Summer vegetables, olive oil

The moment the new broad beans arrive, Italian first, then locally grown, I want to crack open their bulging pods, flick the tiny kidney-shaped beans from their downy swaddling and scoff them raw. Any bigger than your little fingernail are better cooked, plunged into furiously bubbling water for 3-4 minutes, then drained and tossed with olive oil and chopped mint to be eaten with a scoop of milk-white ricotta. Another way is to cook them with the season’s other early risers, peas and asparagus and cloves of the waxy new garlic, so sweet and mild you wonder what it, too, would be like raw. I use it to scent olive oil – just a passing whiff – then simmer the vegetables with a dry white vermouth, such as Noilly Prat, or a slightly fruity white wine. The resulting braised vegetables are piled on to open textured bread, such as sourdough or ciabatta, lightly toasted and saturated with the green-gold juices from the pan. If you have some young, soft-leaved herbs to hand – mint, parsley or basil – now is their moment, so their fragrance wafts up from the warm vegetables.

Great

% Daily Values based on a 2,000 calorie diet