After 5 minutes, add the honey, curry and coriander seeds and sauté for another 3-4 minutes.

Add the stock and cream, bring to a boil, and simmer uncovered for 30 minutes or until the artichokes are tender.

Correct the seasoning with a bit of pepper (you should not need to add salt since the stock is already salty) and blitz into a smooth velouté. I personally like to leave a few pieces in it to add texture.

Serve with freshly grated or shaved parmesan and a sprinkle of paprika for a bit of colour.

Add the onion and sauté over gentle heat, stirring occasionally, until translucent (4-5 min).

Add the pumpkin, apple and sugar, mix and cook for 2 to 3 minutes, until the sugar melts.

Add the curry, orange zest, and 3/4 of the chicken stock. Bring to the boil, cover and simmer for about 15 minutes or until pumpkin is tender.

Purée the soup until smooth and add some of the orange juice to taste (my children have a fine balance here, the soup must be orangy but not too much, so I keep the juice to adjust at the end) and the remaining stock until you reach the desired consistency. Stir the cream in if using (I usually don’t).

Serve topped with crumbed roasted chestnuts or roasted pumpkin seeds, and feta or parmesan cheese.

In a medium mixing-bowl, mix the sugar and butter with a fork.

Add the flour and mix with the fork until reaching a crumbly texture similar to ground almonds.

Add a bit of milk and knead the dough with your hands just enough to form a ball. If the dough does not come together after about a minute, add in a tad more milk and knead again. The idea is to add the milk little by little and stop at just the right dough consistency (if you’ve added too much and the dough gets impossibly sticky, compensate with flour).

Wrap in a tea towel and put in the fridge to rest for 30 minutes.

Prepare the caramel:

Butter the sides of a 25-cm (10-inch) cake tin.

Pour the brown sugar into a small saucepan and melt over medium-low heat, stirring regularly to even out the temperature. Now be careful, you will need to work quickly to avoid overcooking the caramel, which would otherwise become bitter. As soon as the sugar has melted, remove from the heat, add in the butter and stir to form a paste.

Pour the paste into the dish quickly – the caramel hardens as its temperature drops. Use the back of a spoon to spread it over the bottom. It’s okay if the bottom is not entirely covered, but try to make it as even as you can. Set aside.

Assemble and bake the tart:

Rinse, peel, core and cut the apples in eighths. Arrange the pieces prettily over the caramel in the tin.

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Take the ball of dough out of the fridge, lightly flour a clean work surface and use a rolling pin to roll the dough into a disk slightly larger than the pan. Transfer the dough over the apples and tuck in the outer edges. Prick the dough in a few places with a fork.

Bake in the oven for 50 minutes to an hour, until the crust turns golden and your home is filled with a wonderful caramely apple scent.

Take the dish out of the oven, run a knife along the inside edges of the tin and flip it onto a serving dish. If one or two apple pieces have stuck to the bottom of the dish, just put them back where they belong on the tart.

If you feel the apple colour is a bit on the light side (it happened to me), roast the tart, apples side up, another 5 minutes under your oven grill.

Serve warm on its own or with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream or a dollop of crème fraîche or yogurt.

Preheat the oven to 175 degree C.

Cut the chocolate and butter into chunks and melt them together in the microwave in a mixing bowl. Do this in 30 sec sessions, mixing well between sessions to even out the heat and help the chocolate melt faster. With my 850kW microwave, it takes me about 3 sessions. If you don’t have a microwave, place the chocolate and butter into a bowl over a saucepan of boiling water and stir regularly until all ingredients have melted.

In a second bowl, lightly beat the egg whites and sugar with a fork until the mixture looks homogenous, for about 20 sec. Do not use a whisk or an electric beater for this, you don’t want the whites to start foaming.

Add the almonds to the chocolate mixture and stir well. Dip your finger into the mixture, it should be just warm, i.e. you should not have any sensation of heat. If you do, wait a bit before moving on to the next step.

Add the egg yolk to the chocolate mixture and stir energetically. Add the egg whites and mix until reaching a homogenous batter.

Butter the cake tin and pour the batter into it.

Peel, quarter and core the pears, and cut them into segments about 3 mm thick. Press the segments into the batter leaving the tops of the segments visible and following a pretty pattern (concentric circles for a round tin, or neat, parallel lines for a square one). Make sure you place them very close to each other – leave about 1 cm between each slice. You may not use up all the pears, I tend to fill my dish with 2 1/2 pears.

Bake for 35 minutes or until a uniform crust has formed. Don’t worry if the cake feels a bit soft and creamy under its ultra thin crust, it will set when cooling down. If you did not use a loose base tin, wait until the cake is nearly cold before demoulding it.

Eat the fondant warm or cold. The slices will be easier to cut once it is cold, but I usually can’t wait, even if it is much messier!

Gently rinse the mushrooms under running water.

Melt over medium heat the butter in the oil in a large frying pan with tall sides.

Add the garlic, sauté for about 30 sec until flagrant (make sure the garlic does not brown otherwise it will taste bitter), and toss the mushrooms into the pan with the lemon juice, coriander and cumin. Cook over medium heat for 10 minutes.

While the mushrooms are cooking, crumble a cube of chicken stock into the milk topped up with an equal volume of water and heat up the mixture over low heat.

Add 100g crumbled stilton and the milk and water mixture to the mushrooms, and bring to a boil. Simmer for 5-7 minutes.

Transfer the mixture into a bowl and blitz with a hand mixer. Add pepper to taste. You should not need to add salt (or only a little) since the soup already contains salted stilton and stock.

Stir in 2 tablespoons of cream and serve in each plate with 1 teaspoon of onion confit and a bit of crumbled stilton on top. Alternatively, you can spread the confit on toasted bread.

Prepare the pastry:

Cut the butter in small pieces and mix it with the icing sugar, salt, ground almonds and lemon zest until reaching a creamy consistency (you can use a mixer). Add the egg, mix again and finish with the flour, mixing just enough to incorporate it into the dough (if you work the dough too much, this will result in a heavy and tough pastry). Keep 300g for the tart and freeze the rest for other uses.

Roll the dough into a ball, place it on a large square of baking paper on a flat surface and flatten it with your hands into a one inch thick round. Add another sheet of baking paper on top and flatten the dough to 2.5 mm with a rolling pin. Peel the top paper sheet off and chill the pastry in the freezer for 30 minutes (or fridge for a couple of hours), then transfer it to a buttered tart tin (don’t forget to remove the second paper sheet). Trim it and reserve in the fridge until you are ready to bake it.

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees C. Make little crosses at the bottom of the pastry with a knife to prevent air bubbles from forming underneath, and bake for about 20 minutes or until the pastry is nicely golden. While baking, check it regularly to burst any air bubbles forming with a fork. Alternatively, you can cover the pastry with dried beans for the first half of baking – but this is too much trouble for me.

Allow to cool down in the tin before un-moulding. Melt gently a couple of dark chocolate square and brush the inside of the pastry with the chocolate. This quick trick will create a waterproof barrier between the pastry and the filling, preventing the pastry from turning soggy.

Prepare the lemon filling:

Mix in a heat proof bowl the sugar with the lemon zest. Add the lemon juice, eggs, and mix well.

Place the bowl over a small saucepan half filled with gently boiling water, and whisk continuously over low heat until the mixture thickens. Once the thickening process has started, keep cooking and whisking for another 2 minutes (about 8 minutes altogether)

Take off the heat and let cool to 36 degrees C. At this temperature, a finger dipped into the mixture should not feel any sensation of warmth or cold. Then, of course, enjoy the licking

Meanwhile, beat the butter into a nice, soft consistency and mix it to the cooled lemon mixture with a spatula (don’t use a whisk, this would incorporate air bubbles).

Pour the mixture into the tart and place in the fridge for 2 hours.

When ready to eat, sprinkle the centre with a cloud of icing sugar or dispose seasonal blueberries in the shape of small round at the center.

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C.

Mix the flour with the baking powder.

Add in succession the eggs, yogurt, olive oil and pepper, mixing with a wooden spoon.

Once you have reached a homogeneous mixture, pour the batter into the cavities of a greased muffin tray or individual ramequins, filling them to 2/3 of their height.

Remove grossly the skin off the Reblochon with a knife and cut the cheese into as many cubes as you have muffins (i.e. 8 or 9)

Place the muffins in the oven. 4 minutes into the baking, stick a cube of cheese into each muffin. Try not to push all the way down as this would pierce the bottom crust that will have started forming on the muffins. The cheese, which is denser than the muffin batter, would then “leak” underneath. Don’t worry if the cheese sticks out on top, it will melt.

Bake for another 15 minutes or so, until the muffins reach a nice golden colour.

Prepare the salad:

Do this while the muffins are baking. Quarter the figs, core the pear and apple and cut them into segments.

Wash the lettuce and mix it with the fruit quarters. Add the oil and vinegar and gently mix.

Serve the muffins hot with the salad.

Bring another litre of water to the boil with the sugar, vanilla extract (or a vanilla bean slit lengthwise, grains scraped off into the water), star anise and mixed spice. Don’t be tempted to re-use the water in which you parboiled the peaches as it will have been contaminated with pesticides.

Plunge the peeled peach halves into the lightly bubbling syrup and simmer for 10 minutes. Drain and leave to cool.

While the peaches are cooking, save the 12 best looking raspberries for garnish. mash the remaining raspberries with the back of a fork with the icing sugar and a squirt of lemon juice.

Using an electric mixer, whip the cream into a silky crème Chantilly. The top tips for achieving the perfect Chantilly are: 1. make sure the cream, bowl and whisk are all very cold. I place the whisk and cream in the freezer 20 min beforehand. 2. beat the cream at low speed first, moving in stages to high speed, and wait until the cream starts bubbling before adding the sugar (slowly) and vanilla extract. 3. stop once the whisk leaves well defined marks in the cream. Dip a spoon in it and turn it upside down. If the cream peak on the spoon stays up, it is ready. If not, give it another whisking. The Chantilly should only take 2-3 minutes to make. Don’t overbeat otherwise you will reach the consistency of butter.

Just before serving:

Pour some raspberry coulis in martini or wide glasses, place a good sized ice cream scoop on top and a peach half. Top with the Chantilly and a few fresh raspberries. Serve right away.

Meanwhile, cook the onion in a saucepan with a little of the stock until the onion has softened and the stock has evaporated; this will take about 15 minutes.

Remove the peppers and tomatoes from the oven and toss them into a bag – paper or a plastic freezing bag will do. Close it tightly and leave until the vegetables are cool enough to handle (about 8-10 minutes). The steam produced by the vegetables inside the bag will loosen their skin, making the peeling easy. Peel both peppers and tomatoes, keeping as much juice as you can.

Toss the lot into the pan with the onion and the peeled roasted garlic. Add the remaining stock and seasoning, bring to the boil and simmer for 3 to 4 minutes. Liquidise and taste for seasoning, add a few drops of tabasco if you want to give the soup a bit of bite.

Serve hot or chilled (best in my view) with plenty of torn fresh basil, a drizzle of olive oil, fresh goat’s cheese and croutons.

Mix the onion with 1 tablespoon olive oil in a large gratin dish, and place in the hot oven for 10 minutes or until the onion is soft and transluscent. Take out of the oven and turn the heat down to 180 degrees.

Meanwhile, slice the vegetables finely. You will need a very sharp knife to slice the tomatoes. Alternatively you can place the tomatoes in the freezer for 20 minutes beforehand, this will make the slicing easier.

Stack the vegetables in neat rows on top of the onion, alternating between rows of aubergines, courgettes and tomatoes. Make sure the vegetables overlap within and between the rows. It’s OK if the diameter of the courgette slices is smaller, just stack more in each row. Season with salt and pepper.

Crush the anchovies with a pestle and mortar or the back of a fork, and mix with the garlic, 3 tablespoons olive oil, herbs, and bread crumbs. Brush the mixture evenly over the vegetables.

Cover the dish with aluminum foil and bake for 50 minutes. Uncover, crank up the oven to 200 degrees, and roast for another 20-25 minutes or until nicely browned.

Serve hot or cold with grilled meat, fish or chicken.