Quick

Any of the brassica family is good to go here. Most successful are gai lan (kai lan) and choy sum.

Of all the flavors that seem to bring out the rest of the cabbage family’s earthy greenness, few work as effectively as those of Southeast Asia. Ginger, green onion, and garlic have a natural affinity with chlorophyll-rich vegetables of any sort, but the saltiness of the fish sauces with which Thai and Vietnamese cooks season their food does much for cabbage leaves. I often serve this with roast duck, which appreciates such seasoning, or as a side order for a mushroom stir-fry hot with chiles and soy.

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.

There is something uplifting about refreshing food eaten on a frosty day. What follows is a light, fresh-tasting salad that makes your eyes sparkle.

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.

Carrots have been one of my quiet successes. The carrot thinning salad has become a regular weekly addition throughout the summer. Root vegetables no bigger than your little finger have a charm to them that insists you leave them whole. Cooking them, in shallow water so that they steam rather than boil, takes barely a minute or two. I dress them as soon as they are out of the pan, sometimes with a light, lemony dressing, other times with cilantro. To turn this into a main-course salad, add spoonfuls of ricotta or cottage cheese to which you have added pepper and some of the dressing.

The dressing is enough for four and will keep in the fridge for several days.

As cuts of meat go, the turkey breast steak is a relatively new one and will please those who like their protein neat, mild, and fat free. This addition to the meat counter has its advantages for a quick supper. It can be sizzled in butter with a few aromatics (bay, black pepper, thyme sprigs, and a curl of orange rind tend to cheer it up). Turkey still reeks of Christmas, but the white meat less so than the legs, which always smell like a roasting Christmas lunch. Red cabbage makes a satisfactory accompaniment. Go further, with a few prunes and a bottle of Marsala, and you have something approaching a joyful Sunday lunch, though without a bone to pick.

There will be quite a bit of this left over for the next day. Lovely reheated with cold ham.

February 2008. The garden is all frost and cabbages. Here and there the occasional fat seed head, some purple sprouts on bending stalks, and piles of sticks that I have pulled off the trees that overhang the vegetable patch. The earth is crisp underfoot. Soup days. The winter cabbages, especially Savoy and Protovoy, are blistered with webs and hollows that seem made to hold a sauce of some sort. At its simplest, this could be melted butter or hot bacon fat, but a cream sauce seems an especially attractive idea on a cold day, adding suavity to a coarse flavor and at a stroke tempering the leaves’ stridency. The juniper in the spiced cream that follows makes this a perfect accompaniment to ham or roast pork, though I have been known to eat it with brown rice as a main dish in itself.

The brassicas are much revered in Chinese cooking, and dealt with elsewhere in this book, but the white cabbage, with its waxy leaves and crisp stalks, makes an excellent candidate for seasoning with the saltier accompaniments. On cold, rather gray days, the sort of day when nothing much happens, I often crave robust, dominating flavors—perhaps in a quest to inject some vigor into the occasion. Strident greens tossed in lip-tingling oyster sauce can be such a dish. In the last four or five years, this has become one of those recipes I use as a “knee-jerk” accompaniment—an alternative to opening a bag of frozen peas. It is excellent with grilled pork chops, though I have also eaten it atop a bowl of steamed rice before now.

Sprout tops share a luxury of growth and strong flavor with many of the Asian greens. One cold day in November I married them to an impromptu sauce of essentially Chinese ingredients. It worked. The tricky bit was working out what, in future, they needed to share a plate with. A slice of ham steak; a piece of lamb’s liver; a fillet of mackerel, its skin crisped on the grill; a pile of sticky rice with some finely sliced air-dried sausages; a grilled mushroom the size of a saucer. All will work. Eminently.

Raw cabbage, especially the tight, white variety, would be good here if the idea of raw sprouts doesn’t grab you.

I often serve this as a main course, but it is in its element as a side dish. Its bright green and smoky-bacon notes would be interesting with grilled mackerel, or perhaps with thinly sliced cold meat such as roast pork or beef. This is essentially a cheap dish, robust and earthy, to which you could add caraway seeds if juniper isn’t your thing, or shreds of fat-speckled salami in place of the bacon, or a few croutons to make it more substantial.

Any blue cheese will melt into the sauce for these sprouts, but I have been using a lot of Stichelton recently, a relatively new, gratifyingly buttery cheese made from unpasteurized milk. A main course with rice or plainly cooked pasta, and a particularly satisfying side dish for boiled ham.