La Recette du Jour

Another Kaliyoga special.

Sounds fairly ordinary, but the unctuous sauce makes it special. An excellent way of stretching a little asparagus to serve a lot of people.

You may be dubious about raw fish, but I can assure you that this tastes superb and is a very elegant and original starter (if you can get hold of the fresh tuna of course). It's very rich -- you only need small helpings.

A popular dish in Tahiti -- very light and delicate. It's made with freshwater prawns called "chevrettes", but any type of fresh prawn will do.

A simple and quick way of preparing scallops. Serves two.

A simple and very delicious Catalan recipe, with almost the same ingredients as ratatouille, but a very different result.

A highly successful dinner-party starter -- not the cheapest of dishes, but quite easy to do and very tasty. You can prepare everything in advance, and then the shells only need 20 minutes in the oven. Serves 6.

Devised by Steve from several different recipes, this is the best sauce for mussels I have ever tasted. It deserves small, fresh moules de bouchot (grown on posts in Brittany). Make sure you have lots of French bread for mopping up the sauce. This will serve six as a starter, or 3-4 as a main course.

Serves 4 as a starter or 2 as a main course. Best with the large Spanish mussels -- small moules de bouchot should not be wasted on this!

The Catalan national dish -- "bread and tomatoes", which I admit doesn't sound very exciting. But with ripe tomatoes and good olive oil, it is delicious. A simple starter; or, in Catalonia, a breakfast dish.

This is an absolutely classic French bistro dish. I still remember eating it in a little café in Violès after an arduous morning's grape-picking.

From Edouard de Pomiane via Elizabeth David, who says it 'makes tomatoes taste startlingly unlike any other dish of cooked tomatoes'.

We had it as a starter but we reckoned it would be fab with some nice fillet steak - or with roast/grilled lamb.

This is loosely based on a recipe in an old Sainsbury's magazine. It's an unusual idea -- a kind of cross between salad and gratin, pretty and refreshing -- a good light summer lunch or starter. You may vary the ingredients depending on what you have.

As recorded in a Yorkshire kitchen. Photos taken in haste, they are too good to leave hanging around!

This recipe uses little round courgettes. If you can't get them, the risotto will do equally well in peppers or onions -- or indeed on its own, or as an accompaniment to something else.

Serves 4, or 8 as a starter.

A Spanish tapas recipe which can also be scaled up to a main course.

A versatile dish that's a good way of using up a glut of tomatoes.

This recipe comes from the "Great Yorkshire Pudding Contest" held in Leeds, as recounted by Jane Grigson in "English Food". Five native chefs were humiliated by Mr Tin Sung Chan from the Chopsticks Restaurant, who took the top prize with this unorthodox recipe. His pudding, wrote the Guardian's reporter, "rose to the height of a coronation crown and its taste, according to one of the judges, was superb."

If you are in the habit of making Yorkshire pudding, you will find the proportions a bit bizarre. But if your puddings always sag, this recipe is definitely worth a try!

Nice little nibbles to have with drinks or as a very light starter. You can use either filo or feuilles de brick for this.

These make a delicate and elegant starter and are easy to make too.

I was given a copy of the BBC's Olive magazine, coincidentally just at the moment when we picked our last few tomatoes, and had some mascarpone that needed using up. This recipe called to me, a speedy alternative to long-time favourite Tarte à la moutarde (total time an hour, tops). I'm sure you could make smaller individual ones to serve as a starter with a few salad leaves.

These come out a brilliant green, with an unusual tangy flavour. The original recipe specified ricotta, but I used fresh, mild goat's cheese from a nearby farm which I think gave them some extra oomph. Any similar soft cheese would do. If you are not worried about calories they could be served with hollandaise sauce; otherwise, maybe a few salad leaves or sliced avocado and some lemony vinaigrette would be nice. This quantity will make about 6 depending on the size of your tins.