Vegetarian

The white sauce way. Yes, it’s a drag to make white sauce, but what you end up with here is creamed spinach of extraordinary solace and luxury.

Making creamed spinach without the traditional backbone of white sauce produces a quicker, greener, and slightly fresher-tasting result. It makes up in speed and greenness what it loses in nannying quality.

A good soup for a spring day, bright green and not too filling.

There are certain unfashionable meals I want to slap a preservation order on lest they disappear altogether. Faggots and gravy, traditional Midlands meatballs fashioned from pork innards and belly and wrapped in caul fat, is one such recipe (lardy cake—the name speaks for itself—is another). Pease pudding would be many people’s chosen accompaniment; others probably a pile of minted fresh peas. To my mind, the faggot needs a cooling sidekick to soften the blow of the liver and onions. A mash of rutabaga is good, but also this rather more subtle approach.

Rutabaga’s ability to sponge up liquid is shown to good effect when it is baked with butter and vegetable stock. When it is teamed up with potato and seasoned with garlic and a spot of mustard, it is as near to a main course as I feel you can safely get with this particular root.

I’m not suggesting we should inflict anything on our family or friends that they won’t eat, but there are worse ways of getting rid of an unwanted rutabaga than in this three-root mash. Works well with pretty much anything, even fish.

Even the smallest pinch of sugar will take any possible bitterness out of a rutabaga. The method that follows, of cooking the chopped vegetable with a small amount of butter and stock so that it takes on a deep, earthy richness, is one I use for carrots and turnips too. A very fine side order for roast chicken or something altogether more gamey.

Sweet squashes marry well with the earthy flavor of beans and lentils. This is apparent in the dhal and pumpkin soup in The Kitchen Diaries and here in a more complex main dish that offers waves of chile heat with mild citrus and the dusty “old as time itself” taste of ground turmeric. Dried (which is the only way most of us know them) chickpeas are the stars of the world’s bean dishes, used to fill bellies everywhere from India to Egypt. Their character—knobbly, chewy, and virtually indestructible in the pot—makes them invaluable in slow-cooked dishes where you need to retain some texture. Fresh chickpeas are bright emerald green and have an invigorating citrus note to them that is completely missing in the dried version. I saw some for the first time this year. I have long wanted to put lemongrass with chickpeas, partly to lift their spirits but also to return some of their lemony freshness to them (I use more lemon juice in my hummus than most as well). This recipe, which just happens to be suitable for vegans, does just that. Like many of those slow, bean-based dishes, it often tastes better the next day, when all the ingredients have had a chance to get acquainted.

Marrying textures and tastes to one another is one of the most satisfying pleasures of cooking: the soft with the crisp, the steamily hot with the icily cold, the spicy with the mint cool. I somehow had a feeling that crisp crumbs might work well with the soft, collapsing flesh of a squash. They do, but are more interesting when the crumbs are not packed on top like a crumble but lightly scattered over and between the pieces of squash.

This is my version of the Spanish omelette, being lighter, crisper, and more studded with herbs than the norm. The point here is that you can mix the herbs to suit your taste. Tarragon and mint are a must for me, but any of the more unusual herbs is worth using too: chopped sorrel leaves, salad burnet, lovage, or any of the lesser-known basils. Because the herbs are only lightly cooked in this recipe, their flavor will stay true.

Two of these cheese-and-potato cakes are ample for a main course with maybe a spinach or chicory salad to follow.

Potatoes cut thinly are not only good deep-fried but can be blissful when cooked with stock or butter until they are sodden and meltingly soft. I wanted a sliced potato dish that had the simplicity of pommes à la boulangère but something of the richness of its creamier cousin, pommes à la dauphinoise. This is what I have come up with: thinly sliced potatoes layered with garlic, butter, and grated Parmesan. Savory, melting, and, yes, rich, they are a near-perfect accompaniment for cold roast lamb or beef.

I am constantly on the lookout for potato dishes that will flatter a piece of meat or fish such as grilled mackerel, flash-fried lamb’s liver, or some thick bacon slices. This is such a dish.

The idea of a potato salad usually involves slippery potatoes of the purest ivory, but an interesting take entails a much rougher texture brought about by roasting them before dressing.

I say fontina because that is what I had in the kitchen last time I made this—it’s a fondue cheese that melts sublimely and doesn’t overpower the leeks. But Taleggio, another milky Italian, would be just fine, too.