I made and served this dish as a main course, but as we were cooking it, Ross mentioned that it would also make a lovely starter (see Cook’s Notes), and I agree. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

I’m pretty pleased with this recipe. I really like Argentinian empanada pastry and as we are heading towards canapé and finger food season, I thought it’s a great pastry to showcase the game season’s best.

I have used the hare haunches for this recipe, and by cooking them in duck fat this keeps the meat moist and succulent (roasting the meat is too harsh and will dry it out too much). The pumpkin then adds a welcome natural sweetness to the hare.

Many moons ago when I was working at a three Michelin-starred restaurant, I was lucky enough to have been ‘good enough’ to make the fresh pasta and raviolis, and I think my personal love for pasta comes from those days. Nowadays, I make it for us at home, especially when we have friends over for dinner, and I still find it amazingly satisfying to make.

We enjoy venison very much and over the years we have used venison shoulder in many recipes. At the pub in Suffolk we used to smoke the shoulder and use the meat for our award-winning Scotch eggs, sausage rolls, pasties and croquettes.

For this recipe, I use a pressure cooker to cook the meat as I find it very effective and much more efficient (but I do also include an oven-braising method in the Cook’s Notes for those who don’t have a pressure cooker).

Serve these tasty little agnolotti as a starter, antipasto or light lunch or simply serve double the amount as a main course. Enjoy!

The most important route to success with this recipe is time and patience. You must not ‘force’ or try to hurry the curing process along as this will result in a disaster.

We used a meat curing cabinet for this process, as it’s the safest method (we made our own with a fridge, but a temperature-controlled wine fridge works well with a dehumidifier and humidity meter). Humidity also plays a huge part in the process, so I suggest that you buy an inexpensive humidity meter from a DIY store to help you out.

Once the meat was cured and ready to use we were pleasantly surprised at how many servings we got from it. It kept well for a couple of weeks or so (in the fridge) and was used in many delicious dishes.

I buy the Prague powder (cure) No. 2 from https://www.sausagemaking.org/acatalog/cure_2.html

It’s easy, I suppose, to make a vegetable purée (like I do in the recipes below) and then simply stir it into Greek yogurt, but the flavour is never quite the same as when you make your own savoury yogurts. The basics of making yogurt are explained below and once you understand these (it’s very easy, by the way), then you can make any flavour that you fancy.

For the tomato-flavoured yogurt, I applied my chef’s knowledge, because I know that raw tomatoes contain enzymes that may destroy the delicate live cultures in yogurt, so it’s important to cook the tomatoes before use to prevent this happening (cooking kills off these enzymes).

I used equipment that I already had to make these yogurts, including a water bath and metal beakers from a pacojet (a specialist chef’s kitchen appliance), but please don’t be put off by this because you can buy an inexpensive yogurt-maker from online stores, including Lakeland Limited (or perhaps you already have one), and this will work just as well as the equipment I use.

When making yogurt, remember the following:

• Follow the temperature guidelines closely and accurately, otherwise the recipe will not work.
• Once you have got the yogurt set up, do not leave it in a drafty place and don’t stir or disturb it for the entire incubation period. If you stir it before the process is complete, the yogurt will ‘collapse’ and it will not thicken.
• The longer you leave the yogurt at the incubation stage, the thicker and more tasty/sour it will become.
• Draining the yogurt is not essential; it depends on how thick you want the yogurt to be. I drain/hang mine, as I like it to be quite thick, but remember that the longer you drain the yogurt, the less (total volume) you will end up with and the thicker it will become.

Tomato, Lemongrass & Ginger Smoky Barbecued Beetroot & RosemaryOven-roasted Carrot, Maple & Fenugreek

I think raw button mushrooms must have fallen out of fashion for a while; I had forgotten how delicious they are in this fresh, raw salad. It is pretty quick and easy to prepare too, which is a definite bonus on hot summer days.

Please note though that the shaved mushrooms don’t keep well, as they discolour slightly and become soft after about an hour. Therefore, I recommend that you get all the ingredients together, make the dressing and prepare the salad (except the mushrooms), then when you are ready to serve, slice the mushrooms and put the salad together at the last minute; it’s really easy and quick. I have used a mandoline to slice the mushrooms, but a sharp knife will also work just as well.

This salad is delicious served as a side dish at a barbecue with barbecued salmon, Sticky Pork Ribs or Slow-barbecued Lamb Shoulder, or it can be served as a starter with crusty bread. 

I have chosen a particular cheese for this recipe as I liked the look of it and I have a special affection for stronger-tasting cheeses, especially blue cheeses, which get my vote in any shape or form. This cheese also appealed to me because of its lovely bright yellow colour; it looks summery to me.

The cheese dressing for this recipe, well, this is a new chapter in my life! Gosh, it’s so delicious, even if I say so myself! It’s quite thick and looks almost like a mayonnaise but it doesn’t contain any egg yolks. The dressing makes a little more than you’ll need, but this isn’t such a bad thing as the leftover dressing is delicious served over a simple garden salad.

The courgettes are sliced very thinly using a mandoline to create long ribbons, which look beautiful. The raw courgette ribbons and blue cheese dressing go together perfectly – I love this combination!

My grandparents had two very large avocado trees in their garden and these fellas were very tall. Each year my grandfather would harvest the avocados, and each family (six families) used to get their ‘share’. The avocados were treated with utmost respect and in our household my father used to be in charge of looking after them. To ripen the avocados, dad used to wrap them each in newspaper and then place each one into a clean sock. They were then carefully placed amongst his pants and socks at the back of his wardrobe (where it was cool and dark) and left to ripen slowly. Dad would check them regularly and they would finally make their appearance once they were ripe and ready to eat.

Harvesting the avocados was a serious event for us. There were only three of us in our family, but we made sure that we each got our own fair share! It makes me chuckle now, but believe me, it was a serious event back then. The respect that mum and dad showed to avocados has made me treat them with the same respect to this very day. Dad was a fussy eater so his food had to be plain, and the only way he enjoyed avocado was by seasoning it with plenty of salt and pepper. Mum and I liked a bit of lemon juice, but that was the extent of the extravagance back then. A real sense of occasion! I loved the importance of fresh avocados to my family and I still love their specialness today.

For me, bacon and avocado is a natural match. When you have two ingredients that each have a strong flavour, it really doesn’t need much else to make a great dish. I have added the barbecued Little Gem lettuces to this recipe because I love the taste of them. The dressing is fantastic because you can taste both the avocado and the bacon. It’s simply wow and delicious and I hope you’ll love it too!

This pitta bread dough recipe is fantastic. I like the feel of the dough and it works perfectly every time (I use it a lot). For this particular recipe, I thought it would be great to stuff the raw dough pockets with a filling before cooking them.

As I usually cook my pitta breads using a griddle pan, the barbecue idea is not alien at all. The trick with this is to make sure that the barbecue is not too hot. Our barbecue has a lid, meaning I can close all the vents and the lid, which, in effect, turns the barbecue into an outdoor oven. The pitta breads take about 8–10 minutes to cook and if the temperature is controlled and you turn the pitta breads a couple of times during the cooking process, they cook perfectly all the way through with just the right amount of caramelisation on the outside.

This recipe makes a delicious starter or something tasty to nibble on while you are slow cooking a joint of meat on the barbecue.

For the filling, I have kept it simple today by using caramelised onions, feta cheese and oregano, but if you have some lovely curried/seasoned cooked minced lamb (drained of fat and as dry as possible), this would also be fantastic to add as a filling, along with the caramelised onions.

I used feta cheese for the salad as that is what I had in the fridge, but you could use fresh homemade curd cheese or crumbly goat’s cheese instead, if you prefer.

Any leftover dressing keeps well in a covered jar or squeezy bottle in the fridge for up to a week and can be drizzled over other salads.