This is such a gorgeous dish and healthy too. It’s a great way to showcase our beautiful salad leaves and with all the herbs and the lime juice it just tastes so fresh and zingy.

This salad is very much inspired by a delicious salad I had at 26 Grains of Stoney Street in March, just before the Covid 19 lockdown. It was really delicious, but maybe it has stayed with me because it was almost the last thing I ate out before all the restaurants closed and we were all confined to eating at home until goodness knows when. I hadn’t thought of using dried figs in a salad before but if you have some/can buy some (I got mine in the Asian supermarket in Belfast) then I encourage you to try, they are really very yummy.

This dish is somewhere between a soup and a stew, satisfyingly hearty and lush with creamy beans and lots of olive oil. It’s definitely a main course soup rather than a starter soup. It’s also a really great store cupboard/slightly sad vegetables at the bottom of the fridge/the heel end of the bread dinner, hence posting it at the moment when none of us are able to go out and get fresh ingredients quite as much as we usually would.

There is something aromatic about jerusalem artichokes, and I’m not really referring to their tendency to make you fart! Do you know what I mean? When you eat them their flavour is very much in your nose. it makes me think of galangal and lemongrass, and other fragrant South East Asian ingredients. This soup marries artichokes with ginger, chilli, lime leaf, turmeric and coconut, for something that is comforting yet still a little bit exotic.