Newsletter: Recipes for the fresh spring harvest + Enter our Andaza book giveaway

Embrace the season: Elevate your meals with fresh spring ingredients

Spring is the time when garden and field come back to life, when fresh green produce appears after hardier, earthy winter fare. Much of the spring harvest needs little preparation to be tender and delicious. Fresh leaves, shoots, and stems readily offer up their naturally sweet vibrance. In the Northern hemisphere we find the first asparagus, gather wild garlic, and develop a hankering for lightly adorned salads and young vegetables.

Check out our cookbook showcase Making the Most of Spring’s Finest Ingredients for a wealth of ideas. You may still want a warming soup, but try one that includes fresh tastes and color. Try aromatic Asian Noodle Broth. Make a glorious lunch out of young cabbage or greens with this Spring Green and Coconut Dal. On warmer days a salad is always a good idea. Make kale – a nutritional hero – the star of the show with this Kale Ultra salad.

Explore more than 370 fresh Spring Greens recipes

Pictured above: Spring Vegetable Stew from One Knife, One Pot, One Dish by Stéphane Reynaud

Your chance to win a copy of Andaza, the newly published book by Sumayya Usmani

Originating from Karachi, now based in Scotland, cook and food writer Sumayya Usmani spent many of her formative years on a boat.

Her intuitive style of cooking is inspired by the food of her mother, grandmothers, and women of the village, who create flavor as much from their feel for the food as the ingredients they work with. This new book, a much-anticipated follow up to the 2016 bestseller, Summers Under the Tamarind Tree, brings her vibrant Pakistani cuisine to ckbk.

Andaza: A Memoir of Food, Flavour and Freedom in the Pakistani Kitchen, is Usmani’s food memoir, a document of her journey into the food she loves and towards the cook she has become.

To celebrate today's launch, thanks to publishers Murdoch Books we have two copies of this brilliant book up for grabs for lucky winners in our cookbook giveaway.

Visit our Q& A and author profile with Usmani to find out how to enter and at the same time check out Usmani's recipe for Chicken Bot Tikka Bundoo Khan Style.

Find out more about Andaza & discover how to win your copy

Fantastic food to celebrate Thai and Burmese New Year

Thai New Year (Songkran) is April 13, and extends to April 14-15. Those celebrating gather with friends and family and water fights form a key part of the festivities. There is also plenty of time to indulge in some of the fresh, invigorating flavours that make Thai cooking such a popular cuisine.

Once you have the basic ingredients in your pantry, Thai dishes are easy to put together. Our collection of Traditional Thai Dishes includes classics such as Pad Thai, spicy soups such as Tom Yum Pla, and the very tempting Mango Sticky Rice.

For more ideas take a look at this collection of Tasty Thai Curries.

Burmese New Year (Thingyan), extending from April 13 – April 16, is also a water festival. Bordered by India, China and Thailand, Burma has its own rich culinary tradition. In our Discovering Burmese Cuisine collection you will find vibrant, aromatic recipes, packed with the flavors you might expect from Southeast Asian cuisine, but with an identity all their own. Try Burmese Noodle, Tofu and Winter Greens Curry. Salads are a highlight of the cuisine, such as this Burmese Ginger Salad.

Ingredient spotlight: wild garlic (ramsons/ramps)

A forager's treat, wild garlic can be identified by its aroma, broad leaf, and delicate white flowers. Also called ramsons or ramps, it is one of the signs of spring in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere, where its glossy leaves appear at lane and riversides. It’s also available from some farmers’ markets and greengrocers, from mid-March until late April.

With a fresh, intense garlic flavor, the leaves are best picked and used before the plant throws out its white flowers, after which the flavor can become too strong. It adds a taste punch to a fresh pesto or chopped into an omelette, or take a look at these 12 Ways with Wild Garlic. Try Nisha Katona's Wild Garlic and Lamb Salad, or bake a batch of Wild Garlic & Cheddar Spelt Scones.