Anyone with a prostate should eat brassicas three times a week

Today I cut and cooked the first of the summer cabbages. I've been watching them grow fatter and more pointed, and turning that deep glaucous colour. The overnight rain merely sharpened my appetite, the rain drops settling like a winking invitation on the tips of the leaves.

Cut and take cabbage straight to the kitchen. Cut the outer leaves and de-rib, enjoying the squeezy, squeaky sound of really fresh leaves under your knife. Wash then shred, eating the white core as you go. Drop into boiling water, return pan to the boil then drain and serve immediately. Cabbage this fresh shouldn't really have anything added, so I just enjoyed its sweetness. Later into the autumn Bisto gravy makes a magnificent partner.

Spring greens with chilli, garlic and ginger - you can make this now with early summer cabbages, just use the outer leaves in place of spring greens. Heat oil in a wok and add an inch of finely sliced ginger, a sliced and deseeded red chilli then a couple of cloves of garlic, finely sliced. Toss in hot oil until your nose starts to run with the chilli vapours, then throw in washed and coarsely shredded spring greens / outer cabbage leaves / pak choi (best of all). Stir fry a couple of minutes, then pour onto large plate and eat immediately.

Frozen garlic and ginger for busy women - when next passing the Asian food stores call in and buy a kilo or two of garlic bulbs, for a £ a kilo. Separate into cloves and top and tail to remove skin. Tip a kilo of cloves at a time into the food processor and pulse until chopped. This will smell heavenly and will make you feel wonderful and happy and make you remember all those great meals you've cooked in the past... Tip garlic into those little plastic containers your take-away comes in, and freeze. It's as simple as that. Do the same with ginger, but don't bother faffing about peeling it; the skins are so soft and fresh I just throw it onto the fine slicing blade of the processer and freeze the slices as before. Grated ginger's good too.

When you get in from work and you're so tired you simply can't face the rigmarole of finding the garlic, then skinning and chopping it, removing all the green bits that sprouted in the weeks since you bought it, just open your freezer, break off a bit of this frozen chopped garlic, and proceed as normal.

Because sometimes life really is too short to peel a clove of garlic.

Anyone with a prostate should eat brassicas three times a week

Thursday last week picked the first of the broad beans, snappy and full with their promise of buttery goodness. "The Sutton" is such a good old workhorse of a bean, it really isn't any wonder its been a favourite for decades. I picked a bucketful during the morning, and after boiling up some Jersey Royals threw the podded beans into the water, brought back to the boil and immediately drained, before serving up with parlsey sauce and a thick slice of best British gammon.

Good God but the British know how to eat.


Parsley sauce - make a simple roux (lightly toast off the flour in the oven for 10 mins first to cook out the floury-ness), using unsalted butter and farine de blé; add half a pint of milk, lots of salt and black pepper, then once thickening nicely throw in a very large bunch of finely chopped parsley leaves.

Ful medames - drop some broad beans into a pan of boiling water and return to boil then immediately drain (clearly this can really only be done with spanking fresh, very young beans), then tip into a bowl. Add some olive oil to the beans, together with about a teaspoon of cumin seeds and nicely sliced garlic cloves, about two. Zip up by squeezing a lemon's juice over, and season as if your life depended upon it. Mix together gently with your hands. You can add a roughly chopped bit of parsley, unless you have someone sexy coming to lunch, and you intend to be smiling at them a lot...

Lazy slut's supper - Boil up some new potatoes, and when ready drain and eat hot from pan, cutting them almost in half in your hand with a knife holding a slick of unsalted butter so that the butter cuts into the potato as you slice it. Dip into Maldon sea salt as you go.

Lazy slut on a diet's supper - as above, but leave out the salt, in which case it's hardly worth bothering to eat the potatoes in the first place.