Even if you only dabble in growing your own vegetables, chances are that you grow a few radish here and there.  Few crops are as reliable or quick, speeding from sowing to serving in as little as three weeks. Our garden alternates between the mild, multi-coloured globe shaped radish that were my first ever crop and the hotter, torpedo shaped french breakfast radish.

This raita was inspired by a memorable keralan dinner cooked for us by friends, inspired in turn by their recent trip to India.  All of the food was vegetarian and included a dish that looked like a regular cucumber yogurt raita.  The first taste was cooling yogurt and cucumber, but swiftly followed by an unexpected and warming kick of ginger.  The same concept works equally well with the modest radish, which is also much easier to grow in the UK (though I am tempted to have a bash at propogating supermarket ginger indoors).

Like tzatziki and cucumber raita, this dish doesn’t keep terribly elegantly.  It’s not that it goes off overly quickly, just that the vegetables steadily seep water which separates from the yogurt.  You can easily drain off the excess liquid give it a good stir, but as the whole thing only takes five minutes to pull together I just tend to make a batch as I need it.  We use this as an accompaniment to veggie dishes (like the spicy chickpeas in the photo), simply cooked fish and barbecued or griddled meats.  If you fancy it you can add some finely chopped ginger for extra heat.

Green Kitchen Stories is a new to me blog with delicious, vegetarian recipes made by David and Luise in Stockholm. My favourites so far include this No-rice risotto with chard and Goats cheese and thyme dip.

High in the top 10 questions I get asked in clinic is "Is it really important to eat breakfast - I'm just not hungry in the morning"?  Michelle May has some great food for thought in answer to the question Should I eat breakfast if I'm not hungry to help you decide if introducing breakfast might work for you.

There's a real treat tucked away on the BBC web site, a whole collection of irish chef Dennis Cotter's recipes, taken from his book Wild Garlic, Gooseberries ...and Me. Purple sprouting broccoli with leek and shallot farrotto and Roasted asparagus with blood orange aioli sound perfect for spring.

Sometimes the simplest suppers are the best - a current favourite in our house are soft-boiled eggs with purple sprouting broccoli and granary toast soldiers to dip into the runny yolk.

We've talked before about how every country seems to have it's own tomato-based supper staple such as ratatouille and pisto. A new one to me is this Israeli incarnation posted on Smitten Kitchen, a spicy, poached egg-topped number called shakshuka

In the snowy weeks at the start of the year there were a couple of days when I couldn’t get to work and I had the opportunity to really immerse myself in some reading. Springing off from Elaine’s excellent collection of links on How to build & maintain healthy bones on a plant-based diet I spent a happy couple of days reading up on bone health and found inspiration very close to home.

In Oxford (where I live and work) there is an ongoing research study called EPIC, the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition. EPIC is an impressive undertaking; it has been running since 1993 and has followed the diets of 65,000 Oxford residents since then, watching and waiting to see which patterns emerge between the food we eat and our health.  Because Oxford has such a lot of vegetarian folk, the study has provided excellent opportunities to look at the pros and cons of being vegetarian and vegan.

Are vegan diets (by definition dairy-free) good or bad for your bones is one such conundrum the researchers hope to answer.  So far in the EPIC group, the meat eaters, fish eaters and vegetarians all seem to have about the same overall risk of having a fractured bone.  The vegans in the group however had about a third more fractures than those other groups.  It’s a deceptive result this one though, and the true picture only emerged after the statisticians had a closer look at the numbers.  Those vegans who had enough calcium in their diet were no more likely to have a fracture than those following other styles of diet.  It seems it’s not a vegan diet that is bad for your bones at all, just a badly balanced vegan diet without enough calcium in it.