Both tantalising and restorative, zesty and creamy, this Greek take on chicken soup hits all the right notes and is perfect for Easter

Chicken soup for the soul is more than just an American self-help trope: as Carolina Doriti points out in her book Salt of the Earth , “every culture around the world has a restorative chicken soup”, from Romanian ciorba radauteana to Filipino tinolang manok . Creamy, tangy kotosoupa avgolemono is Greece’s version, and it’s “greatly healing and medicinal, and the most delicious, comforting, warming meal you will have”, according to food writer Georgina Hayden, whose Greek Cypriot family prescribes it for anyone feeling under the weather or simply run down.

Based on avgolemono, Greek cuisine’s famous egg and lemon sauce, which is a rich, bracingly sour mixture that’s often added to stews and other dishes (such as stuffed cabbage ), in the words of Rena Salaman , “its welcoming aroma always adds a bright note to a cold day, and it makes a very substantial meal by itself”. So if you’re craving sunshine but still feel in need of a little winter comfort, this is the dish for you. It also makes a lovely splash of colour at the Easter table, particularly if you’re serving chicken for the main course.

A fresh take on seasonal favourites adds Middle Eastern spice and cleverly accommodates leftover hot cross buns for afters

The daffodils are out, parading their annual magnificence, and I can’t help but be enchanted by the beauty of spring. While I’m not religious, I also can’t help but revel in the festivities of Easter. Eggs, lamb and hot cross buns are all traditional, but these fuss-free recipes give them a new lease of life. Buy in some flatbreads and pickles to serve alongside the meat, so you aren’t stuck in the kitchen for the whole day. After all, there are more important things to do – such as hunting for chocolate eggs!

A cheesy, mushroomy five-layer lasagne that is both sumptuous and just plain satisfying

A month ago I bought myself a stainless-steel oven tray. Not only was it the last one in the shop, but it was also the last of a size that was soon to be discontinued. Not that I needed further convincing of my need for this splendid, functional tray. It was only as I carried it home, with the bottom of the carrier bag bumping against my ankles, that it crossed my mind it might not fit in our oven.

It didn’t. And not by a fraction, either: it was as much as 30cm too long and deep enough for 10 layers of pasta. Even so, it was splendid – and I am dysmetric. I went straight back and swapped it for what I actually needed: a new but familiar 32cm x 22cm x 6cm rectangular porcelain dish for lasagne (I cracked the last one).

A hearty barley and vegetable soup with a cheesy topping and a quick miso- and ginger-coated chicken traybake on a bed of chard

Like any cook, I love it when people enjoy my food, and I get even greater pleasure when it’s also easy for me to make (and with minimal washing-up). I often turn to these one-pot recipes, which empty the pantry and make something comforting – a hearty, vegetable-filled soup and a speedy, miso- and ginger-coated chicken.

Yasmin Fahr is a US food and travel writer and the author of three cookbooks . Keeping it Simple, by Yasmin Fahr, is published by Hardie Grant Books (UK) at £16.99. To order a copy for £15.46, go to guardian.bookshop.com

A thrifty yet irresistible Neapolitan dish of tomatoes, nuts, raisins, capers and olives, all sweated down in lots of olive oil and tossed through a tangle of spaghetti

’E Curti is a small, very good osteria in a town called Sant’Anastasia, which is perched on the slopes of Vesuvius about 13km north-east of Naples. We made a detour and stopped there two summers ago, thanks to the trusty Slow Food osteria guide (although no thanks to my navigating). One of the specialities at ’E Curti is spaghetti with dried nuts and fruit, capers, olives, herbs and a local variety of tomatoes called pomodori piennoli . The dish came about as a way of using up the dried fruit and nuts left over from Christmas, and its name, ’O sicchje ra munnezza , is a humorous nod to this resourcefulness – ’O sicchje meaning “bin” and ra munnezza “rubbish” in Neapolitan dialect.

Such joking is possible only if you are confident of how good something is. And the combination of tomatoes collapsed in extra-virgin olive oil and the texture from the various nuts, the slight sweetness from the fruit and the defiantly savoury capers and olives, all held in a twisted net of spaghetti, is extremely good. Which is in no small part due to the local olive oil and flavour of the pomodori piennoli, particularly because they can be hung and kept for months, wrinkling and developing in richness. That said, it is absolutely a dish that can be recreated with other tomatoes, especially sweet cherry or datterini tomatoes, or even tinned plum tomatoes (that you like the taste of) drained of their juice. Being able to recreate this is also thanks to a recipe directly from ’E Curti itself that is wonderful in its specificity, suggesting (among other ingredients): 16 pine nuts, 10 raisins, 18 capers, eight olives, half a kilo of tomatoes and 1kg spaghetti for eight people.

Perfect for a light lunch, starter or snack: asparagus and artichoke fritters with herby yoghurt, and leek fritters with a lemony, green yoghurt sauce

Just three days to go, people! Three days until the equinox when, at 11.06pm, the sun sits directly over the Earth’s equator as it moves northwards. With both hemispheres sharing the sun’s rays equally, night and day are roughly the same length and the season officially, finally, changes. For those of us who look to our plates as much as we look to the sky, this change in season in the UK is marked, unofficially, by the arrival of one wonderful thing: asparagus! It’s here, and we can all boil it and char it and steam, grill or bake it as much as we can during its short season. I’m never one to miss out on the opportunity to make fritters, so frying is going to be first up in my kitchen, not least because it’s also at long last time to open the kitchen window.

A hearty winter soup with an ancient punchy pesto called cuminatum – can you guess its magic ingredient?

Frustrated by our inability to do not just urgent things in our small flat, but anything, I recently forced the issue and pulled everything out of an extremely large wardrobe. Weeks later, the empty wardrobe is still waiting to be removed, while the rest of the flat is inside out, there’s no hook without nine things hanging on it and no surface clear. Except one. One of three shelves in the cupboard above the washing machine – the one I look at most, with the tea, custard and jars filled with things that are not only tidy, but clean, so I can see what is cocoa and what is cumin.

In De re coquinaria , or Apicius , an extensive source of ancient Roman recipes, cumin is medicinal and a pantry staple. Its warm, volatile nature adds spice and stimulates all sorts of appetites. The dried seed of the herb Cuminum cyminum – part of the Umbelliferae family along with parsley and celery – cumin is ancient and has its origins in Iran. It is also precious and useful, which is why it travelled so widely. Three types are described in Apicius: Ethiopian, Syrian and Libyan cumin, all of which are used in various recipes, and also made into a cumin-based sauce called cuminatum .

Make an impression with burrata and blood orange salad, baked trout with tahini and peppers, and tinned peach tarte tatin topped with ice-cream to finish

What makes a good Valentine’s meal? Something to share, maybe, Lady and the Tramp-style? Or food to eat by hand, signalling informality and ease? For some, it’s a full-on steak and champagne feast, eaten under candlelight, while for others a baked potato eaten on the sofa while wearing PJs does the trick. All good meals are a relationship match of sorts. Some pairings are clearly going to work from the start, while others take a bit longer to persuade, not least because they seem an odd fit: trout and tahini, say, are hardly the most obvious couple but, once tried, they make so much sense. It’s tempting to force the analogies when it comes to food and love, so let’s leave the ingredients to do what they do best.

Who knew you could put the genie back in the bottle by pulsing stale breadcrumbs back into flour and turning that into pasta?

The @no_mise_en_plastic Instagram account is an incredible resource of practical tips to help cooks create waste-free kitchens, and often showcases chefs from around the world. The sourdough pasta made by one of them, Albert Franch Sunyer from the restaurant Nolla in Helsinki , really caught my eye.

In fact, Albert thinks leftover bread is one of the most versatile ingredients in the kitchen, and says his pasta recipe came from the need to use up stale leftovers after service: “We’ve been playing with leftover bread recipes since the beginning of Nolla, making everything – cheese crackers, ice-cream, crumbles, you name it. And we thought that, if bread is made from flour, we can probably make flour again.”