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

• Ask Ottolenghi: send in your kitchen questions

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.

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A grilled salad of onions and shallots with boiled eggs and tarragon yoghurt, and a hearty chive and challah bread pudding

It’s the oldest trick in the book: get some onions and garlic on the stove, cook them until they’re smelling lovely, and everyone will assume that dinner is just around the corner. One way to fast-track that process is to make those alliums the stars of the show, rather than just a background note. From shallots to spring onions and chives to calçots, onions and garlic are just two players in the vast and varied allium family. Unlike other vegetables, alliums accumulate energy stores in chains of fructose sugars, rather than starch, and cooking transforms them from harsh to super-soft and sweet. So, instead of making everyone think of supper, think of onions themselves as supper!

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Beetroot leaves are nutritious, thrifty and work brilliantly mixed into a hash with other leftover vegetables. Just top with a fried egg and away you go …

Hash is a clever way to use up the day before’s leftovers, because almost any combination of chopped meat and vegetables, all fried together and topped with a fried egg, is scrumptious. I’ve focused today’s recipe around a whole beetroot, including its leaves, which are even more nutritious than the root itself, full of vitamins A, B6, C and K, and rich in iron, magnesium and potassium.

Discover this recipe and over 1,000 more from your favourite cooks on the new Guardian Feast app , with smart features to make everyday cooking easier and more fun

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Zany caper follows Jo Hartley as a big-veg enthusiast defending her patch from elaborate ill-doings

Chaos reigns in this strange, funny and amiably anarchic mockumentary about dirty tricks in the cutthroat world of competitive marrow-growing, written and co-directed by film-maker Brook Driver. Maybe the script could have gone through another couple of drafts, but that might have removed some of the flavour. As it is, it feels like Thomas Pynchon had emailed Ricky Gervais an idea he’d had for a British comedy, and the result certainly has some laughs.

Jo Hartley (a stalwart of Shane Meadows’s movies Dead Man’s Shoes and This Is England) is Caroline, a marrow-grower and a divorcee who pretends her ex-husband is dead and is now in a kind of NSA relationship with her needy neighbour Willy (Celyn Jones); they are both mates with conspiracy theorist and fanatically competitive prize-veg enthusiast Paul (Richard Lumsden). When Caroline’s marrow is disqualified one year for having a hairline crack and then her other marrow (called Ricky Hatton because it’s such a fighter) is stolen from her garden greenhouse by masked raiders, Caroline sets out on a desperately dangerous quest to find what on earth is happening. But this involves hiring a supremely louche pair of private detectives: Louise (Aisling Bea) and Lawrence (Ray Fearon) a married couple who also run swinging parties that Caroline has attended.

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When you’re hankering after something starchy and satisfying, this soupy spring rice delight will definitely please the tastebuds

I don’t know whether I prefer saying risi e bisi or eating this Venetian springtime speciality, which is traditionally made to celebrate the feast of St Mark, the city’s patron saint, on 25 April. That said, this deliciously soupy, starchy dish ticks a lot of boxes for me at this time of year, not least because even I can amuse myself in a terrible Italian accent for only so long.

Prep 15 min
Cook 1 hr
Serves 4

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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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A particularly bright and zingy way with roast veg for spring

Preheat the oven to 200C/gas mark 6. Remove the stems from 2 large aubergines or 3 medium ones (about 600g total in weight), then cut each one in half, then in half again and then into short lengths (about 4-5cm). Put the aubergine wedges in a roasting tin with 125ml of olive oil , then roast for 30 minutes or until golden on the underside. Turn them, pour in 100ml of water and return to the oven for about 20 minutes until soft and golden.

Meanwhile, cut a 250g piece of cucumber in half lengthways, scoop out the seeds and the wet central core with a teaspoon and discard them, then cut the flesh into small dice and put into a mixing bowl.

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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.

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A city of welly-wearers, Birmingham has more allotments than any other UK local authority – some of its keen plotholders tell us why

On Dads Lane, where several Birmingham suburbs meet, there is a gap in the houses, no wider than a driveway. If you didn’t know what was hiding in there, you would walk straight past. It is a brisk, bright Sunday in late March, and behind the gate, a narrow road stretches out into a busy haven of growth and greenery. The city centre is less than four miles away, but it might as well be on the moon. After a long, wet winter, the sun is out, people are digging, mowing and cutting, and everyone has something to say about the badgers.

“Men’s piss!” I’m having coffee in the pavilion with John Beynon, a warm, 71-year-old Welshman, who has been chair of the allotments since last summer (“I’m not a president! That makes me think I’m a Trumpian!”), and secretary Bryan Foster, 60, who opens his jacket to reveal a COR-BYN T-shirt, in the Run-DMC font. The allotments got national lottery funding a few years ago, and they put up this hub, which will host the monthly Sunday afternoon poetry reading later, as well as a compost toilet next door. They also paved the road and built two disability plots. Apparently, the only thing that will deter a hungry badger from nibbling the crops is men’s urine. They joke that they might start selling it in bottles at the next open day.

Emma Rabbitt, 42, and her children Patrick, 14, Lydia, 12, and Seren, 11

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