Every shade of pink and packed with flavours in a single bite - bitter radicchio, sour grapefruit and smoky sweet trout. A great recipe for pre-dinner nibbles or deconstruct for a hearty spring salad.

It is, as I write, snowing. And that’s just typical isn’t it? The moment COVID restrictions allowed us to meet up to 6 people outside the temperature plummets. Still, if you too are sitting around a fire pit in ski kit, I have COVID-friendly snack suggestions. They can also be eaten with wooly gloves on. Which is an unforeseen benefit…

Another quick Easter treat for those in need of a speedy seasonal treat and without a kitchen. These tiffin squares, a sort of Eastery Rocky Road, will power my Bank Holiday weekend which is to be filled with shoveling into the raised beds the three tonnes of compost which has just arrived….

This recipe is a quick fix pudding that I loosely term 'trifle' or 'pudding pot'. It is packed with simnel cake, lemon curd, marzipan, candied peel and almonds - all the flavours of Easter in a single pot, and a five minute job

The hero harvest this week is asparagus. But don’t imagine that’s because I like it. I mean, I love to eat it, sure. But asparagus is, in my view, petulant. I wouldn’t grow it if you paid me. In fact, I was paid to look after a bed of it once when I was working in an organic kitchen garden and it was enough to put me off for life.

I am just about back in control. Of the rhubarb, that is. I’ve been compotting, pickling, preserving, baking, freezing (less romantic, but very practical) and have worked my way through the armfuls of stems that were plump and in need of urgent picking. I’ve made a fair few savoury dishes with the fat, greener stems. But the pinkest ends of the daintiest stems I have saved for pudding purposes….

I caught 30 seconds of the TV talent show Great British Menu the other day. A chef from a fancy restaurant was describing the preparation of his dish. He talked of dehydrating this, sous-vide-ing that, ballotining and steaming some long-suffering piece of meat, then braising it overnight before glazing and roasting to serve. (I exaggerate for effect, but not much and the general tenor is accurate.) The plate was a throng of reductions, foams, tuilles, dots of jellies, smears of this and shards of that. Whilst it surely would have tasted terrific, I couldn’t help thinking that there was more ego on the plate than food.

The veg patch is very needy at the moment. Planting seeds, replanting seeds because the mice break into the cold frame and eat them, spreading compost on the beds, cutting back fruit canes, feeding fruit trees, potting on seedlings, watering seedlings… and all accompanied by the damp, chill of drizzle that seeps through your garden gloves and into your bones. So this week, I’ll be brief so we can all get back to shovelling compost.

Forced rhubarb season is upon us. Regulars will know my obsession with rhubarb so we don’t need to go over it again. Suffice to say that every year, when the thin, pink stems arrive in the shops I am never, ever, short of new ideas for using them. This week I made this hazelnut (though it could just as easily have been walnut) and rhubarb cake, inspired by a Nigel Slater plum cake recipe.

There’s so much rhubarb in the patch that it is becoming a bit of a problem. Rampant and unwieldy, it is technically caged in a spot removed from the main veg beds to protect it from the rabbits, but I think the barbed wire is really to keep it from taking over the EVERYTHING. Anyway, its abundance means I find myself with the first of many main crop rhubarb gluts.