Two light and sprightly Thai dishes for spring: mushroom tom yum soup with rice noodles, and crisp cauliflower in a sweet-sour tamarind sauce

” Gin khao yung ?” – or “Have you eaten yet?” – is a way of saying hello in Thailand. It’s similar to “‘What’s up?” and “How’s it going?”, and is an indication of just how important food is in the everyday lives of Thai people. These recipes from my book, Thai Made Easy, are two classics reinvented with plant-based ingredients – simple to assemble and suitable for most.

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

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.

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.

Meaty jackfruit takes the place of fish in this fresh and fragrant Thai-style curry with vermicelli noodles

Forget about breakfast at Tiffany’s: breakfast in Phuket is where it’s at. At Pa Mai, you can pull up a plastic stool to a table resplendent with the finest herbs, pickles and fresh fruit Thailand has to offer. And those are just the accoutrements: the star of the show is the khanom chin buffet, where coils of handmade, fermented rice noodles sit waiting for you to ladle over your choice of (frankly, an embarrassment) of coconut milk curries. Back home in the UK, my breakfasts are not quite so leisurely, but my evening meals sometimes are, and that’s when I’d recommend you indulge in this slice of Thai paradise.

Golden fried boiled eggs in a salty-sour curry sauce with a crunchy toasted coconut topping, and Thai baked chicken in a coconut sambal sauce

Thai New Year, or Songkran , is celebrated next weekend. Traditionally, water symbolises happiness and purity across the kingdom, and the festivities culminate in a huge nationwide water fight. If there’s an end-of-festival tradition more delightfully fun than this, I’m not sure what it is. I’d love to be in Thailand myself one year, water pistol in tow, but for now, I’ll be in the kitchen having almost as much fun. I’ll also certainly be staying dry while paying homage to the end of one year and the start of the next.

A diced potato binds this cheesy leek and pasta dish into a delightful gluey mess

Watching any pasta shape being extruded, be that through a small domestic machine or a vast industrial one, is hypnotic. Short shapes are particularly mesmerising, because the dough – made from durum wheat flour and water – emerges at speed from the bronze or Teflon-coated die, and is then chopped to size by a rotating blade. And then there are fusilli, whose helix form is created by an ingenious die that was invented and perfected in the early 1900s. Fusilli twist their way into being, the Syd Barrett of pasta shapes, emerging from the die in a psychedelic spiral.

The fusilli shape is an old one. In her Encyclopaedia of Pasta , Oretta Zanini De Vita traces the shape back to the fruitful Arab domination of Sicily and Sardinia, and the forming of the pasta by twisting dough around a thin reed known as a bus. The habit travelled and De Vita notes that fusillo became a southern Italian dialect term for any pasta made by wrapping or pressing dough around or into a ferretto , a thin metal rod with tapered ends, known as a fuso. As you can probably imagine, shaping pasta around a slender rod (or, alternatively, a knitting needle, bicycle wheel spoke or umbrella rib) and sliding it off makes for a particular form, sometimes like scroll of paper, at others canoes or even loose ringlets, all of which are still found in southern Italy. The industrial form, meanwhile, which took decades to perfect, is a helix or spiral and has since travelled all over the world. As with all pasta, the quality of the durum wheat used, and the way it’s extruded (through bronze, which gives texture) and dried (steadily, and with great attention) has a huge effect on the taste.

Both sides of the changeable season are covered here: in like a lion with hearty cheese and pickle roast potatoes, out like a lamb with a light gratin with lemon, capers and herbs

Easter is an in-between time of year. I have spent some basking in the garden, while on others, there’s been snow. Spring demands food that is both fresh and hearty. Today’s gratin is loosely based on one from the cookbook Sunday Suppers at Lucques – coins of early season courgettes with a perky salsa verde topped with golden cheesy breadcrumbs. And you can’t go wrong with this spin on roast potatoes with cheese and pickle, served with a crisp bitter leaf salad.

Buttery and soft leeks with a cheesy crusty topping – a relatively faff-free Easter meal

Parsley sauce is making a comeback – you heard it here first. I eat it a lot, in various iterations, but in today’s dish it is one of three things that are very simple to make and work beautifully in harmony. The other two are soft, buttery leeks and cheesy breadcrumbs. Together, these three building blocks make a perfect Easter lunch, either alongside potatoes and greens, or as a side for ham or roast chicken. I urge you to make extra breadcrumbs – they are addictive and go with everything. Thank me later.

Kitty Coles’ book, Make More with Less: Foolproof Recipes to Make Your Food go Further, is published by Hardie Grant at £22. To order a copy for £19.36, go to guardianbookshop.com