Mushrooms, butter beans and pumpkin scone

Just a super-quick meal of fallbacks tonight: a punnet of mushrooms fried with two cloves of crushed garlic, a bag of broad beans, podded, boiled and dressed with mint, lime and olive oil, and Nigel's lovely pumpkin scone.

Cold Noodle and Tomato Salad

Yesterday was almost unbearably hot and muggy. The forecast promised a thunderstorm to break the tension, but it failed to materialise. My planned meal of sweet and sour pork seemed far too heavy and I decided to make another of Nigel Slater's salads from last Sunday's Observer Food Monthly. I'm not usually a fan of noodle or pasta salads but this one converted me. I was also a little nervous about not using any oil at all in the dressing; I usually use extra-virgin rapeseed oil for Asian salads but I followed instructions and left it out. This might have improved things by ensuring that the noodles were not at all slimy, instead absorbing the tangy dressing and providing a nice soft contrast against the juicy vegetables.

Once again we correctly guessed that Nigel's estimate of four servings would only work for tiny people with no appetite, so we made and ate the full recipe between two of us, and picked up a couple of spicy pakoras from the local Asian store for good measure. It's also impossible to buy sprouted seeds at the moment, thanks to the German E Coli scare. So we used sugar snap peas and it was just as good. And we substituted baby broad beans for peas as I love them, and the season will end be over soon.

Ingredients:

• 60g rice vermicelli
• 100 g small broad beans, shelled weight
• 125g cherry tomatoes
• a large handful of sprouted seeds or sugar snap peas
• 1 red pepper
• half a cucumber
• 100g salted, roasted cashews or peanuts
• a small bunch of coriander
• 4 sprigs of mint
• juice of a lime
• 3 tbsp nam pla (Thai fish sauce)
• 1 tsp caster sugar

Cover the vermicelli in boiling water and soak for 2 minutes, or as according to the packet instructions. Drain and run under cold water, then leave to drain again. Pod the broad beans and simmer for 4-5 minutes, until tender, then drain. Finely slice the sugar-snap peas and halve the cherry tomatoes. Peel and deseed the cumber, then dice. Deseed the pepper and finely slice. Finely chop the herbs, then combine all of the ingredients in a big salad bowl and toss very thoroughly. Chill for half an hour before serving.

Broad Bean and Pea Salad

A warm and zesty salad, and a delicious way to use broad beans, which tend to glut in the spring. We peeled ours after cooking tonight, as they seemed to have more bitter skins than usual. But sometimes the skins are thin and delicate so you can leave them on. Otherwise, peeling them doesn't take too much time: just use your thumbnail to nick a small hole in the end opposite the black sprout line, and squeeze the cooked bean out.

Ingredients:

• 200g broad beans, unpodded weight
• 100g petit pois (frozen is fine)
• 1 generous handful of mint leaves
• juice of half a lemon or a whole lime
• 1 tsp demerara sugar
• good olive oil

Pod the broad beans, bring a small pan of unsalted water to a moderate boil, and drop in the broad beans. If you have a lot of different sizes, try to give the largest an extra minute or two of cooking time by dropping them in first. Cook for 7-8 minutes, until tender. Just before they're done, you can drop in the frozen peas and bring back to a boil, then drain. Run under cold water, especially if you intend to peel the broad beans.

Toss the beans and peas with the rest of the ingredients and serve warm. Tonight it went well with lamb burgers and apricot cous-cous, before we got down to the serious arts and crafts of wedding invitations..!