March has something that February lacks: hope! This expresses itself in a number of small but irrepressible details. However cold and wet it gets, and stays, various life changing things are sure to have happened by the end of the month. Primroses will defy the harshest weather with their unambiguously spring splash of yellow. Likewise the daffodils. You may be waiting a couple of months yet for sleeveless tops and short skirts but in the garden at least, spring is showing a leg.

I dedicate more and more ground to purple sprouting broccoli each year, and just can’t get enough of the stuff.

Nettles are full of good things – iron, vitamins and natural histamine – making them an excellent tonic, particularly useful for improving blood circulation and purifying the system. The best nettles for cooking are the young shoots of early spring, no more than a few inches high. They can be cut from just above the ground and used stalk and all. A stout rubber glove or gardening glove is the best way to put an impenetrable barrier between your picking hand and the nettle’s sting. To serve simply as a green vegetable, pick over the nettles and discard any tough stalks. Wash well (and carefully – they can still sting for some time after picking), and wilt in a pan with just the water that is clinging to them and a sprinkling of salt. Keep turning for a few minutes until they are wilted and tender, then drain off excess water, add a good knob of butter, and season with pepper and a pinch of nutmeg.

These days, cod stocks are crippled and haddock's taken a serious knocking too; yet few cooks and anglers stop to reassess the potential of the other members of the cod family - coley and pouting, as well as pollack. 

The anti-pollack brigade are the equivalent of flat-earthists, and it's time they were stopped.  We eat a lot of pollack (more, perhaps, in the last couple of years than any other fish with the exception of mackerel), and we think it is delicious.  We fillet and flour them for the frying pan, batter them for that chip-shop experience, smoke them, salt them, put them in pies, even eat them raw as pollack carpaccio or sashimi.  The simple fact is that anything you can do with a cod, you can do with a pollack.