There’s nothing like a run of good restaurant meals to raise my cooking game. An invitation to lunch in Paris was a surprise treat at Alain Passard’s L’Arpège. I’ve revered this great chef since the Nineties when he invented tomate confite farcie aux douze saveurs, a sublime tomato dessert. These days his love of vegetables and intelligence with tomatoes result in an almost exclusively vegetarian menu sourced from his own market gardens outside Paris. A series of impressive bonnes bouches involved little potato pastry tarts and pretty vegetable assemblies. But his intensely flavoured gazpacho with Maille mustard ice cream and a salad of fine green beans with batons of white peach and a frothy green dressing dabbed around the edge was outstanding.

Another inspiring idea is matching spinach with sesame seeds and sesame oil. This would go with anything, but made a deliciously healthy supper with fillets of plaice.

At dinner at the Chelsea Arts Club recently I settled on Secretts Farm beans, a pretty salad of wax, bobby, Italian flat and Romano beans with hazelnuts and a well-balanced vinaigrette. I chose the courgette risotto and it was so good I copied it the next day. The secret, I reckon, is very young courgettes and to add them at the last moment so that they retain their crunch. It was a pretty idea to decorate the risotto with deep-fried mint leaves. A dollop of mascarpone sets off the look and lusciousness of this dish.

It was bad luck that my dinner at the Chelsea Arts Club happened on the day I’d been a guest for lunch at Gordon Ramsay’s Maze in Grosvenor Square. The menu at the chefs’ table in the kitchen comprises a series of mini courses. A smooth and silky pea purée featured in several dishes, but most spectacularly in a pretty broad-bean and pea risotto. At home I made my own simplified version of the purée with frozen petits pois, English mint sauce and a dollop of cream, and served it with salt marsh lamb steaks.

All this beautiful food put me in the mood for a bit of fancy footwork and it turned up in a clever trick with garlic and balsamic vinegar. It’s an idea I picked up from another admired chef, Simon Hopkinson. Peel two heads of garlic, blanch them in several changes of boiling water, adding white wine to the final boil, then fry them in olive oil and balsamic vinegar until stained a dark brown. My sleight of hand takes moments using mild-flavoured, bottled, peeled garlic which is cheap considering the work involved. These delicious nuggets go with any food that loves garlic.

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