Here’s a lovely, fresh and seasonal risotto that’s easy to make and requires very little extra shopping

Ithink my favourite sort of meal might be the one on the last night of a really good holiday. It’s partly because a holiday fridge is so much better than your home one could ever hope to be, filled with treats you wouldn’t buy on an average week.

There might be a couple of ends of good cheese, the last scrapings from a pat of proper salty butter, a bit of local sausage. There might be the remnants of a bunch of market herbs, a few tomatoes that taste of the sun, a jar of exciting condiment or pickle. There could be leftovers from a barbecue or the final slice of pizza that was too good to throw away. Using up all the bits and bobs from that holiday larder tends to make for one of those unexpectedly good meals.

It’s how a particularly good tomato and red wine risotto was born last week – the result of a holiday haul which featured some slightly tired herbs, a pan with plenty of fat in it from the sausages we’d taken on a picnic, a lemon, some soft goats cheese and a bit of stale baguette. There was the end of a caponata I’d made earlier in the week, a couple of over-ripe tomatoes, and a slosh of red wine as we’d drunk all the white (and all the rosé… and everything else, for that matter).

I sprinkled fennel seeds and olive oil over the goats cheese and left it in the fridge for a couple of hours and we spooned it on top of great steaming bowlfuls of rice. Breadcrumbs fried in sausage fat and a handful of torn herbs finished the job.

Back in a decidedly grey London, I’ve been craving the tang and savoury punch of that last supper. The pots of herbs by my kitchen window are in dire need of a trim, so I thought of a green herb risotto. There were a couple of lemons knocking about, the end of a loaf and half a pack of streaky bacon in the fridge from the breakfast sarnies we made on Bank Holiday Monday.

For this very fresh, early summer risotto, use any combination of soft herbs you like. I’ve gone for handfuls of chives, mint, basil and parsley. You’ll fry the bacon until crisp, then blitz the bread into crumbs and fry them off in the bacon fat. If you don’t have bacon, a bit of sausage or chorizo would be good. Olive oil is also absolutely fine.