Seasonal food in June

June is here and the sun is warm, our thoughts turn to lighter foods, picnics and barbeques, and out comes the salad bowl and servers, but how interesting are your salads?

How many of you, like me, were brought up on salads made using limp Dutch round hothouse lettuce with a few quarters of tomato, half a boiled egg, some slices of cucumber and, if you were lucky, a couple of radishes and a some pickled beetroot?

Thankfully we have at last seen salad leaves and ingredients improve beyond recognition over the last decade or so and not only that but the dressings we use on them have improved far beyond salad cream! No longer should you have to put up with the salad made from thick cut raw red cabbage, chunks of peppers and Chinese leaf all finished off with a slice of orange twisted and placed on top!

Sometimes I really despair when I see food treated in this way, with no thought, sympathy or understanding of simple ingredients, with a total lack of regard for what is and is not edible. 20 years or so ago, in my first job as Head Chef, I had in my fridges a minimum of 10 different leaves at any one time, often many more.

Leaves such as red oak leaf, escarole, batavia trevisse, purslane, pissenlit as it is known in French - dandelion to us, rocket (which as suddenly become the leaf of the decade) pousse or baby spinach, land cress, claytonia, mizuna, shungiku, salad bowl, frizzy, Belgium endive, continuity, lambs lettuce also known as mâche or corn salad to name but a few. Sadly the majority came in on my weekly delivery from the Paris market Rungis although I did eventually have someone growing the majority of them for me over here.

Every week new varieties, with different textures, a myriad of colours, flavours and leaf shapes would be delivered to my doorstep courtesy of my French supplier. Then one day, out of the blue, I had a telephone call from one of this countries superstores (can't say which one but they are well known for their saintly food!), can we come and see you?

We understand you are using some unusual types of salad leaves. They duly arrived and I proudly presented my cornucopia of leaves to them, explaining as I went along the attributes each one, my first job as a consultant! Shortly after that bags of mixed leaves and interesting salads started appearing in their shops and the rest, as they say, is history! As a rule we have a tendency to wait for summer to eat salads, but in reality there are as many winter varieties of lettuce as there are summer ones, and salads can be eaten at any point in the day or at any point of the meal too. They're eaten as a starter or main course, for lunch and dinner, as a light supper dish or as a snack, they may replace vegetables in a meal or even replace dessert, they can be served as simple accompaniments or as a side dish. But above all they are a great excuse for experimentation, for trying out different combinations, for expressing your personality.

Making even the simplest of salads is an art, mixing flavours, textures and colours so that they blend together while complementing each other. A salad should taste and look fresh; it should be exciting, tantalising, even sexy. The dressing you drizzle over it should be light and clean, not overwhelmingly thick or heavy. The salad should then be arranged with a lightness of touch and tumble onto the plate freely and elegantly.

The leaves should be freshly picked not limp and tired looking; there are so many different colours and textures available in leaves that they should be mixed with care, some leaves are incredibly fragile and need treating carefully while others are robust and will take more punishment. Some are quite pungent while others are mild or subtle in their flavours. If your salad leaves are a bit on the limp side do not despair, wash them in very cold water then leave them in a plastic bag in the fridge for a few hours, they'll soon come back to life.

Always dress your salad at the last possible minute never letting them sit dressed for more than a few minutes before getting tucked in, all dressings and salt especially will very quickly take the life out of a salad sending it limp and soggy in no time, dress it and eat it straight away. Many dressing should also be made as needed, rather than sitting around, as their flavours can change quite drastically over time.

If using lemon for instance it very quickly looses its tang and zing if squeezed too soon. Garlic and herbs soon loose their vitality and become quite stale while refrigeration is probably the worst single thing for salads. Everything, if served or used too cold, will not show its true flavours, they will be suppressed and hidden, better to let everything come to room temperature before using.

A simple green salad made purely from a mix of various leaves and herbs tossed either just with a little oil and seasoning or a little simple vinaigrette is an excellent and refreshing accompaniment to almost anything be it fish, meat or fowl, but salads of course don't even have to contain leaves to fall into this classification.

The word salad can and does cover a multitude of concoctions, far too many to list in this small space. But however or whenever you take your salad it is often the dressing that makes or breaks it, it may be a simple but good quality olive oil, or what about a light curry oil, an easy and quick lemon vinaigrette or a healthy yoghurt dressing, a parmesan and garlic vinaigrette, or even a spicy oriental dressing to evoke the feeling of being in a far away land.