Tuscan pasta with kale, leeks and sausage, traditionally served with pappardelle, is another great dish for those who like pasta but can't eat or don't like tomatoes. I'm doing it here according to the recipe my father recorded in his journal in the 1960s, though it's easily turned lactovegetarian. It's neither slow-cooked nor a quick dish, but easy to cook with relatively few ingredients.

This Durban vegan eggplant curry —usually simply called brinjal curry after the lead vegetable's name in various Indian languages —uses baked or grilled eggplant (aubergine) to bring a deep, slightly smoky flavour to a curry brimming with the flavours of onions, pepper, chillies, tomatoes, coconut, and sweet potato in a rich mix of spices. It can be cooked fiery hot in accordance with the cliché about Durban curries or as a milder affair.

This dish of pasta with celery and basil sauce, served here with broad beans, is an amalgam of a fondly remembered dish from childhood via what happens when you start nosing around in the British Library. Highfalutin bibliographic japes aside, it's also easy to cook.

This pasta with creamy asparagus and smoked salmon is one of my favourite summer dishes for when you're hungry but want something a little refreshing. It's certainly filling, but it is also light with the flavours of warm weather; citrus and green things. Better still, it takes very little effort to cook.

A chorizo and chickpea stew (potaje) from the north of Spain full of vegetable goodness. In addition to the core ingredients, it includes shallots, sweet peppers, tomatoes, broad beans and a plethora of leafy green herbs.

Pasta with prawn and anchovy cream sauce

Vegetarian tandoori masala butternut squash, roasted to perfection and served with a mildly spiced dish of leeks, lentils, celery

A fricassée with dumplings; fresh green flavours. Quick and ideal for mixed groups of diners—vegans, vegetarians and carnivores

Lombard chicken with pumpkin, fennel and asparagus; adaptation an 18th-century recipe