Easy

I love buttery, cloudlike mash but sometimes I want something softer. I use a floury-textured winter potato beaten with butter and hot milk to produce a snow-white mash suited to mopping up the juices of winter recipes. The quantity of milk will depend on the level of starch present in the potatoes, so I simply stop adding the warm milk when I have the texture I like.

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.

Rice has for centuries been the obvious contender for stuffing a pepper—and indeed eggplant or a beefsteak tomato—flavored with caramelized onions, golden raisins, and musky raisins, and seasoned with capers, anchovies, cinnamon, or cumin. Small grains—cracked wheat, brown rice, the underused quinoa—are eminently suitable fillings, as is any type of small bean, lentil, or the plump, pearl-shaped couscous known as mograbiah. Vegetable stuffings can set the pepper alight. Piercing, cherrysized tomatoes, such as Sungold or Gardener’s Delight, or chunks of sweet steamed pumpkin offer more than just jewel colors to lift the spirits. They have a brightness of flavor very different from the humble, homely grains. They offer a change of step. A few hand-torn chunks of mozzarella and some olive oil will produce a seductive filling. Ground beef, the knee-jerk filling, somehow makes my heart sink. Mograbiah, sometimes known as pearl couscous, takes the idea on a bit, having the comforting, frugal qualities of rice but possessing an extraordinary texture, poised between pasta and couscous. Made of wheat and similar to Sardinian fregola, it is available at Middle Eastern markets.

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.

Anyone who has shelled a bag of peas will know how good they are raw. Far too little is made of their scrunchy sweetness, and I put forward the pod-fresh raw pea as an idea to throw into salads of pale yellow butterhead lettuce, cracked wheat, or dishes of cooked fava beans. They work in their uncooked state only when very young and small. Old peas are mealy and sour. One rainy lunchtime in June, I put them into a simple salad of Peter Rabbit lettuce, crisply cooked smoked bacon, and hand-torn ciabatta. The result—restrained, refreshing, and somehow quintessentially English.

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.

The tools for my winter gardening sessions tend to lie on the kitchen floor from one week to the next: the pruning knife, my leather-handled pruning shears, the largest of the two spades, the rake. They serve as a reminder that even though the garden may look crisp and neat from the window, there is still work to be done. It is during these cold, gray-sky days that I sometimes feel as if I live on soup. Roots—fat carrots, artichokes, and woody parsnips— are part of the lineup, along with onions and the occasional potato. I take much pleasure in the way something can be both earthy and velvety at the same time. Rather like my gardening gloves.

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.

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 have eaten these onions, at once caramel sweet and pickle sour, with bread and cheese, and that is really what I meant them for. But they also make a sticky accompaniment for a roast—maybe a fillet of lamb or pork—and are good on the side with cold roast beef, kept pink and sweet. I serve them warm rather than hot or chilled.

Onions were never a big deal at home when I was a kid. One or two turned up in the occasional stew, floating in the languid stock along with thickly sliced carrots, parsnips, and a bay leaf, but they were not stalwarts of our kitchen. In my teenage years I was finally introduced to the liver and onions so hated by most of my school friends, the onions cooked lovingly in our battered aluminium frying pan, blackened from years of Sunday fry-ups, until they took on the color of varnish and their flesh turned from acrid to a deep, honeyed sweetness. I took to this marriage of the intensely savory meat and sugary-sweet onions straightaway, though more for the glistening alliums than the panfried organ. My first attempts at cooking onions to match those luscious little nuggets I had been enjoying at home failed for lack of a heavy-bottomed pan and a little patience. The gorgeous, caramel-edged stickiness of a fried onion needs time in which to develop. A quick ten minutes in the thin frying pan that accompanied my crummy bedsit was never going to work. To make perfect fried onions, you need a shallow, heavy-bottomed pan. The temperature should be low to medium and the onions should be allowed to soften slowly. Winter onions, which contain less water, will produce a sweeter and deeper gold result. Summer onions, full of water, will produce rather a lot of liquid, which will have to be evaporated away by turning up the heat. The essence of frying onions is to let them soften in an unhurried manner with only the occasional stir to stop them sticking. You want their sugars to caramelize on the bottom of the pan; it is what gives fried onions their characteristic gloss and sweetness.

To balance the sweetness of leeks, we can use a little white wine vinegar, especially tarragon, or lemon juice. The addition of either removes any risk of the dish cloying. The recipe that follows is one of my all-time favorites for a good, easy midweek supper. What especially appeals is that although the sauce tastes rich and almost creamy, it has no butter or cream in it at all.

Even though much of the bitterness of this cultivar has been bred out, some extra sweetness is often welcome. Casting around for something sweet to scatter over a plate of steamed kale, I suddenly remembered the Sicilian habit of adding golden raisins to soft, sweet onions. The contrast between the leaves and their seasoning is strangely comforting. Quite when you might eat this is debatable. We first ate it with treacly rye bread and Gruyère cheese, next to fillets of smoked mackerel. It is tricky to know where it would sit most comfortably.

Kale is just one possibility for bulking out this supper of pork balls and broth. I use it because I like the fullness of its leaves with the smooth pork balls. You could use any member of the greens family, and particularly Savoy cabbage. The important bit is not to overcook the greens.