Nothing on Easter bunnies, chocolate, lamb or what you will as I am sure you have your Easter cooking and entertaining well planned and under way. I wish you all a very happy day.

Picking up where I left off in my last column, I offer more thoughts on cooking techniques, ingredients, basic recipes and how to run a kitchen − in short, what to buy, how and when to cook it. The theme throughout is not how to cope with cooking, which already induces negative feelings, but how to enjoy cooking.

The fastest cooking technique is, of course, not to cook at all but to serve raw food. Much has been written recently about the ‘paleo diet’ in which various health gurus claim to have re-invented the diet eaten by our Paleolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors, based around nuts, berries, fruit, seaweed, fibre and protein. Dairy products and carbohydrates are not part of the ‘paleo’ way of eating as these came later in man’s development with the planting of grains and the domestication of animals.

The ‘paleo’ aficionados are not as avant-garde as they perhaps think. In the early1960s, a gentle Provençal poet, Joseph Delteil, wrote La Cuisine Paleolithique. Natural, instinctual cooking, ancestral cooking, based on the seasons, he refers to it as la cuisine de Dieu. Snails, rabbits, omelettes, plenty of garlic, olive oil, meat at the weekend, fresh herbs, soup, tomatoes. This gentle version of paleolithic eating is very like the Mediterranean diet. When Delteil and his wife cooked dinner for the writer Henry Miller and his wife, they served raw radishes and butter, tomatoes, beetroot, green beans, cucumber, then cured ham, foie gras and sanquette, a very old southern French dish of coagulated chicken blood, highly seasoned, which sets like a flat cake and is eaten in wedges.

No, I don’t much like it either. The main course was chicken with saffron rice, served with foraged wild mushrooms and the meal finished with cheese, then raspberries and cream. So some cooked food, but plenty of raw food.

Such food, however, has to be the best, the freshest, the most impeccable. Carpaccio of beef and steak tartar can be delicious, but need to come from the most reliable sources and preferably on the same day you serve them. In Malta we are fortunate enough to have the freshest fish imaginable, so I have no qualms about serving it raw, whether swordfish or tuna carpaccio, tuna tartar, beetroot-cured mackerel, lampuka in the style of gravad lax or ceviche of squid and dott.

Cold smoked or cured products such as smoked salmon, prosciutto and jamon serrano are also raw food, having undergone no heat treatment. And for the same reason it is worth remem-bering that extra virgin olive oil and butter are both ‘raw’ products, unlike margarine.

Raw food has its natural place at the beginning of the meal and it is particularly good as a complement to one-pot cooking, providing a perfect balance of textures and nutritional elements. Salads of leaves and herbs and crisp vegetable crudités can be rapidly assembled from readily available ingredients and then given an elegant and unusual dressing to lift them out of the ordinary. Or choose to make an absolutely classic vinaigrette with the best extra virgin olive oil, a fine vinegar such as an aged sherry vinegar or balsamico, sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, and some chopped chives.

Raw vegetables and fruits can be juiced for a powerhouse of vitamins and as the season progresses wonderful gazpacho-style soups can be made. Strawberry gazpacho is a delight as is a pale green one made with melons and almonds.

Try orange and carrot, scented with a hint of orange flower water and garnished with a nasturtium flower. At the other end of a meal, fresh fruit is always welcome. Try a green fruit salad of apples, melon, grapes and kiwi fruit and flavour it with ginger wine or lime cordial.

A golden fruit salad of mango, melon, papaya, physalis, pineapple and any other bright fruit you can find is delicious liberally bathed in sweet muscat wine or white grape juice. Or you might try an ‘imperial’ fruit salad, using red and purple fruit, figs, strawberries, raspberries, black and red grapes. These are perfect in a spiced red wine syrup, or simply dressed with red grape juice.

For sorbets, granitas and jellies try some unusual combinations: juiced carrot and orange works well as a refreshing dessert plate, as does cucumber, mint and melon, but a classic strawberry sorbet is always welcome. Here I heat the fruit very gently, another attribute of trendy ‘paleo’ cooking.

Cured salmon and tomato salad

(Serves 4)

150g centre cut of salmon fillet
Gozo salt
Black pepper, freshly ground
2 tblsps extra virgin olive oil
5 large tomatoes
Fresh basil
1 celery stalk, trimmed and finely chopped
¼ cucumber, peeled, seeded and chopped
Decoration: borage flowers, herbs

Cut 16 small postage stamp square pieces of salmon for garnish, and chop the rest. Season the squares of fish and brush with olive oil. Cut a cap from the tomatoes and hollow them out, spooning the contents into a sieve set over a bowl to collect the liquid. Lightly season the inside of four of the tomatoes and stand them upside down. Chop the remaining one into small chunks. Mix these with the chopped cucumber, celery and salmon and season to taste, adding a little olive oil.

Fill the tomatoes with this mixture, arrange on serving plates with the salmon squares, herbs and borage.

Whisk olive oil with some of the strained tomato liquid and spoon on the plates. Try not to refrigerate these longer than a couple of hours, and bring out to room temperature 15 minutes before serving.

Cook’s note: mackerel, acciola, lampuki in season and other oily fish can be prepared in the same way.

Strawberry sorbet

(Serves 4 to 6)

500g strawberries, rinsed and hulled
Thinly pared zest of half a lemon and half an orange
200g caster sugar
15g glucose syrup (optional, for extra smoothness)

Gently heat the strawberries with the citrus zest and the sugar until they collapse, about 3-4 minutes only, not enough to cook them, just to release their juice. Remove the zest and sieve the purée. Stir in the glucose, if using it.

Cool the strawberry purée then freeze in an ice cream maker or in a container in the freezer. An ice cream maker will turn the mixture and make it smooth.

You will need to stir the mixture by hand or in a food processor during the freezing process for a really smooth ice cream if you freeze the mixture in a container.

Cucumber and melon gazpacho

(Serves 4)

½ honeydew or Gallia melon
2 cucumbers
Gozo salt
½ tsp green chilli sauce
White pepper, freshly ground

Discard the melon seeds and scoop the flesh into a blender or food processor.

Wash and roughly chop the cucumber and add to the melon. Blend until smooth, then season to taste with salt, pepper and chilli.

Sieve the gazpacho into a jug and refrigerate until ready to serve.

In order to keep the bright colour and vivid flavour this is best prepared no more than a couple of hours in advance.

Tuna tartar

(Serves 4)

600-800g tuna, freshly filleted and trimmed
6 or 8 chives or garlic chives, or 2 or 3 spring onions, finely chopped
1 tbsp of parsley, finely chopped
Gozo salt
Black pepper, freshly ground
2 tblsp extra virgin olive oil

Slice the tuna into thin strips, then cut across the grain to make small chunks of about half a centimetre. Chopping by hand – and the same is true of steak tartar – is a laborious process, but the results are infinitely better than chopping in the food processor. Put the fish in a bowl and add the chives and parsley. Start seasoning to taste with the salt and pepper, then gradually stir in the oil, so that the fish is nicely moistened but not swimming in oil.

Divide the fish in four and serve with toasted soudough. I like to shape it in serving rings, circle it with a cucumber or courgette strip, and serve it in a pool of gazpacho.

Cook’s note: as an alternative, use oriental aromatics, replacing the salt with soy sauce, parsley with coriander and lemongrass and olive oil with toasted sesame oil.