I invented this starter for Sunday lunch this week. I confess it was a little inspired by the crab mousse with smoky ham wafers which I tasted at Les Quatre Saisons restaurant in Sarlat la Caneda (photo right).

For my version I used diced smoked salmon, shredded carrots, chopped red onion and cucumber chunks. Mix all these ingredients in a light mayonnaise with added mustard, lots of dill, olive oil and lemon juice.

First, make some ribbons of cucumber with a potato peeler, as long as possible along the whole length of the cucumber. Wrap these around a yoghurt pot (or anything round, you can find special stainless steel rings in some professional cookery shops which, obviously, is the best and can be used for all sorts of other recipes), three or four ribbons per plate, to make some round cucumber “crowns”. Fill with the salmon and carrot mixture and decorate as you want.

This is a recipe that I think originally came from Jean-Baptiste Reboul’s book La Cuisinière Provençal written in 1910. If you can find this book anywhere, buy it. It starts with a whole chapter on the concept and theory of Pot au Feu.

This is dead easy. You need a cast iron of earthenware pot with a lid. Start by placing 40 or 50 unpeeled cloves of garlic in the bottom of the pot with a little olive oil. In French we call this “ail en chemise”, garlic with its shirt on. Separate the cloves from the head of garlic but do not peel them. And yes, I said forty or fifty cloves of garlic, more if you want.
Place a chicken (with some lemon slices inside the cavity) on top of the “pearly bed” of garlic and place the pot under a hot grill in the oven (without the lid on) – this serves to brown and crisp the chicken on top.
While your chicken is getting crisp under the grill (just a few minutes) mix some flour and water to make a bread dough. Remove the pot from the oven when the chicken is nicely browned, stuff all the fresh herbs you can find around the chicken (rosemary, sage, parsley, thyme, basil, whatever you’ve got), add some salt and pepper, and place the lid on the pot. Seal the lid hermetically onto the pot with the bread dough all around the joint and place back in the oven (normal oven settings, switch off the grill) at 160 degrees for 1 hour and a half or two hours, more for a big chicken. The idea is to cook everything slowly inside the sealed pot and enable the garlic cloves to stew in the juices.
Bring the pot onto the table and break open the bread dough around the lid to release the fabulous aroma of garlic and herbs when you open the pot. The stewed garlic cloves pop out of their peel like butter, spead onto country style bread and eat with the chicken.

This is a tricky recipe because the flowers are very delicate and you must be very careful not to damage them.
You have to choose very fresh baby courgettes. Wash the courgettes and flowers in cold water and carefully dry them with kitchen roll. There is a debate about removing the pistils inside the flowers or not: personally I remove them because this allows more space for the stuffing.
Dice the baby courgettes leaving about 2cm on the flowers. You can leave the whole baby courgette with the flower but in this case you need to cook everything a little longer in the oven (unles you like your courgettes al dente.
Prepare your stuffing. I make a sausage meat stuffing and add the diced courgettes but you can use your imagination here (blue cheese and hazelnuts is quite a good one). Bind your cooked stuffing with an egg and add lots of fresh basil.
Delicately stuff the flowers and lay them on an oven dish. Add a couple of diced tomatoes to the remaining stuffing and surround the flowers with the mixture. Sprinkle parmesan cheese on top, cover with tin foil, and cook in the oven at 180 degrees for 20 minutes.