Adaptability and ease is the order of the day for this tinned fish crostata with chermoula topping and conchiglie with smoked oyster sauce

My cupboards are rarely without a tin or two (or three) of tinned fish. Sardines, anchovies, tuna, smoked oysters: they’re all usually on standby, and I’m crazy about all of them. I find them very reassuring, too, because they mean I’m never more than about two minutes from a meal, whether they’re just spread on toast, or mixed with a little Tabasco and lemon juice, perhaps, or some soured cream and herbs. I also use them to dial up all kinds of other dishes – pizza and pasta, say, delight in tinned fish as much as toast does, as do potato salads – and they can even be the main reason to make a particular dish. Starring role, not standby.

The answer, surprisingly, is not just to use more garlic (but you can go to town with the basil)

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How can we get a pleasingly strong garlic taste in our tomato sauce for pasta? Is the secret the amount of garlic , or how you cut it , or the length of cooking? Our sauces tend to be bland rather than zingy . The same goes for basil, in the same simple sauce – how to highlight its flavour?
Nancy, New York
I trust that’s pleasingly strong as opposed to harshly strong? If so, slow-roasting would be my initial go-to. Don’t turn on the oven just for this, though, but next time you have it on, cut the very top off a head of garlic, just to expose the cloves, drizzle over a little olive oil, then wrap in tin foil and pop it in the bottom of the oven for about 45 minutes. Remove and, once cool enough to handle, squeeze out the now amazingly soft and sweet garlic flesh, and stir it into your tomato sauce. The chains of fructose in the garlic will have broken down during roasting and given rise to something called glutamic acid, which brings with it that bold umami taste and depth we all look for in a sauce. In short, you’ll have created the most mellow but bold, sweet and pleasingly strong burst of garlicky flavour.

If you’ve not had time to roast it, it’s also fine to start with raw garlic. The more you mince it, the more the flavour compounds are released and the stronger the flavour will be, so crush or finely mince it, rather than slice it, if you want that garlic flavour really to penetrate the sauce.

In this quick and easy midweek recipe, the cookbook author goes big on flavour – with minimal washing up

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One-pan pasta recipes can be a little hit and miss. While one pan implies you won’t need to boil the pasta separately – meaning one less item to clean up – some people find the pasta has a tendency to overcook or undercook. Others are put off by the starchiness, but I like to think of this dish as a risotto-paella-pasta situation, where the starch should be embraced and mitigated with cheesiness and acid.

You can totally add frozen corn, or even peas, to this pasta for bonus veg. Just pour some boiling water over half a cup of them while the garlic is sauteing, and wait until they thaw before adding once the pasta’s done. If you’ve got any zucchini or golden squash about, you could add these in, thinly sliced, with the burrata.

A spring soup-stew known as scafata and typical of Lazio, featuring chard, potatoes, artichokes and new-season broad beans

Broad beans are back – long, green fingers with the odd black nail. And so are the warning signs, for those who suffer favism (a rare but acute haemolytic syndrome), as well as for those, such as my neighbour, who think that fave are an abomination. For fans, the first young beans are good raw, with pecorino or cheddar. In Lazio and central Italy, scafa is dialect for a broad bean pod, and scafare the verb for removing the beans from their pods; therefore, scafata is a dish involving podded beans. As you might expect from a dish shared by different regions, scafata has as many variations as cooks that make it, but, broadly speaking, it can be described as somewhere between a brothy stew and a dense soup involving broad beans and other spring vegetables, such as chard, onions, potatoes and artichokes.

The cooking method is what I think of as a steamy braise, which is also a possible chapter title for an as-yet-unwritten detective story. One steamy braise might start with a letter containing a feather and a ring. The other – this one – starts by cooking vegetables in a generous amount of olive oil. Once they are just starting to soften, liquid is added and the pan half covered, allowing the vegetables to soften further in both the liquid and steam, which (having done its job) evaporates, leaving behind a vegetable liquor and an olive oil broth.

Welcome to a win-win vegetarian Italian classic: it’s simple, delicious and makes clever use of old bread

Today’s easy recipe for Italian vegetarian “meatballs” is a great way to use up stale bread in a tasty yet economical way. I like them gently fried, then mixed with tomato sauce and spaghetti, but they’re also great coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried or baked until crisp and delicious. They’re good with steamed seasonal greens, too. Other variations on the theme include placing a cube of mozzarella in the middle of each ball and taking this dish to the next level. Unless I’m feeling flush, though, I prefer to keep things simple with just breadcrumbs flavoured with parmesan or a vegetarian alternative (or whatever cheese I have to hand).

These delicious fruits like to ramble freely and thrive in a warm greenhouse

Last summer, I had a text from a friend who was visiting Oaxaca in Mexico. “Can you get these in the UK?” she asked, with a link to a vegetable she’d just tasted. I enthusiastically responded with a photograph of the green orbs that were piled high in the crate in front of me. “Yes! You can get tomatillos here!”

They weren’t imported from Latin America but growing on the farm in East Sussex where I work. This golf ball-sized fruit with light-green skin, encased in papery jackets has a tart, refreshing flavour and succulent texture. By that point (mid August), we were busy producing more than we could keep up with. I did my best to eat as many as I could and am fairly certain that I’ll be coveting their tangy flavour every summer from now on.

It really is easy to crumb flathead from scratch, especially with some judicious use of Kewpie mayonnaise, says the cookbook author. But at a pinch, frozen fish fingers will do

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Recently I was at a bean conference (it was called BeanCon) in Mexico , where I picked up some tips for cooking better beans (that I’ll share in due course) plus some other useful bits and bobs over my travels: a traditional Talavera platter, some granite dominoes, a colour-changing T-shirt emblazoned with an axolotl and confirmation that fish tacos are always a sure bet.

There I was, in a Cancún taqueria, with two friends from opposite ends of the earth, perusing a menu of prolific taco fillings (nopales, huitlacoche) when the best-travelled among us suggested we go all in on fish. The other friend and I initially resisted, but he was right. We ordered six more, and it remained my go-to order for the rest of the trip. When in doubt, taco de pescado !

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 wide spread of lots of different dishes is my usual go-to, but at Easter I’m more than happy to let one (semi-)traditional main steal the show

Easter is perhaps the only traditional meal for which I’m happy to let one dish dominate. Normally, I’m all about the spread: a table full of food where all sorts – meat and veg, salad and fish – sit side by side as equals. There is something about a shoulder of lamb, though, packed full of flavour and cooked slowly until it’s more or less falling apart, that’s so symbolically tied up with both the season and the occasion that it turns me into a meat-and-two-veg sort of cook. Well, maybe a few more than two, but still, there’s a lot of space on the table reserved for the centrepiece.