Eat only soft food for at least a week” was the parting shot from my dentist after a particularly gruelling session recently. I’d hoped I might lose my appetite but as my mouth came back to life, the opposite happened. My first craving was for mashed potato, super-fluffy mash with a soft-poached egg and a shower of finely grated Parmesan. The next day I was in serious need of comfort food and inspiration came from a glut of ripe tomatoes in need of eating up. There is something extraordinarily uplifting about the smell of slowly roasting tomatoes and as they cooked I used more to make a buttery stew with shallots. Into this I mixed risotto rice, then simplified the risotto cooking by adding saffron and honey-flavoured stock in two batches. Within 30 minutes my tender mouth was happily dealing with this luscious risotto finished with a lump of pale Italian butter and those gooey, intensely flavoured roasted tomatoes.

Homemade tomato sauce is endlessly variable and extremely speedy to make, almost as fast as heating up a ready-made supermarket version. It also has all manner of uses. With pasta, of course, but fine-tuning the flavours with ginger, say, or cinnamon, takes it in many exotic directions. I love it cold, when the juices thicken, turning it into a delicate chutney or jam to serve with fish, or piled on to a slice of mozzarella nestled in a curl of lettuce, to wolf down with a splash of olive oil. One of the quickest and most useful sauces merely requires olive oil and garlic. It is though, I think, essential to peel and core the tomatoes to avoid skin and pith getting stuck between your teeth. This sauce was the perfect companion to some did-dy little green burgers, made with minced lamb and a humungous bunch of coriander. I ate it with left-over risotto, but it goes with anything you fancy from green beans, couscous, rice or new potatoes. Either way, I like this combination of food with a dollop of Greek yoghurt laced with mint.

It wasn’t long before all these gentle flavours led to a need for something spicy to refresh my jaded taste-buds. I’ve been making variations on this Thai-inspired potato soup for years and it’s one of the simplest and most successful quick soups I know. If it ends up too chilli-hot, then the flavours can be subdued with a splash of coconut cream.

Apart from tomatoes, the other seasonal glut that appealed to me at my local fruit and veg stall was greengages. Almonds complement these lovely plums, particularly in the form of frangipane, made by beating ground almonds with sugar and egg. In this impressive cheat’s tart, the frangipane puffs and billows around the weeping plums to create one of those food marriages made in heaven.

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