Three delicious and quick recipes for sourdough toast snacks

You'll learn to love your starter like one of your children (well perhaps not quite as much), and to savour the warm fug that bread-making creates in your kitchen. The bread you make will form the heart of your week's meals. You'll use the bread as toast for breakfast, sliced into generous sandwiches for lunch, alongside warm soups and stews for supper. You can use the starter to make many sorts of bread - and all of it with the wonderful keeping properties and health-giving nourishment of sourdough.

....the mouth-watering smell of a roasting chicken is enough to make a hungry man or woman cry. Here, for the moment in summer when the garden is bursting with succulent new green vegetables, is a one-pan dish that celebrates both tender chicken and summer veggies.

What started as a simple tasting project, to list and describe common supermarket varieties of strawberry has ended revealing much more than I expected.

I have rediscovered the radish. Their colour and shape is so wonderful. Tiny globes or fingers of scarlet pink, sometimes tipped with pale cream, sometimes unified in one glorious smack of colour.

One morning in May I got a call from Anna (my collaborator on Gather Cook Feast) saying that in order to make Vin D'Epine I would need to get outside quickly and pick the necessary young shoots of blackthorn, or wait another year. The result was a very pretty pink drink, which makes a really delightful springtime aperitif served in tumblers with a very little sparking water, ice and a twist of lemon or orange zest. As I write, it is the beginning of June, so depending on how far north you live, this weekend will be just about the last momen...

Make the very best Ajo Blanco.

The smell of fresh turmeric root is green and sappy, like the smell of a snapping elder branch when clambering through undergrowth (if, like me, you ever do climb through undergrowth), together with a wide fragrance of warm spice and a sense that your mother has just polished the wooden table with beeswax. It's magical used instead of the dry ground stuff in curries, but I was really intrigued to see if it could work with sweet flavours.

The Spring Cabbage called to me from the top of the supermarket shelf, muffled by its clear, flexible plastic wrapping, in a voice that was sort of squeaky and green. I picked it up and checked the origin. Grown in Lincolnshire, UK. Spring Cabbage. Now it had me.

Bake with three sweet herbs - sweet woodruff, sweet cicely and lavender