In my days as a restaurant critic, one of my favourite discoveries was Buzkash Afghan Restaurant tucked away next to Putney bus garage in southwest London. It was an eccentric place, colourfully decorated with tasselled rugs and a treasure-trove of Afghan objects including an intriguing collection of old guns and Pashtun swords.

The meal began with a dish of pickled carrot and a potato fritter with a minty yoghurt sauce while choosing from the long and enticing menu. Afghan food is a fine mixture of the spices, curries and tandoori oven-cooking of northern India and the finesse of Arab food. It is rarely hot, and often incorporates fruit, nuts and seeds.

Chicken, lamb and veal are the favoured meats, but vegetables predominate in stews often served topped with seasoned yoghurt. Long-grain rice – chalau – is cooked slowly with cumin or dill and often heavily and excitingly garnished with nuts and slices of burnt orange peel. Their nan bread is light and crusty.

Both Buzkash and its relative, Caravan Serai in Marylebone, are long gone but I often dip into Helen Saberi’s wonderfully accessible Afghan Food and Cookery, published by Prospect (£12 from www.prospectbooks.co.uk or Books for Cooks in Notting Hill). I love the chicken stuffed with nuts, split peas, orange zest and saffron, the leek-filled pastries and silky-smooth, ground-rice pudding called firni. It is full of dishes suitable for big gatherings and has a particularly interesting chapter on pickles and chutneys.

While on holiday recently, I was totally absorbed in The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini when I was stopped short by a simple phrase to describe an anticipated meal: “rice, kofta and chicken korma”. Immediately I was transported back to Buzkash and its rice with chopped nuts and slices of burnt orange peel, meatballs in an aromatic onion gravy, and creamy, spice-scented qorma-e-murgh, or chicken korma to you and me.

Back home I tracked down Helen Saberi, a charming and modest cook, who shared tips and ideas for speeding up her recipes, making these delicious dishes suitable for after-work meals. In Afghanistan, she told me, the women always keep a jar of gently prefried onions in the fridge, ready for the times when they need to knock up a quick korma for unexpected guests.

My solution is Eazy onions, 390g cans of chopped Spanish onions fried to the slippery stage in olive oil. Lest anyone has a problem finding them, selected branches of Sainsbury, Tesco and Waitrose stock Eazy onions, or ring 01372 375444 for your nearest stockist.

If you prefer to cook onions from scratch, I would particularly recommend British sweet fresh onions (previously called supa-sweet onions), which cook quickly and evenly, are available until October, and are stocked by all the leading supermarkets; Waitrose even peels them for you. Mrs Saberi suggested that white long-grain rice would be served with kofta and korma. Afghan-style long-grain rice, chalau sof, is quite complicated to cook and is seasoned with salt, vegetable oil and cumin. She agreed that my quick and easy method for basmati rice would work perfectly. The distinctive feature of Afghan meatballs is their smooth texture, achieved by kneading the minced lamb with a corianderflavoured onion paste. This could be done in a food processor, but a bit of pummelling is quite pleasing and the results far better.

The Afghan lamb meatballs are cooked in a tomato-seasoned, terracotta-coloured onion sauce and served with yoghurt. The chicken korma is similarly reliant on gently cooked onions, loads of them. This version is flavoured with aniseed, interchangeable with more accessible fennel seed but slightly easier to crush, coloured with turmeric and finished with Greek-style strained yoghurt and mint.

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