Peas feature in two of my three recipes this week, and while fresh peas and beans signal, for me, the height of summer, frozen peas are great all year.

Despite my love of cooking seasonal food, we are now in what is called the “hungry gap”, the period of time between March and May when fresh vegetables are thin on the ground.

At this time of year, frozen peas are a great way to fill the “hungry gap” and they are a perfect example of how freezing some food preserves their quality. Like broad beans and sweet corn, peas start turning their sugars into starch from the moment they are picked. Freezing them arrests the process, keeping them juicy and sweet for as long as you want.

A bag of frozen petit pois is perfect for whipping out at a moment's notice and will make a wonderful fast soup with a chicken or vegetable stock, or a very good purée to have with fish, as in my third recipe.

For the first recipe, I cook frozen peas with fennel, bacon and small chunks of sausage meat, all flavoured with a good slug of Spanish fino sherry. The uncooked bangers from the packet can be grilled and eaten with mashed potatoes (try mixing in wholegrain mustard to give it bite) or with a parsnip gratin, which takes very little effort.

Shopping List

2 packets good pork sausages

1 packet streaky bacon

3 heads fennel

1 bag mint

4 hoki fillets (available from good fishmongers. If you can't find, use pollack instead)

1 bag parsnips

If you don't have them already

Onions, a leek, potatoes

Parmesan, olive oil

Fennel seeds

Fino sherry

Chicken or vegetable stock

Star buy

3 bags frozen peas

Store cupboard buy

Maldon salt

Recipe 1: Peas and sausages with mint and sherry (serves 3)

Prep time: 10 min; cooking time: 25 min.

Remove 3 fat sausages (weight should be about 250g) from their skins and chop into pieces. Don't worry too much about the size as they will break up in the pan. Heat a tablespoon of olive oil and sauté the sausages with a teaspoon of fennel seeds for 5 minutes on a high heat until the sausage meat is starting to turn golden.

Break up the pieces with a wooden spoon as they are cooking. Remove them from the pan, pour in another tablespoon of oil and add a chopped medium onion, a well-washed sliced leek and a diced fennel bulb, from which the hard outer skin has been removed. Sauté for 10 to 15 minutes on a medium heat until the vegetables look soft and start to caramelise.

Add 3 rashers of chopped bacon and the sausage and cook for another 5 minutes, adding a splash of water if the onions start to burn. Add a good splash of sherry (up to 2 tbsp), 100ml of water or chicken stock and 450g of frozen peas. Bring to the boil, simmer until the peas are tender and scatter with 2 tbsp of chopped mint. Serve at once with hunks of fresh bread.

Recipe 2: Sausages with parsnip gratin (serves 4)

Peel and slice six parsnips thinly lengthways. Peel two fennel bulbs and slice thinly. Slice an onion thinly and grate 100g parmesan. Layer the parsnips in an oven dish with the fennel, onion and parmesan with drizzles of olive oil, salt and pepper. Top with parmesan, moisten with 100ml water (or stock) and bake for 30 minutes at 210C. Serve with grilled sausages.

Recipe 3: Pea puree with pan-fried hoki (serves 4)

Cover 600g of frozen peas and a small handful of mint in chicken or vegetable stock (or water), season with salt and pepper and simmer until the peas are tender. Roughly blitz in a food processor. Meanwhile, heat a frying pan until smoking hot and fry four hoki fillets, skin side down in a dessert spoon of olive oil. Turn after 2 to 3 minutes and cook until the flesh turns opaque. Serve the fillets on mounds of hot pea purée with steamed potatoes.

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