Nigel Slater’s recipes for baked peppers and blueberry compote

The local greengrocer’s, where I do much of my shopping, display their fruit and vegetables with an extraordinary generosity. Precarious piles of peppers, a small mountain of aubergines, tray upon tray of tomatoes – crisp and green, golden-shouldered, tiny orange varieties – sit next to rows of asparagus and short, sweet cucumbers. Mint, dill and parsley are sold in fat bunches and they are good, too, for curry leaves, lemongrass and my beloved coriander. These are the most reliable shops to come to for a ripe watermelon in summer and rust-speckled apricots that don’t taste of cotton wool.I arrive home with peppers, fat and glossy, each one large enough to carry a cargo of minced pork with rosemary and garlic or mushrooms and tarragon, neither of which I have. There is a block of tofu, the fragile, silken variety, to soak up the fruity notes of the olive oil, the salty olives and the tomatoes. The juice that sat in the hollows of the roasted peppers was so good we sponged it up with pi...