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Green lentils and bacon has long been a salad worth making. I will occasionally fold in some shards of crisp, olive-oil-drenched toasted ciabatta or lots of whole parsley leaves. A couple of years ago I started moving the whole thing up a notch by putting the lentils against a few pieces of exquisite Spanish ham and adding a certain smokiness with wide slivers of zucchini, their edges blackened from the grill. This has become a late-summer lunch I can’t get enough of.

Small squashes deep-fry particularly well, offering a refreshing, almost juicy contrast to the ethereally crisp batter. This is one of those recipes—pancakes are another—that I tend to make when there are just two of us, and we can eat our sizzling fritters at the stove while the next one cooks. I find I get a much crisper result if I don’t overcrowd the pan.

There is a small but distinguished group of seafood and tomato dishes, from the Provençal soups with their croûtes and brick-red rouille to Portuguese soup-stews reeking of garlic. With those dishes as a starting point, I spent some time working on a soup of tomato and crab. After making several versions that were too thick and rich, I took the step of bringing chile and lemongrass into the proceedings to add a breath of freshness and vitality. This is a bright-tasting soup that sings with the sweet heat of chile and crustacean. To add enough substance to treat it as a main dish (when this recipe will serve 3 or 4), I introduce a last-minute addition of bean shoots or maybe some shredded, very lightly cooked snow peas.

This colorful, big-flavored tomato salad is something you could eat alongside rose-pink cold roast beef, but it could easily make a more substantial candidate for a main course with the addition of a few croutons or some slices of olive oil–drenched toast. The colors are important here if the salad is to look lively—I usually use a mixture of tomatoes, including little peardrop ones and yellow cherry tomatoes. I think it is worth adding that this is also good with cilantro instead of basil.

Late summer, the sun high, the vegetable patch is filled with slow-moving bees and tiny, piercing-blue butterflies. The day stands still, baking in the sunshine. The cats lie silently on the dusty stone terrace, too hot to move. It is the day for a lunch of melting softness. I wander into the kitchen on bare feet to roast tomatoes and break open a milky, silky buffalo mozzarella.

The first time I made this, I discovered a wealth of delights: the way the tomato holds the little cheese like an eggcup holds an egg; the point at which the juice of the tomato and the melted cheese meet; and the subtle difference in smell and flavor depending on which cheese you use. Two of these tomatoes are lunch for me if there is something else on the table—a couscous salad, perhaps, or some bread and salami. Others may want more.

A sweet-sharp salad with a creamy dressing. Avoid the temptation to overmix the salad, as the beets are inclined to send everything a very unfetching shade of marshmallow pink.

As much as I like big flavors, I sometimes want something more gentle, a little genteel even. French beans lend themselves to such cooking.

Anyone who has shelled a bag of peas will know how good they are raw. Far too little is made of their scrunchy sweetness, and I put forward the pod-fresh raw pea as an idea to throw into salads of pale yellow butterhead lettuce, cracked wheat, or dishes of cooked fava beans. They work in their uncooked state only when very young and small. Old peas are mealy and sour. One rainy lunchtime in June, I put them into a simple salad of Peter Rabbit lettuce, crisply cooked smoked bacon, and hand-torn ciabatta. The result—restrained, refreshing, and somehow quintessentially English.

Among the charcoal and garlic of midsummer’s more robust cooking, a quiet salad of palest green can come as a breath of calm. Last June, as thousands joined hands around Stonehenge in celebration of the summer solstice, I put together a salad of cool notes: mint, fava beans, and young peas—a bowl of appropriate gentility and quiet harmony.

I relish the frugality and bonhomie of a bowl of onion soup. This is slightly richer and thicker than the one in The Kitchen Diaries, possibly for colder weather. I don’t often use flour to thicken a soup but in this case it produces a particularly velvety texture.

Good cooking often comes from simply going with what is around at the time. Ingredients that are in season at the same time tend to go together—in this case, the last of a hat trick of leek soups made with all that is left in the depleted winter vegetable patch.

Onions have always had a slightly awkward relationship with fish. They seem particularly ungainly and rough edged alongside the white varieties or shellfish. Shallots work better, with their milder notes and less significant dose of sugar, but of all the alliums it is the leek that marries most successfully. The white of the leek has an elegance and subtlety that is unlikely to overpower any fish you put it with. In a soup or pie, it dances with the piscine ingredients where an onion would tread on their toes. Chowder is traditionally a hearty bowl of food. The one I make with mussels and bacon is a short step away from the big clam and potato numbers I have eaten in Boston, in that it is somewhat lighter and less creamy, but it is still essentially a big soup for a cool day.

The potato and the leek are happy bedfellows, as anyone who has eaten a good vichysoisse will know. Softer than potato and onion, more graceful than a chowder, warm potato and leek soup has a peaceful, almost soporific quality. A silky, cool-weather soup that somehow manages to taste creamy and rich with only the smallest amount of butter and no cream in it.

Kale is just one possibility for bulking out this supper of pork balls and broth. I use it because I like the fullness of its leaves with the smooth pork balls. You could use any member of the greens family, and particularly Savoy cabbage. The important bit is not to overcook the greens.

I have long made a simple artichoke soup by adding the scrubbed tubers to softened onions, pouring over stock, and then simmering until the artichokes fall apart. I often add a little lemon juice, bay leaves, and sometimes a thumb of ginger. I blitz it in the blender, then stir in lots of chopped parsley. Some might introduce cream at this point but I honestly don’t think it’s necessary. The soup is velvety enough. It has become a staple in this kitchen over the last few winters; its warm nuttiness is always welcome on a steely-skied January day. Late in the winter of 2008, possibly having had one day too many of what Beth Chatto calls “dustbin-lid skies,” I changed the soup’s tone by adding a stirring of bright green spinach. As often happens, it came about by accident—a bowl of creamed spinach left over from a boiled ham lunch—added to the soup just to use it up. The magic in this soup is in the marriage of earthy cold-weather food and a shot of mood-lifting chlorophyll. Spring is obviously stirring.