What's in season: March

Artichokes make a sociable and easy main course, one for each person, with a bowl of hollandaise, mayonnaise or vinaigrette in which to dip the leaf base. To eat, simply scrape the flesh off with your teeth and discard the rest of the leaf. Work your way through the leaves down to the hairy choke. Carefully pull this out to reveal the prize: the tender, intensely flavoured base, which you simply eat with a knife and fork.

Oysters and mussels are still good, as the weather is cold; one of my all-time favourites for St Patrick's Day is oysters with Guinness hollandaise. For a less expensive dish, I recommend a mussel and potato salad (read my February seasonal for details of how to prepare mussels). Once cooked, remove from the shells when cool enough to handle, mix with cooked and sliced waxy potatoes, such as Charlotte, and with plenty of mayonnaise and chopped chives or spring onions.

Lamb is classic for Easter as well as St David's Day, but I also like duckling at this time of year. It is a rich meat that you might not want to eat as the weather gets warmer, but I find it perfect for cool March days (see my Cured Spring Duckling recipe). Sometimes I stuff and roast it, other times I divide it into legs and breast, making a casserole from the legs, and a quick stovetop dish with the breasts.

Just desserts
If you're bored with rhubarb and Bramleys, and have had enough orange salads, consider dried fruit for a variety of desserts. This month's menu includes a spiced compote, but you might also consider a prune and chocolate cake, apricots soaked in Muscat wine, or a dried fruit crumble, using the compote mixture and topping it with the usual butter, sugar and flour crumble, into which you have mixed some ground and flaked almonds for extra crunch.