What's in season: September and October

We often neglect our familiar vegetables, carrots, broccoli, cabbage, chard, in favour of the exotic baby corn, mangetout, and other miniature vegetables, or ready prepared vegetables. One pays for the preparation, miniaturisation and the vast distance much of this produce has travelled. Rather than just see them as an adjunct to our meat dishes, it is worth looking at carrots, celery, beetroot, cauliflower, broccoli, beans and all the other home-grown veggies as ingredients for warm, well-dressed salads, exquisite soups, both hot and cold, and delicious medleys to be cooked into curries, mixed with pasta, or used in risotto. A beetroot risotto is quite something, believe me, and one of our favourite summer soups is a smooth, mildly curried carrot soup, served chilled.

Cheap tips
If you are prepared to invest time rather than money in your ingredients, you can make delicious meals from the least expensive cuts of meat. Neck of lamb, belly pork, spare rib pork chops and shin of beef all require long, slow cooking, but yield succulent stews, which you can stretch by adding soaked pulses such as chick peas, black beans or cannellini beans, to make tagines, pork and baked beans or a spicy beef and black bean stew, Cuban-style.

Buy dried fruit, flour and oatmeal in bulk in health food stores where these products are sold loose, and you have the perfect breakfast, but also the ingredients for making fruit flapjacks, pancakes and tea breads.

Fish, on the whole has an expensive image, but some of the most nutritious fish is amongst the least expensive, such as sardine and mackerel. Sardines, scaled and gutted, bake in the oven very quickly, or you can flatten them out and grill them. Try flaking cooked sardines into cooked pasta, mixing with chopped fennel and topping with breadcrumbs, before baking under the grill for a few minutes to produce the classic Sicilian pasta con le sarde. Mackerel fillets, rubbed with a little mustard and sprinkled with breadcrumbs, grill in no time. And smoked mackerel is delicious too, with brown bread and a cucumber salad.

Above all, allow yourself the occasional bottle of wine. Tom says don't go for the cheapest, as that will give you a cheap headache. Look for promotions and bin-ends, and always pay just a little more than you think you can afford; the pleasure will far outweigh the minor extravagance.