Whether it’s cheese rinds or the cooking water from your potatoes, here is how to use ingredients that might otherwise be thrown away

Give them a slick kitchen and some fancy ingredients and we know chefs can do ingenious things. It’s their job, after all. Less well known but arguably more useful in this era of soaring food and energy prices, is that chefs are also very adept at improving food and intensifying flavours at little to no cost. Show them a typical weekly shop, and their brains will begin to whir over potential ways of making food tastier with a few simple tricks. No need for expensive gadgets. No rare ingredients.

From reviving traditional kitchen habits to vogueish approaches to seasoning, here’s how to maximise flavour at minimum expense.

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Seasonal fresh sweetcorn and tinned both work well in today’s thrifty recipes for a charred sweetcorn and green bean salad and super-snackable cheesy scones

For me, the sunny yellow colour and crisp, juicy kernels of sweetcorn encapsulate summer. But while tinned sweetcorn is a store-cupboard staple, and delicious in these scones and salad, fresh corn on the cob is reaching its peak right now, so it’s worth getting your hands on some, if you can. Chargrilling fresh corn in a pan or, better still, on a barbecue is the ideal cooking method. Don’t be afraid to char it really well; the smoky flavour is heavenly when combined with the kernels’ natural sweetness.

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An inventive savoury bake in which layers of softened courgette are squashed firmly between two types of cheese and tomatoes

While the selection is best between midday and 2pm, I prefer going to the canteen-like Felice just under our flat at about 3.30pm, because, after the rush of lunch, even the chairs seem to sit back and sigh with relief. And because there is less to choose from, which is great, because I am busy, hungry and don’t want to think; the counter tells me. Also, by mid-afternoon, the last of the vegetable dishes they do so well – the several-inches-deep aubergine parmigiana, the mashed potato cake, the flat green beans stewed in tomato, and little cubes of roast potato with rosemary – have been sitting a while, resting, soaking. And now that hot days are here again, the resting is even better for vegetable dishes long out of the oven but far from cold, and their flavours are the better for it.

Four o’clock, however, was too late, and I watched the last slice of parmigiana go home in an aluminium box with a man in a Guns N’ Roses cap with a guitar strapped to his back. Which, of course, made me resent him and his parmigiana more. So, after a rice ball and a potato croquette with a bit of cheese in the middle, I bought basil, tomatoes and mozzarella, which I pulled out of its plastic bag of cloudy liquid and put on a plate in the fridge, so it would drain overnight, ready for the next day.

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The soup of my childhood, borsch, has become emblematic of Putin’s assault on Ukrainian land, culture and heritage, of his drive to plunder and obliterate Ukraine

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From student haunts to a first ‘proper’ meal out, why we mourn the places where we ate that are no longer with us

On the surface of it, the problem was straightforward. Somehow, we’d all made it to the sixth form, an elevation we thought so magnificent – oh, the grandness of being allowed to drink Nescafé in free periods! – it was surely only right now to mark it with a minor increase in sophistication come Friday night. But the question was: how? Clubbing was one thing. We were avid for that, and went dancing in town twice a week in our cliff-top shoulder pads and scratchy white shoes. The bigger drama was the matter of what to do first. No longer would the pub do: that slow eking out of our Cinzano and lemonades, the better that we might not conk out too early later (alas, I usually did conk out too early).

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Fresh and tangy, bright and spicy … keep cool with easy dishes from brilliant cooks such as Georgina Hayden and Fuchsia Dunlop

Georgina Hayden

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Sandrae Lawrence, from the Cocktail Lovers podcast and magazine, tries out this summer’s best mixes

250ml, £1.25, sainsburys.co.uk
Nice aroma – fresh, summery. It tastes like those Fruit Salad sweets, with a lovely fizz. A nice roundness, from the nose to the finish on the palate. Surprisingly complex. It’s dangerously good.
★★★★

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In his daughter’s Notting Hill restaurant, the chef reflects on his food dynasty and the most gifted cook he’s worked with

Michel Roux’s wife, he says, wasn’t convinced when their only daughter, Emily, wanted to follow her old man into the family business. “Giselle told her: ‘Look at your dad! He’s always tired. He’s grumpy! He spends all day Sunday sleeping. He stinks when he comes home! Look at his hands!’” The chef himself was more philosophical, bowing to the inevitable. “Cooking is what we Rouxs do.””

The proof of that particular millefeuille is Caractère , the smart Notting Hill restaurant in a former corner boozer in which he and I are having lunch. Emily is in the kitchen, with her husband, Diego Ferrari – former head chef at Roux’s own restaurant Le Gavroche . Emily and Diego opened Caractère in 2019, and they are showing particular devotion to duty today, Michel suggests, because it is their son’s third birthday. Emily is too busy at work on her perfect desserts to come out and chat with her dad, but a couple of times she forwards pictures of his grandson, eating birthday cake at nursery, from her phone. Does he show signs of the family passion for puddings? “He does seem to have a bit of a taste for it, yes.”

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An uncomplicated, comforting pleasure that harks back to childhood – post-Covid, it’s no surprise that ice-cream parlours are coming in from the cold

• OFM’s pick of the licks – 10 places for great ice-cream

One lunchtime, a few weeks into the first lockdown of 2020, a customer came into Caliendo’s Gelato in London’s Kentish Town, bubbling with excitement. “I asked her how long she’d been waiting,” says Michelina Caliendo-Sear who, with her partner, Fiona Bell, had opened the ice-cream parlour in December of 2019. “She said over half an hour. I went to the back door and looked out.” Customers were queueing right round the corner and far up the sidestreet. They were clearly prepared to wait a very long time indeed for scoops of blackcurrant and liquorice or fig and walnut and, most of all, for the famed Bronte pistachio, made with prestige nuts harvested from the very foothills of Mount Etna. “We were their treat at the end of their lockdown walk. That was when I knew the business was going to be OK,” Caliendo-Sear says.

In May, Caliendo’s was named the first ice-cream parlour of the year, in a competition run by the Ice Cream Alliance, which represents hundreds of parlours and producers. “We are honoured and proud to have won,” Caliendo-Sear says, “especially among such stiff competition.” She’s not wrong. The fact is that ice-cream – a broad term that can cover everything from hard scoop to gelato, soft serve to kulfi , dondurma to sorbet, frozen yoghurt and so much more – is having a moment. You could say that right now, ice-cream is hot. In 2022, the value of the UK sector rose by 6% to £1.7bn. While tough trading conditions recently have taken their toll, before the pandemic the number of dedicated ice-cream parlours was rising by 20% a year. Nearly two-thirds of all ice-cream manufacturers operating today have been incorporated only since 2015.

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