This week's recipe is very seasonal as it can only be made with the sweetest ripe juicy figs. Orignating in Sicily, its combination of sweet and saltiness is another example of the residual culinary influence of the island's 10th century Moorish rulers from North Africa. It is often made with smoked pancetta, but guanciale (cured pork cheek) has a more delicate flavour and the crispy fat perfectly balances the rich sweetness of the figs and shallot.   

This week's recipe combines Dover Sole, one of the 3 great eating fish, with sweet mussels, white wine and butter. Variations of this dish are served in high end restaurants throughout France, and if you can't get hold of Dover Sole, John Dory or Turbot both make a very acceptable substitute. The best mussels to use are small ones which have a wonderful flavour and natural sweetness that perfectly balance the final dish. 

This week's restaurant review is of Comice, a Michelin-starred fine-dining restaurant near my former home in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, serving product-driven contemporary French cuisine and a wine list centred on grower-producers. Owners Noam Gedalof from Montreal and Etheliya Hananova from Winnipeg, chef and sommelier, husband and wife, bring to Comice more than thirty years of combined professional experience in California, New York, Montreal and Paris.

This week's recipe is one of the best ways to eat fresh crab, which many chefs regard  the most delicious member of the crustacean family.  For tastiest  results, fresh picked mud or blue swimmer crab meat is the best to use, but if steaming your own crabs and picking the meat sounds a bit daunting, feel free to use pasteurised or even canned crab meat for an alternative version.  

This week's recipe is the essence of Provence in a bowl.  It combines fennel, tomatoes and pastis with butter and has a mild chilli kick. Pastis is the iconic Provençal aperitif, and is made using anise , liquorice and herbs.  It is a 45% proof spirit served diluted with cold water and ice, and the chemical reaction of the water turns it a cloudy yellow colour.

Turbot is widely considered one of the 3 great eating fish, alongside Sea Bass and Dover Sole. It can grow to enormous sizes, and is usually sold whole up to 2 kgs in weight or in tranches for larger fish. This recipe is for a smaller fish cut sliced into 8 tranches, and cooking it on the bone extracts maximum flavour.

This week's recipe is a variation of a famous pasta dish from 3 Michelin Star restaurant Da Vittorio in Bergamo, Northern Italy. Deceptively simple, it is usually made with 3 types of tomato, yellow datterini, red cherry and San Marzano, but any good quality ripe tomatoes will give equally good results. It is also very quick to make since ripe tomatoes break down very quickly to form a thick and unctuous sauce. 

This week's recipe comes from Sicily, combining oranges, fennel and olive oil for an unlikely sounding but delicious summer salad. Sicily is famous for blood oranges, but these can be hard to get hold of and in any case normal oranges tend to be sweeter which works better for this recipe. In Sicily you quite often see additions such as black olives, but this simple version is the best. 

This week’s recipe comes from Campania in Southern Italy, marrying pistachio nuts with guanciale and parmigiano.   For such simple ingredients, the end result is a very luxurious dish that you would normally expect to find in a high end restaurant.  Guanciale is cured pork cheek, an essential ingredient for pasta dishes such as Carbonara and Amatriciana, but unsmoked pancetta makes a perfectly good substitute.  

Variations of this week's recipe can be found throughout the Mediterranean.  It requires the freshest of raw prawns, unwaxed citrus and good quality olive oil.  For the prawns, red prawns are perfect for their colour, but these can be hard to find and grey ones have the same flavour profile and make a perfect alternative.  It is usually served with fresh or dried chilli, but you can leave this out if you don't like anything spicy.  

This week's recipe comes from Sicily, where the pistachio nuts and preserved lemon peel are lingering vestiges of the islands Moorish past. It is normally made with swordfish, but sea bream makes a very good alternative, and the lemon juice partially cooks the fish so it is not raw when you combine all the ingredients. Taglierini are a type of very thin tagliatelle made from durum wheat and eggs, and it's a very versatile pasta as well as being extremely quick to cook.

Le Bistrot de Jan is chef Jan van der Westhuizen's second restaurant in Nice. It is located in rue Lascaris in Port Lympia, right next door to his amazing Michelin Stared flagship restaurant Jan. Both restaurants share the same kitchen so the bistro provides the opportunity to taste chef Jan's extraordinary food more affordably. The menu is eclectic, with influences from his native South Africa, the French Riviera and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, combined with classic French technique.

This is a spectacular dish to prepare for a large lunch or a party. It is essential to use good quality salmon, wild if you can find it and ethically farmed if you can't. In the southern hemisphere, this means buying New Zealand rather than Tasmanian. The cucumber slices are arranged as a garnish to look like fish scales, with the added benefit of being a tasty accompaniment.

This week's recipe comes from the Basque area of south western France, and is sometimes known as Basque scrambled eggs . The name Piperade comes from the Basque word for pepper, piper. Traditionally it is served with crisp fried Bayonne ham (similar to Prosciutto Crudo), but it goes better with crisp fried cooked ham. It is usually cooked with green pepper, but the red ones are sweeter.

This week's recipe is a foolproof pasta recipe that originates in Puglia in the South of Italy. It combines ripe eggplants (aubergines) and tomatoes, closely related members of the nightshade family, into a delicious and unctuous sauce. The technique includes finishing the final 2 minutes of the cooking of the pasta in the sauce, for maximum absorption of flavour as it reaches the al dente stage.

The Turbot is one of the 3 best fish in the world to eat (the other 2 being Dover Sole and Sea Bass).   It is a delicious flat fish, with firm white flesh and can be roasted, fried or poached.  The skin is very thick, and although edible if crispy, it is too easy to overcook the fish so I always discard it.

I recently ate this dish in the Franciacorta wine region of northern Italy , and was blown away by the flavour and colour of the spinach, perfectly complemented by minced black olives. It makes a perfect starter for a vegetarian dinner, followed by a main course such as frittata or stuffed zucchine.   Equally, you could pair it with a meat or fish main course or eat it as a very satisfying one course lunch or dinner.

This week's recipe comes from Emilia Romagna in Northern Italy.  Stuffed meat rolls are popular throughout Italy as a way of making expensive meat go further, with slow cooking to tenderise tough cuts. Usually they are stuffed with a bread based stuffing, but this version uses vegetables and a small slice of local mortadella sausage. It is often served as a main course, with most of the sauce being used for a first course of pasta.

Chef Massimo Bottura's Osteria Francescana in Modena has a coveted 3 Michelin stars, and was voted the best restaurant in the world in 2018. It has a long waiting list, but you can more easily (and inexpensively) sample Chef Bottura's award winning cuisine at his second Modena restaurant Franceschetta 58. Both restaurants are not far from each other, with Franceschetta 58 located just outside the city centre in a modern but fairly functional building.

In Italian, a ragù is a sauce made usually with finely minced meat, tomatoes and usually minced onion, carrot and celery. It derives from the French word ragoût which means a tasty main course stew of cubed meat and vegetables. This week's recipe is a ragù with a twist, using finely diced lean veal to give an interesting solid texture compared to the finely minced version.

This week's recipe is another one inspired by a recent trip to Lisbon, enjoyed at Taberna Da Rue Das Flores. This must visit establishment is owned by chef André Magalhães, and specialises in  quirky and  delicious  tapas style dishes.    The recipe itself  is Japanese in origin. Scallops and butter have an affinity,  and the addition of miso transforms an already  delicious combination into sometime sublime. 

The origins of this week's recipe are claimed all along France's Mediterranean cost from Languedoc to Provence, with a broad consensus that the  original version came from Sète.  It is not dissimilar to the more famous Bouillabaisse, the iconic fish stew from Marseille.  Although the list of ingredients is impressive, it is a quite simple dish to cook because after you have sweated the diced onion, all you have to do is assemble the other ingredients together, simmer for 25 minutes or so and then add the fish for the last 5 minutes of cooking.  

This week my travels have brought me for the first time to Lisbon for an Easter long weekend. Lisbon is an amazing city, quite unlike anywhere else in Europe and well worth a visit for its interesting architecture, friendly and obliging people and superb food and wine scene. Ciclo was established in 2024 in the upmarket district of Graça by French trained chef José Neves and his partner and restaurant manager Claudia Silva.

This week's recipe  is a classic example of cucina povera (poverty cuisine), making expensive meat go much further with the addition of a cheap stale bread, onion and herb stuffing. It is also a classic method of tenderising a tough but highly flavoured cut of meat by long and slow cooking in a wine and tomato sauce.  I usually serve this as a one course meal with polenta chips and olive oil steamed broccolini…