Celebrate the freshness of a new season with ricotta gnocchi with raw pea pesto, fennel sausage penne and broccoli orecchiette

Prep 20 min
Cook 1 hr 25 min
Serves 4

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It’s not as complicated as you might think to make this superstar aromatic curry from scratch – here’s a definitive step-by-step guide

For many of us in the west, green curry, or kaeng khiao wan , was our first taste of Thai cuisine – indeed, just 30 years ago, the Irish Sunday Independent felt the need to explain to its readers that Thai curries were “very different” from Chinese or Indian ones. Fresh and fiery, this modern classic is still a wake-up call to the palate today.

Prep 20 min
Cook 20 min
Serves 2 , and easily doubled

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Three joyful dishes for a new year: a mild yellow curry, street food-style fried pork and a simple dish of baked mackerel and rice

Songkran , the Thai New Year on 13 April, is a vibrant and joyous celebration marked by a famous water festival that symbolises the cleansing of the past year’s misfortunes through playful water fights and anointing one’s elders with water at the hottest time of year. Traditional Thai dishes play a central role, reflecting the culinary heritage that unites families and communities at this auspicious time.

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All four Thai flavour sensations – salty, sweet, sour and fragrant – feature in a prawn salad with green mango and peanuts and a pineapple coconut lime loaf for dessert

I still remember the first time I tried Thai green mango salad. It was, and is, a heady combination of flavours: salt, in both crystals and from fish sauce; sugar, preferably unrefined; fresh chilli, lots of it; citrus tang from the lime; and lots of aromatic notes from the herbs. It’s also very simple to bash together at home, as is this embellished version with prawns and peanuts. Just make sure you have a large pestle and mortar, which is the secret to many a great sauce.

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There is two Michelin star-level ingenuity going on here, even when they’re only slinging oysters in the deep-fat fryer or doling out bread

Pearly Queen , a newish seafood restaurant in east London, refers to the majesty of oysters, though there will be readers, older ones especially, who associate the phrase with those pearly queens (and kings) in suits and dresses festooned with mother-of-pearl buttons. They were always on the telly back in the 1970s, on shows such as That’s Life! and The Good Old Days , belting out Knees up Mother Brown and offering a route back to a golden time when all of London loved jellied eels and the pavements were clogged with folk doing the Lambeth Walk . Pearly Queen, the restaurant, instead takes a regal attitude to the likes of Carlingford Lough and Gallagher Atlantics , and serves them with scotch bonnet hot sauce and lime. It also serves crisp buffalo oysters, which involve dredging Carlingford number twos in panko breadcrumbs, deep-frying them at 190C, then drizzling them with a sauce made with sriracha and clarified butter, and finishing the whole, crisp, jammy, hot, salty mess with ranch dressing.

Pearly Queen isn’t slap-bang in the middle of Shoreditch’s head-thumping epicentre, but is instead, and rather wisely, down the quieter end, between Aldgate and Spitalfields, and opposite the fantastic pulled noodle spot Xian Biang Biang Noodles and the ever-reliable Sunday lunch spot The Culpeper . Just like chef Tom Brown’s first solo restaurant, Cornerstone , his new place isn’t terribly formal, even if the food is certainly serious. There are no strings of pearls or cummerbunds required, but you’ll definitely need the capacity to eat Cornish brill poached in squid stock and butter, with a potato velouté and white asparagus and dotted with squid ink, or cuttlefish lasagne topped with a 36-month aged parmesan-enriched bechamel.

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Crisp hake fillets with clams basted in a power-packed sauce of chorizo and dry sherry – let everyone dig in straight from the pan

Today’s recipe epitomises the vibrant spirit and rustic charm of so much Spanish cooking. I’ve always cherished the incredible power that food has to unite people, and to infuse gatherings with warmth and joy. This dish, a big favourite of my mother’s, uses succulent hake fillets and hearty clams, all bathed in a flavourful chorizo and sherry sauce. It’s essentially a tribute to Spain’s rich coastal traditions, but it also blends the earthiness of the land with the freshness of the sea, creating a glorious chorus of flavours. Perfect for sharing, it captures Spanish conviviality and the simple pleasures of a meal cooked with love.

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Whether small, waxy new potatoes in a salad or big floury spuds best for baking, you can always turn to spuds for satisfaction

When my garden was more of an allotment, there was nothing I enjoyed growing more than potatoes. The planting and earthing-up, the first green leaves poking through the soil and the mauve and white flowers like tiny stars were pleasures enough; the real business started when I plunged my garden fork into the earth and dug them up.

I no longer grow them – this garden is tiny – but I will pounce on any good-looking tattie when I’m shopping. Potatoes, pasta and polenta get me through the winter and those first chilly days of spring. Waxy fleshed or floury, “new” or as big as a brick, I always come home with a few potatoes, to bake, steam or sauté till their edges are crisp and golden.

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A layered bake of potatoes, risotto rice, cheese and mussels that will leave your kitchen smelling like the sea

Leafing through Luigi Sada’s book of La Cucina Pugliese , I couldn’t find riso, patate e cozze (rice, potatoes and mussels). I was looking for rice dishes in primi piatti , lost in the countless, great-sounding recipes for mussels and other shellfish from the heel of Italy – in short, the wrong chapter. This layered bake of rice, sliced potatoes, tomatoes, cheese and mussels is the first recipe in the chapter titled Les Soupes (oddly, in French). Sada crowns riso, patate e cozze , also known as tiella , “ the queen of minestre ”, and notes that it is made differently from town to town, and that this “mothership recipe” is tiella barese from Puglia’s capital, Bari. It includes courgettes and uses pecorino. Meanwhile, other recipes from Bari remind us that there is no such thing as a definitive version, each suggesting wildly different proportions and all sorts of rice, or not to include courgettes and to use parmesan instead.

What everyone seems to agree on, though, is that a rest brings out the best in tiella – they all advise waiting before eating – as well as the importance of opening the mussels by hand. Several people reassured me that this is just like opening oysters, which, after being defeated by shell-clenched oysters and shamed by a professional shucker, I didn’t find reassuring at all. However, it turns out that if you insert the point of a knife near the hinge, then run the blade between the two shells, mussels, while a faff, are much easier to lever open than oysters. Yet they’re no less dramatic when you pull apart the shells apart and see the soft, secret flesh inside.

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Make a jar of this killer lime and pepper sauce, and it will keep for months, on hand and ready to perk up all sorts, including this super-simple mackerel with baked beans

For many in the Caribbean, hot sauce is part of everyday life. While locals in Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana are hardened to the punch of scorpion, wiri wiri or scotch bonnet peppers, I have more than once made the mistake of drizzling chilli-based condiments a little too liberally on my food. The citrus in my lime and pepper sauce offsets the intensity of the chilli, making it more palatable for the hot sauce-averse yet still delicious for existing fans. It goes really well with this Caribbean play on beans on toast.

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