Spelt rhubarb cake

It's our rhubarb season again and this big moist pillow of a cake has as already gone down well with gluten-avoiding - and, when I substituted the butter and milk - with dairy-free friends. For best results, allow time for all your ingredients to reach room temperature before mixing.

225g spelt flour, 1 tbsp baking powder (wheat free if avoiding gluten),1 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon, 200g ground almonds, 225g light brown sugar.
2 large eggs
75g butter and 250ml whole milk (or 3 tblsp olive oil and 250ml water if avoiding dairy)
1 small orange
300g rhubarb
3 tbsp Demerara sugar & 1 tsp ground cinnamon.

Preheat the oven to 190C/gas mark 5. Line a 23cm springform tin with baking paper.
Melt the butter and allow to cool. Grate the orange and squeeze its juice.
Chop the rhubarb into 2 cm lengths.

Mix the flour, ground almonds, light brown sugar, salt, baking powder, 1 tsp cinnamon and the orange zest in a large bowl. Whisk together the melted butter and eggs in a separate bowl, then whisk in the milk and orange juice. Fold the eggy mixture into the dry ingredients and mix lightly into a smooth batter with a knife.
Pour a third of the batter into the tin, scatter over half the rhubarb, add another third of batter and the rest of the rhubarb. Top with the remaining batter and sprinkle with the Demerara sugar and 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon.
Bake for about 50 minutes until the cake begins to shrink from the sides of the tin. Allow to cool for about 15 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack.

A very filling cake which lasts for days, so serve in small portions with a generous blob of plain Greek yogurt or vanilla ice cream and – if you have any to spare - some freshly stewed rhubarb.

Spring Salads

I love this time of year when the first blast of sunshine makes my comfort dishes of winter suddenly seem as hot and heavy as an old woolly sweater. I long for a change, for bright colours and crisp, raw tastes. Trouble is, although there's plenty of gorgeous looking fruit and vedg out there, it's not yet growing on my allotment and it still doesn't taste like much.
So, to inject that missing zing in shop-bought green leaves or tomatoes, I'm adding two ingredients for Spring: a teaspoon of honey in the vinaigrette and a handful of mixed seeds.
Most supermarkets stock some variety of mixed seeds - often in the healthy eating section as they're good for you, too. The mix I'm using from Waitrose contains sunflower, pumpkin, golden linseed, hemp and sesame seeds, which are all very fine, but be warned: nibbled straight from the pack they're as dull and worthy as bird food! The secret is to toast them quickly in a hot dry pan and scatter them, hot or cold, over your salad.

Big garlic

Have you seen the huge bulbs of garlic, the size of oranges, that are suddenly in our supermarkets? Odd. Like being in California, where everything is the wrong size and shape - tomatoes the size of grapes and minty green, citrus fruits the size and colour of tomatoes - very confusing to someone like me whose eyes and taste buds are irrevocably linked.
But the good thing about the new Uber-garlic is that it's very mild, more like the Spanish garlic that makes those heavenly sauces such as the one for "huevos escalfados", a strange (to us) supper dish of poached eggs with an almond and garlic sauce and more toasted almonds sprinkled on top.
A peculiar combination? Yes, but gorgeous. You slow-poach the peeled garlic cloves for 30 minutes in deep olive oil that only ever reaches 80 degrees (use a thermometer if you can, or do it by eye - if the oil starts to bubble even a tiny bit it is too hot so whip it off the stove to cool for a moment, or else it can make the garlic sour). The Catalans call this method of cooking garlic "confit" - I don't think there is a term for it in Italian or French cuisine. The cloves come out milky-spiky-sweet, without a suggestion of dragon-breath: you can eat them like beans, just piled up beside an egg or a steak, or squished on bread, or in a host of other recipes.
For this sauce, though, you whizz or pound them up with a handful of ground almonds, some salt and a generous pinch of chilli, adding a little of the cooking oil to make the right consistency - there is your sauce. Drizzle it over your softly poached eggs, which are sitting on top of a hunk of toasted bread (possibly itself rubbed with a little garlic and tomato), and if you love them sprinkle more sliced toasted almonds on top. Nothing fancy. It's peasant food, not haute cuisine. An excellent and unusual vegetarian dish: very good, and very good for you too.