Darina Allen: Three summer salad recipes to enjoy on a sunny day

Plus, here are my tips to help make the perfect potato salad

Salad of Nectarines, Green Beans, Almonds and Feta with Simple Vinaigrette. Recipe by Sarah Johnson

During this spell of gorgeous weather, we’ve been feasting on huge salads. The garden is bursting with beautiful produce, there are scarcely enough meal slots to enjoy and celebrate it all, and the work of the heroic gardeners who sowed the seeds many months ago. Apart from a great big green salad, our other staple is a bowl of unctuous potato salad flecked with green scallion tops and parsley.

For those of you who think that potato salad is always dull, let me share the secrets of a truly moreish and surprisingly delicious potato salad. Myrtle Allen, my late mother-in-law whom I spent many years learning from and cooking side-by-side with in the kitchens of Ballymaloe House, was very pernickety about small details which very often made the difference between something tasting utterly delicious rather than ‘just OK’.