5 Ingredients or Fewer

The first time I made this, I discovered a wealth of delights: the way the tomato holds the little cheese like an eggcup holds an egg; the point at which the juice of the tomato and the melted cheese meet; and the subtle difference in smell and flavor depending on which cheese you use. Two of these tomatoes are lunch for me if there is something else on the table—a couscous salad, perhaps, or some bread and salami. Others may want more.

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.

Young potatoes of any sort roast sweetly, especially if scrubbed hard so their skin almost disappears and they are allowed to develop a sticky, golden coating in the oven. They need a few minutes in boiling water before they hit the oven if they are not to toughen as they roast. I match them with robust ingredients—slices of fat-flecked salami or perhaps a spoonful of softly fibrous pork rillettes—as a Saturday lunch.

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.

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.

The thyme is essential here, adding an important herbal note to the general sugar-fest. You need something savory alongside, and nothing works quite so well as gloriously rare roast beef. Sausages come a close second.

I cook them in dripping or butter for preference. Peanut oil if there is nothing else. They take forty minutes to color interestingly but an hour will turn them into vegetable toffee. The initial steaming is worth the ten minutes’ wait and the pan to rinse and dry, helping as it does to keep them moist during the roasting and preventing them from toughening up in the heat.

Banana shallots (sometimes known as torpedo), the most generously proportioned and mild tasting of the shallot family, roast superbly, their translucent flesh almost melting inside their skins. I have eaten them this way with creamy goat cheese mashed with herbs (thyme, tarragon, chives) and with a lump of good, mouth-puckering Cheddar too. Yet they will also stand as a vegetable. I think it worth including them here for that alone.

I often take bright young leaves and their sprouting shoots, cook them briefly in boiling water, then toss them into sizzling butter seasoned with garlic and lemon as an accompaniment for grilled pork belly, a roast fillet of lamb, or a nice piece of fish. That said, it still takes up more room on the plate than the meat. Red Russian kale, which I often cook in this way, is finer boned than the curly plumes we know so well. The heavily laced leaves have a fragility to them, and wilt quickly after picking. For all their gentility and mauve-pink blush, they still carry something of the coarseness of the stronger stuff.

This little pancake has a springlike freshness with its filling of young, peeled fava beans and freckling of feathery dill. Curiously, it is not at all “eggy.” In fact, a devout noneater of eggs, I have been known to finish a whole one by myself. A drizzle of yogurt over its crust or a few slices of smoked salmon at its side are possibilities too. I really think this is only worth making with the smallest of fava beans, and they really must be peeled.

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.

This is one of those recipes I find come in handy on several levels. I use it as both starter and main dish—often with parsley-flecked couscous on the side—but it is also a fine dish to bring out as one of the constituents of a laid-back summer meal in the garden. The sort where you just put a few simple dishes on the table and let everyone help themselves.

The purity of a leaf and its edible stalk, lightly steamed and served “naked,” is always somehow life enhancing. But occasionally I want a more sensuous treatment (a welcome lift in times of recession). The spiced cream with juniper and peppercorns recipe that I occasionally use with green leaves makes them a particularly sound accompaniment for grilled or roast pork, or for poached ham or chicken, but I also find it perfectly acceptable with brown rice as a main dish in itself.

Perhaps because of the thickness of its stalks, or the unruly tangle of leaves on the plate, chard always manages to exude a rustic quality. It is not really a vegetable for “fine dining.” Blanched and seasoned with young, mild garlic and a squeeze of lemon, the stems and leaves become a useful side dish for any big-flavored main course. Allowed to cool, they also work with cold roast meats, thickly torn chunks of mozzarella, wedges of warm savory tarts, or coarse-textured “country” pâté. In other words, a distinctly useful thing to have in the fridge.