed corn, where the sweet vegetables are stewed with cream to give a deliciously sloppy side dish. There wasn’t. Until I worked backward and added spices to the carrots before enriching them with both cream (for richness) and strained yogurt (for freshness). The result is one of those suave, mildly spiced side dishes that can be used alongside almost anything. In our house it has nestled up to brown rice, grilled lamb steaks, and, most successful of all, sautéed rabbit.

Broccoli doesn’t stir-fry well from raw. The beaded crown—the tight flower buds—tends to burn before the stem even approaches tenderness. Heads that have been briefly blanched in boiling water will, however, stir-fry deliciously, soaking up the ginger and soy or whatever other seasoning you might throw at them. In the last year or two I have taken to adding them to stir-fries of ground lamb or pork, letting the meat thoroughly caramelize in the thin pan before adding the greens. It’s a very quick, bright-tasting supper, invigorating and toothsome. But you do need to be brave with the meat, letting it glisten and almost crisp before you add the rest of the ingredients.

This tastes no more of beets than a carrot cake tastes of carrots, yet it has a similar warm earthiness to it. It is less sugary than most cakes, and the scented icing I drizzle over it is purely optional. The first time I made it, I used half sunflower and half Brazil nut oil, but only because the Brazil nut oil was new and I wanted to try it. Very successful it was too, not to mention boosting everyone’s zinc levels.

Late spring, 2007. Six small beets, round as golf balls and not much bigger, arrive in a thick brown paper bag, its edges sewn together with string. The air of moist Riverford soil and sweet roots wafts up as the bag is torn open, but the day is leaden with damp and cold and I have rarely felt less like eating a beet salad. Supper is going to be meatballs: fat, crumbly patties of ground lamb with garlic, dill, and parsley. It crosses my mind that a handful of grated beets might sweeten the ground meat and lighten the texture. What we end up eating on the coldest spring day for years is plump rounds of sweet and spicy meat, crunchy with cracked wheat and crimson with the vivid flesh of finely grated beets. The inclusion of the roots has broken up the solid lump of ground meat and married well with the garlic and clean-tasting herbs. We dip the sizzling patties into a slush of shredded cucumber, yogurt, and mint, given a snap of piquancy (to balance the beets) with a spoonful of capers.

Start this recipe the night before you serve it if you are straining the yogurt. To convert one cup of regular yogurt to 1/2 cup of thick Greek-style yogurt, set a strainer over a bowl and line it with a clean, lint-free dish towel or a coffee filter and pour in one cup of yogurt. Put the bowl in the refrigerator overnight. The next day, discard the liquid and scrape the thickened yogurt into a bowl. Serve this dip with bread or raw vegetables, or as part of a Middle Eastern spread with Cucumber Yogurt (page 184), Cucumber and Pomegranate Salad (page 85), and Chickpea Cakes (page 39).

You can make sorbet by simply freezing fruit and pushing it through a juicer. That’s it. While plain fruit in season is quite sweet on its own, you can top the sorbet with maple syrup or any other sweetener of your choice. Toppings could include chopped nuts, cacao nibs, or whipped cream. If the fruit freezes for more than an hour, it be will be too hard, and you will need to thaw it a bit before it can pass smoothly through the juicer.

In summer, look for blueberries on hikes in temperate parts of the country. Last summer, I found enough for an entire pie on a hike in upstate New York. Wild blueberries can be even sweeter than farmers’ market berries, while store-bought berries can have high pesticide residues. So if you get the chance to pick them yourself, you might end up with a healthier and tastier cobbler. Serve with good-quality vanilla ice cream.

This is a quick sauce that’s not overly sweet. Serve it over cake, ice cream, or yogurt. Strawberries, mulberries, blackberries, raspberries, and boysenberries will all work well, either on their own or mixed. For a piquant sauce, be sure to use sweet, full-flavored berries.