What to Eat: Food that’s good for your health, pocket and plate

One way to get better value out of supermarket herb plants like basil and chives is to break each one up into much smaller clumps of roots and repot in new pots, giving them more space to grow. This will produce a more usable herb and more vigorous, healthy growth. Treated like this, a purchase of one herb plant can give you a summer’s worth of supply.

Despite their often high price, herbs can help you cook quite economically because they have the capacity to transform otherwise humdrum, cheap ingredients into something special. By using herbs to lend colour and flavour to your food, you can cut down on more expensive ingredients such as meat and cheese and make much more of vegetables, grains and pulses.

Lettuce and other salad leaves

The umbrella terms ‘lettuce’ and ‘salad leaves’ do not do justice to the exciting portfolio of salad greens that can be grown in the UK. British salad need never be boring at any time of the year.

There are six broad categories of salad leaf:

Dark green and peppery

Mustard cress

Watercress

Landcress

Rocket

Tatsoi

Mizuna

Mibuna

Nasturtium

Soft and sweet

Lamb’s lettuce/corn salad

Butterhead (curly)

Oak leaf

Lolla rossa (red)

Lolla bionda (green)

Salad bowl

Juicy and sweet

Pea shoots

Purslane

Juicy and sharp

Sorrel

Claytonia

Red chard

Spinach

Red orach

Bitter

Belgian chicory

Red (Treviso chicory)

Frisée endive

Radicchio

Dandelion

Escarole

Batavia

Crunchy

Cos/Romaine

Buttercrunch

Little Gem

Webb’s wonderful

Lakeland

To make a great ‘green’ salad, the art is to combine leaves with different colours, textures and flavours so that the salad is packed with interesting contrasts. For extra freshness, you can add any seasonal herbs that you have to hand.

While vegetables like carrots can be stored for months and still taste good, salad leaves need to be ultra-fresh to deliver on the taste front. Hearts of Little Gem lettuce, for example, may stay looking green in the fridge for a week or more but their fresh sweetness will give way to an unpleasant, flat bitterness.

Puffy ‘pillow’ packs of salad leaves are filled with ‘modified atmosphere’ (nitrogen and carbon dioxide gas) to prolong their life. They may look fine when you buy them, but often flop dramatically when exposed to air. This is because their life has been extended unnaturally and so they just don’t have the natural vitality, or the flavour, of freshly picked leaves. It makes more sense to buy fresh whole lettuces and leaves that have not been packed this way so you can more easily assess their freshness.

Modern supermarket distribution systems can mean that it takes several days for salads to reach our shelves. They must be ready picked by growers in anticipation of a supermarket order, sent to a factory for trimming, or full cleaning and bagging, then on to a distribution centre, which may not be close by, before being trucked from stores where they will be sold with a ‘best-before’ date a few days on. Traditional greengrocers, market stalls and box schemes cannot rely on refrigeration to store salads so when you buy salad leaves from these outlets, it is much more obvious whether they are really fresh or not.

Things to do with salad leaves

• Combining the more ordinary salad leaves with fresh herbs such as whole mint leaves, flat parsley, fronds of chervil, dill and oregano – including any that are flowering – will make the mix much more inspiring.