Engage with greengages

There are plums and then there are greengages. Bright green and round with greenish-yellow or golden flesh, they have a beautiful sweet scent when ripe and can be used instead of plums for desserts and preserves.

The blogger Pim Techamuanvivit (chezpim.com) has a recipe for greengage and vanilla jam made with 2lb (about 1kg) greengages, 1lb (about 500g) sugar, 2 vanilla pods and the juice of 1 lemon. When cooked down into compote or jam, the fragrant flavour of the greengages intensifies. There’s also a enough acidity to balance the sweetness and plenty of natural pectin in the skin so there’s no need to add extra.

Another blogger, Princess and the Recipe (princessandrecipe.blogspot.com), has adapted Pim’s recipe to make greengage sorbet, substituting lime for lemon and leaving out the vanilla beans. She cools the stewed greengages before they reach a jammy setting point, pushes them through a sieve to get rid of the skins, pops the sieved liquid in the fridge, then churns it in an ice-cream maker.

Sweet as... sweetcorn

The season is short but sweet for sweetcorn, running from now through most of September. A golden buttered corn on the cob is a seasonal delight. It has been cultivated in the south for years but with warmer summers has begun to appear further north, too.

When buying, choose creamy yellow kernels because they will be the sweetest. Eat fresh, as once the cob is cut the sugar starts to turn to starch and loses its sweetness.

Try putting whole cobs in their pale green husks in a roasting tin and roast in the oven preheated to 180C (Gas 4), or on the rack over a hot barbecue for about 30 minutes, turning once. Pull back the husks, add a knob of butter and freshly ground black pepper.

Also in season, baby corn is a specialised vegetable harvested before the kernels develop. The sweet, nutty cobs no bigger than a finger can be cooked whole or cut in chunks and are great in stir fries cooked with sesame oil and soy sauce.

Food for free - blackberries

Blackberries are such a good free source of antioxidants and vitamin C that during World War One children were encouraged to collect them for the production of juice that was sent to soldiers on the frontline.

Ready for gathering now, blackberries can be eaten fresh, used for puddings and pies, or preserved into jelly or “pippy” jam.

They team up particularly well with the first of the cooking apples, are a good match for rich or gamey meat such as venison, lamb or pheasant, and add a seasonal flourish muddled into a cold martini for a late summer cocktail.

For a simple blackberry and oat sundae (serves 2), whisk 150g Greek yoghurt, 3 tbsp crème fraîche and a few drops of vanilla extract together until thoroughly mixed.

Alternately layer lightly crushed blackberries with the yoghurt mixture and handfuls of granola to fill two sundae dishes. For best results chill for an hour.

Plum season

Plums are in season now and this year's combination of a very cold winter and warm spring means bumper crops. Pershore, in Worcestershire, celebrates with a month-long festival featuring plum sausages and other recipes from the festival's Plum Cook Book (pershoreplumfestival.org.uk)

Rosie Lovell of Brixton's retro-feel deli has a recipe for Plum Clafoutis in her new book Spooning With Rosie (£18.99, Fourth Estate).

Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Stone and chop 450g of Victoria plums into 2.5cm pieces. Butter a baking dish and scatter the fruit into this. Beat two medium free-range eggs in a bowl and add 50g plain flour so that it forms a smooth paste. Gradually add 75ml double cream and 150ml milk and 50g caster sugar so that it becomes a creamy batter. Add 1 tbsp Calvados before pouring the mix over the fruit. Bake in the oven for 40 minutes. Serves 4.

New: pink gooseberries and long-stem broccoli

Gooseberries are not everyone’s favourite fruit. But a new, less tart variety Pink Gooseberry, grown, by Charles Gaskaine, at his farm in Faversham, Kent, has gone on sale recently in Marks & Spencer stores.

It is naturally much sweeter than the green cooking variety and has fewer spines so it can be eaten raw straight from the punnet or added to fruit salads, cereals and fruit compotes.

Sweet, long-stemmed broccoli is another twist on standard seasonal fare marketed with a view to capturing consumers’ palates and imaginations.

Grown in Lincolnshire, where its young shoots are hand-picked after just ten days of growth, bellaverde broccoli resembles the Italian cime de rapa.

TV chef Gino D’Acampo suggests eating it in a spaghetti dish with grated courgettes, crushed walnuts, lemon zest and chilli flakes or served warm with fresh mint, goat’s cheese and toasted pine nuts dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Both dishes go well with a 2008 Pinot Grigio delle Venezie, Cavit, Italy (Co-op £4.99) - a lively white with a citrus finish.

Raving about raspberries

Although there are many varieties of raspberries, from amber red to yellow and white, they all have the same delicate tart-sweet flavour. Raspberries have a long season, from now until November, and some of the tastiest fruits come from Scotland, where they have cooler summers.

Naturally raspberries are delicious on their own, eaten just when they’ve softened and leave a stain on your fingertips. They make an instantly delicious topping for desserts from lemon meringue pie to cheesecake or embedded in an almond tart or at the heart of a summer pudding or jelly. Match fruity puds with a lightly sparkling Gancia Astia, Piedmonte, Italy (£5.79, Waitrose).

Try fresh raspberries with duck, grilled and sliced in a warm salad, dressed with olive oil and raspberry vinegar. The latter (vinaigre de framboise) is a French favourite served with foie gras and other fatty meats, while in Britain it was used as a cure for sore throats from the 17th century until World War Two.

Starwberry yields forever

Ripe strawberries, like sunny days at Wimbledon, never fail to induce summery vibes. The warm spring means it should be a bumper crop and the Prime Minister’s wife, Sarah Brown, shared her excitement last week on Twitter about tiny strawberries in her garden.

Strawberry plants have short lives and rarely remain productive for more than a few years so new varieties are introduced often. They have names to match such beautiful fruit: Symphony, Florence and Eve’s Delight, for example.

Long-cropping Elsanta is the most common British strawberry variety; Ava is a premium Scottish strawberry first grown in 2005, the same year that Sonata, a large, firm variety was launched. English Rose is another newcomer noted for its zesty flavour and Marie de Bois is similar to a wild strawberry.

To enhance the flavour of strawberries allow them to bask a while in the sunshine and go soft. Wash and hull some strawberries then mush them up with sugar, double cream, a nip of Cointreau, if you like, and orange zest. Dig in. Match with a fruity-sweet Sauternes Chateau Sudiraut 2005 (£9.95, Waitrose).

Elderflower power

Creamy clusters of elderflower are perfuming hedgerows and lanes all over the country at the moment with their delicate fragrance of Muscat grapes. Collect them just-bloomed, wash carefully, pat dry and use in a recipe immediately.

Traditionally elderflowers, like many other flowers (primroses, cowslips and lime blossom, for example) were infused into vinegars, cordials and wine. Today they are mainly used in desserts and refreshing summer drinks. Add a single stem to stewed rhubarb or any fruit to give a compote, jam or fool a fragrant flavour. Alternatively, make an elderflower and gooseberry sorbet, elderflower fritters or a syrup to add to summer fruit salads.

For elderflower cordial dissolve 450g (1 lb) sugar with 900ml (1.5 pints) water, the zest of 1 lemon and the juice of 2. Boil for 2 minutes. Add 12 elderflower heads. Stir, cover, leave until cold. Strain into a bottle. Chill. Serve diluted with sparkling spring water. It also adds a spritz to cocktails, and is great stirred in to custard or drizzled over vanilla ice cream.

Edamame - soy British

Next month British-grown edamame beans will go on sale at 100 branches of the supermarket Asda.

Joe Cottingham, UK Young Grower of the Year 2008, has been growing a crop of these fresh green soya beans on a farm in Kent. This protein-packed bean is said to contain all nine essential amino acids and is usually imported frozen from the Far East.

Made popular in this country by Japanese restaurants, from Nobu to YO!Sushi, edamame are usually eaten as a starter or a side-dish, boiled in the pod and doused in a naturally brewed soy sauce or sprinkled with salt.

For a delicious summer salad, cook 300g of shelled edamame in boiling salted water until tender. Drain and cool under running water, then pat dry. Transfer the edamame to a bowl and add the 250g crab, 1 chopped avocado, 2 finely sliced shallots, 4 finely sliced radishes, 2 tbsp olive oil and 1 tbsp lime juice. Season, mix up and serve.

Broad beans feast

Broad beans are at their best at the beginning of summer, as they become tough and bitter towards the end of the season.

All the podding and shelling is worth it to retreive the smooth-skinned pale green beans inside their fur lined pods.

The beans have a nutty, chalky flavour and are best steamed or boiled until tender when they can be easily popped out of their skins.

To make a warm broad bean, streaky bacon and goat’s cheese salad, fry some chopped onion in a good knob of butter until golden, add some diced streaky bacon – cook until crisp. Add the cooked broad beans, some chopped flat-leaf parsley and a capful of red wine vinegar. Toss gently, scatter with goat’s cheese and season to taste.

The first crops of beans and peas need virginal, unoaked wines such as a citrussy Soave classico or try Spain’s version of Sauvignon Blanc, a grassy and crisp Palacio de Bornos Verdejo 2007, Rueda (£6.99, Waitrose).